Current explanations why a growing economy necessarily goes through booms and recessions predict countercyclical R&D investment. As this is very controversial from an empirical perspective, a stochastic Poisson model of endogenous business cycles and growth is presented where the determinants of...

A country with Cournot competition and free entry experiences an increase of its market size either due to economic growth or international integration of goods markets. The implied increase in competition leads to shrinking mark-ups and forces firms to reduce overhead costs relative to output....

Worker movements played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Workplace safety is costly for firms but increases labour supply. A laissez-faire approach leaving safety of workplaces unknown is suboptimal. Safety standards set by better-informed trade unions are output and welfare...

Getting a tenured position in economics in Germany is viewed as a random outcome where the probability of tenure depends on the quantity and qual- ity of publications, age and years since PhD. We measure publications both in units of Top 5 journals and in units of the European Economic Review...

The paper studies the containment effects of public health measures to curb the spread of Covid‐19 during the first wave of the pandemic in spring 2020 in Germany. To identify the effects of six compound sets of public health measures, we employ a spatial difference‐in‐differences...

Creative destruction due to new technologies causes both long-run growth and short-run business fluctuations. The creative part of new technologies pushes the economy on a higher productivity level while the destructive part implies partial obsolescence of old production units. Obsolescence due...

Using the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, we derive both a Keynes-Ramsey rule and a closed form solution for an optimal consumption-investment problem with labor income. The utility function is unbounded and uncertainty stems from a Poisson process. Our results can be derived because of the...

This paper examines the role of bequests and of taxation on bequests for the distribution of wealth. We investigate a model with overlapping generations and heterogenous households where parents derive utility directly from their bequests. Using the coefficient of variation as the measure of...

Cyclical components are analytically computed in a theoretical model of stochastic endogenous fluctuations and growth. Volatility is shown to depend on the speed of convergence of the cyclical component, the expected length of a cycle and on the altitude of the slump. Taxes affect these channels...