Inflation rates in a number of OECD follow a common trend over the past four decades: inflation starts out low in the 1960s, rises for a time before peaking in the 1970s or early 1980s, and then falls back to initial levels. This similarity in the behavior of trend inflation suggests that any...

Recent theoretical work shows that changes in the volatility of inflation and/or unem-ployment affect equilibrium in°ation outcomes when the central banker's loss functionis asymmetric. We show that previous evidence offered in support of the propositionthat the volatility of unemployment helps...

Size effects matter in banking. Typically, banking systems are dominated by a smallnumber of large players who are also active in a large range of countries and marketsegments. At the same time, there exist small and often regionally-focused financialinstitutions. This holds also for the German...

Aggregated output in industrialized countries has become less volatile over the pastdecades. Whether this “Great Moderation” can be found in firm level data as wellremains disputed. We study the evolution of firm level output volatility using abalanced panel dataset on German firms that...