The legal regulations require the minimum wage in Germany to be adjusted biennially which gives rise to a policy discontinuity. From the perspective of rational expectations models, such policy features render standard local approximation techniques infeasible. The paper presents a stylised...

In this dissertation, I examine the effect of the minimum wage and monetary policy on inequality and the aggregate economy. The first chapter develops a theoretical model to simulate the impact of policy experiments on labor income inequality and the aggregate economy. The second chapter...

The average worker in the US needs to work more than a year to earn his or her CEO's daily wage. The well-accepted justification among economists for these huge wage gaps is the necessity to achieve economic efficiency, in terms of efficient allocation in the labor market and incentivizing...

This paper estimates forward-looking monetary policy rules for Germany over the 1979-98 period and for the United Kingdom for the periods 1979-90 and 1992-98. The estimation results indicate that there were substantial differences between systematic monetary policy in Germany and in the United...