The financial and economic crisis has drawn attention to the need for a better understanding of destabilising effects that arise in the financial sector and spill over to the real economy. In turn, weakening economic conditions are likely to feed back to the financial sector, thus giving rise to...

Die neue Bundesregierung steht in der kommenden Legislaturperiode vor großen wirtschaftspolitischen Herausforderungen. Zwar war die deutsche Wirtschaftsentwicklung in den letzten Jahren überraschend positiv. Hervorzuheben sind vor allem die starke Zunahme der Beschäftigung und die schnelle...

The aim of this paper is to assess the dimension of factors and shocks that drive financial conditions, and in particular financial stress in the euro area. A second aim is to construct summary indices on the conditions and level of stress in financial markets with the aid of a dynamic factor...

The path of output prior to the financial and economic crisis turned out to be not sustainable and lower than previously estimated in some European crisis countries. Specifically, the output gaps have been underestimated (and inversely potential output overestimated) before the recent crisis. It...

In this paper we analyze the macroeconomic forecasts of the Consensus Forecasts for 12 countries over the period from 1996 to 2006 regarding bias and information efficiency. A pooled approach is employed which permits the evaluation of all forecasts for each target variable over 24 horizons...

Die vorliegende Arbeit diskutiert Ursachen für Unsicherheiten von Konjunkturprognosen und demonstriert die Berechnung von empirischen Prognoseintervallen. Die Verwendung empirischer Prognoseintervalle für eine Beurteilung der Signifikanz von Prognoserevisionen wird für den Median der...

Hours worked is a time series of interest in many empirical investigations of the macroeconomy. Estimates of macro elasticities of labour supply, for example, build on this variable. Other empirical applications investigate the response of hours worked to a shock to technology on the basis of...

The aim of this paper is to construct an indicator of potential growth for developed countries using the insights of the theoretical and empirical growth literature. The Pooled Mean Group Estimator of Pesaran, Shin and Smith (1999) that employs a panel data technique is used. This estimator is...

The study analyses the business cycles of the G7 countries in a structural vector autoregression(SVAR) framework comprising output, nominal interest rate and inflation. Common and country-specific supply, demand and nominal shocks of each G7 country are identified, and the corresponding shock...

The aim of this paper is to take a structured approach at estimating the coefficients of factors explaining movements of the labour share across countries. In particular, we focus on proper dynamic specification and test the validity of the homogeneity assumption of slope coefficients frequently...