The decline in output volatility in Germany is analysed. A lower level of variance in an autoregressive model of output growth can be either due to a change in the structure of the economy (a change in the propagation mechanism) or a reduced error term variance (reduced impulses). In Germany the...

Das Papier untersucht die makroökonomischen Determinanten der Arbeitslosigkeit. Dabei werden die Argumente neoklassisch-monetaristischer, neukeynesianischer und postkeynesianischer Provinienz auf ihren Gehalt sowohl theoretisch wie empirisch überprüft. Das Hauptgewicht der Analyse wird auf...

A couple of recent papers have shifted the focus towards disagreement of professional forecasters. When dealing with survey data that is sampled at a frequency higher than annual and that includes only fixed event forecasts, e.g. expectation of average annual growth rates measures of...

This paper compares relative unit labour cost developments in the countries of the euro-area since the beginning of the European Monetary Union (EMU) both with historical developments and with intra-regional unit labour cost developments in the United States of America and Germany. To this end,...

We investigate convergence in European price level, unit labor cost, income, and productivity data over the period of 1960-2006 using the non-linear time-varying coefficients factor model proposed by Phillips and Sul (2007). This approach is extremely flexible on order to model a large number of...

New-Keynesian macroeconomic models typically assume that any long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment is ruled out. While this appears to be a reasonable characterization of the US economy, it is less clear that the natural rate hypothesis necessarily holds in a European country...

We estimate the sticky information Phillips curve model ofMankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, in...

The paper analyses reasons for departures from strong rationality of growth and inflation forecasts based on annual observations from 1963 to 2004. We rely on forecasts from the joint forecast of the so-called "six leading" forecasting institutions in Germany and argue that violations of the...