In this paper, we exploit exogenous variation in navigability of the Rhine river to analyze the impact of weather-related supply shocks on economic activity in Germany. Our analysis shows that low water levels lead to transportation disruptions that cause a significant and economically...

We investigate the impact of errors in medium run tax revenue forecasts on the final budget balance. Our analysis is based on fiscal data for the entirety of German states and takes advantage of revenue forecasts and respective errors that can be considered as exogenously given in the budgeting...

This study investigates the role of government activity in economic growth, arguing that economic systems are important and that, therefore, one size of government does not fit all countries. Taking a panel of 111 countries over the years from 1971 to 2010, we consider clusters of economic...

We study the macroeconomic effects of monetary policy during financial crises using a Bayesian panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) model for 20 advanced economies. We interact all of the endogenous variables with financial crisis dummies, which are constructed using the narrative approach. We...

The EU's macroeconomic surveillance mechanism, namely the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP), is based on the so-called Scoreboard, which comprises a set of indicators that serve as a signalling device for potentially harmful macroeconomic developments. We first evaluate the early warning...

Between 1995 and 2005, the German economy has experienced a phase of weak economic growth. We analyze whether this weak growth performance can be attributed to the stance of monetary conditions during that period. We show that the real effective exchange rate did have almost no dampening effects...

Housing crises usually go hand in hand with a long lasting recession and a considerable loss in output. We first re-examine the effects of a housing crises on the business cycle based on historical crises. Then we estimate the international spill-over-effects if several huge industrial countries...

During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....

This paper provides statistical evidence suggesting that in industrial countries, recessions that are associated with either banking crises or housing crises dampen output far more than ordinary recessions. Using a parametric panel framework that allows for a bounceback of the level of output in...

This paper analyzes the costs of housing crises in terms of GDP growth and the economic conditions under which crises are particularly costly. Housing crises are often followed by recessions that are longer than other recessions. According to empirical estimates, a housing crisis reduces the GDP...