Does time-varying business uncertainty/volatility affect the price setting of firms and, if so, in what way? To address this question, we estimate from the firm-level micro data of the German ifo Business Climate Survey the impact of idiosyncratic volatility on the extensive margin of the price...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper empirically analyzes three prominent explanations for this development. First, using a novel quarterly utilization-adjusted total factor productivity measure for the...

In this paper we challenge the view that the oil price has lost its influence on economic activity after the mid-1980s. While we concede that typical VAR models put forward in the literature fail to identify oil price shocks that significantly affect aggregate production, we obtain clearly...

Does time-varying business volatility affect the price setting of firms and thus the transmission of monetary policy into the real economy? To address this question, we estimate from the firm-level micro data of the German IFO Business Climate Survey the impact of idiosyncratic volatility on the...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...