While a widespread consensus exists among macroeconomists that the German labour market reforms in 2003-2005 have successfully contributed to the decline of the unemployment rate, critics claim that the reforms led to wage restraint and consequently consumption dampening accompanied by...

In an influential recent paper, Beaudry and Portier (2006) propose a sequential approach for identifying technological news shocks. Thereby, the correlation coefficient between news shocks of a short-run identification scheme and technology shocks of a long-run identification scheme in the VAR...

The paper investigates the effects of temporary consumption tax cuts using firm-level data. As part of its countercyclical measures implemented during the recent global economic crisis, Turkey temporarily lowered consumption taxes on selected durables. Using data on the change of sales of firms...

Recent empirical literature delivered, based on different structural VAR approaches, controversial results concerning the role of anticipated technology-news-shocks in business cycle fluctuations. We deal with this controversy and investigate (i) the extent to thich two prominent structural VAR...

The role of global, euro area and country-specific shocks in business cycle dynamics of six euro area member countries is assessed with the aid of SVAR models. Output fluctuations are driven by global shocks to a large extent in the euro area, and no Europeanisation of business cycles due to,...

The paper investigates the effects of temporary consumption tax cuts using firm-level data. As part of its countercyclical measures implemented during the recent global economic crisis, Tur-key temporarily lowered consumption taxes on selected durables. Our empirical strategy ex-ploits variation...

In this paper we analyze the (potential) effects of labour market and fiscal policy reforms by heterogeneous European countries—Germany and France—on the domestic and foreign economy. We test the implications of the gains in matching efficiency and reduced unemployment benefits induced by...