When employers face a trade-off between growing large and paying low wages—that is, when they have monopsony power—some productive employers will decide to acquire fewer customers, forgo sales, and remain small. These decisions have adverse consequences for aggregate labor productivity....

This paper examines how households adjusted their consumption behavior in response to COVID-19 infection risk during the early phase of the pandemic. We use a monthly consumption survey specifically designed by the German Statistical Office covering the second wave of COVID-19 infections from...

This article discusses the economic effects of a potential cut-off of the German economy from Russian energy imports. We show that the effects are likely to be substantial but manageable. In the short run, a stop of Russian energy imports would lead to a GDP decline in range between 0.5% and 3%...

Mit der geplanten Einführung des ETS2 im Jahr 2027, der dann auch die Sektoren Verkehr und Wärme umfasst, wird es wahrscheinlich für viele private Haushalte zu einer unmittelbar spürbaren und starken Steigerung der Ausgaben für CO2-Emissionen kommen. Geht man davon aus, dass die gesetzten...

Despite some progress, German macroeconomists are generally dissatisfied with access to important data in Germany. Legal, technical and organisational obstacles abound, in particular as far as mergers of data sets from heterogeneous sources are concerned. This article suggests a number of...

Die verlinkte Stellungnahme stellt heraus, welche Probleme beim Datenzugang aus makroökonomischer Perspektive bestehen. Hierzu zählt neben der verbesserungswürdigen Datenverfügbarkeit insbesondere die fehlende Möglichkeit der Datenverknüpfung. Lösungsansätze - beispielsweise die...

When employers face a trade-off between being large and paying low wages - and in this sense have monopsony power - some productive employers decide to acquire few customers, forgo sales, and remain small. These decisions have adverse consequences for aggregate labor productivity. Using...

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...

Using a German firm-level data set, this paper is the first to jointly study the cyclical properties of the cross-sections of firm-level real value added and Solow residual innovations, as well as capital and employment adjustment. We find two new business cycle facts: 1) The cross-sectional...

Are firms` expectations systematically too optimistic or too pessimistic? Does it matter? We use micro data from the West German manufacturing subset of the IFO Business Climate Survey to infer quarterly production changes at the firm level and combine them with production expectations over a...