An important issue facing policymakers is the degree to which fluctuations in economic activity affect employment in large and small businesses across sectors and regions. These issues are particularly relevant for developing countries, as they matter for the understanding of the labour market...

As is well known, one of the major shortcomings of the New Keynesian model (NKM) with Calvo-type price setting is the lack of a microeconomic foundation of its most important building block - price stickiness. In this paper I investigate the ability of a monetary Customer Markets model to...

As GDP is highly correlated with both entering and exiting firms, we develop a totally microfounded DSGE model with endogenous firms entry as well as exit decisions. We show that the simplifying assumption of a constant firms' death rate made by the recent literature on DSGE modelling can lead...

The output gap is a key variable of business cycle analysis and policy. Obtaining reliable estimates for it, is very difficult, though. Most real-time estimates are frequently revised over time. The idea of this paper is to use various indicators, for example from business surveys, that (i) were...

According to Mark Thornton, we could be very close to another major economic crisis. Ten years have passed from the so-called Great Recession and Thornton's prediction confirms my view according to which business fluctuations are pervasive, and the crisis that emerged in the Western world in...

Diese Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit den makroökonomischen Konsequenzen der Annahme heterogener Firmen. Die geldpolitischen Implikationen stehen dabei im Vordergrund. In den ersten beiden, theoretisch ausgerichteten Kapiteln liegt der Fokus auf der Tatsache, dass Firmen unterschiedlich...

This study was prepared by Beate Schirwitz while she was working at the Ifo Institute’s Dresden Branch. It was completed in February 2012 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Faculty of Law, Management, and Economics at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in July 2012. It focuses on a...