This paper uses a 'new open economy macroeconomics' model to study the effect of a productivity shock on exchange rate dynamics. The special features of the model are that households' preferences exhibit a 'catching up with the Joneses' effect and that international financial markets are...

This paper elaborates on the relative importance of sectoral shocks for real economic activity in Germany. Implications of multisectoral real business cycle models are examined by resorting to testing techniques based on stock market returns. The empirical evidence is obtained by calculating...

In our dynamic optimizing sticky price model, agents are heterogeneous with regard to their age and their productivity. We find that the business cycle dynamics in the OLG model in response to both a technology shock and a monetary shock are similar, but not completely identical to those found...

We evaluate explanations for why Germany grew so quickly in the 1950s. The recent literature has emphasized convergence, structural change and institutional shake-up while minimizing the importance of the postwar shock. We show that this shock and its consequences were more important than...

The role of expectations for economic fluctuations has received considerable attention in recent business cycle analysis. We exploit Markov regime switching models to identify shocks in cointegrated structural vector autoregressions and investigate different identification schemes for bi-variate...

Can the standard search-and-matching labor market model replicate the business cycle fluctuations of the job finding rate and the unemployment rate? In the model, fluctuations are prominently driven by productivity shocks which are commonly interpreted as technology shocks. I estimate different...

Is time-varying firm-level uncertainty a major cause or amplifier of the business cycle? This paper investigates this question in the context of a heterogeneous-firm RBC model with persistent firm-level productivity shocks and lumpy capital adjustment, where cyclical changes in uncertainty...

This paper seeks to understand dynamics of inflation and marginal cost (labor share) in models that account for the inclusion of productivity shocks in standard New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC). The question of interest is on the empirical importance of and whether productivity shocks shift...