We analyze the interaction of stock market movements and politics in Germany. In contrast to the empirical evidence available for the U.S., we do not find that German stock market returns tend to be higher during liberal than during conservative governments. Also in contrast to results for the...

This paper elaborates on the relative importance of sectoral shocks for real economic activity in Germany. Implications of multisectoral real business cycle models are examined by resorting to testing techniques based on stock market returns. The empirical evidence is obtained by calculating...

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 analyzes Germany's fiscal policy position. Half of GDP passes through the hands of government, a high debt to GDP ratio limits the maneuvering, and the revenue sharing mechanism prevents a competitive federalism. Most importantly for the future, the federal finance minister has to...

Recently, the world economy has seen its greatest down turn since World War II. Although not as bad as during the Great Depression, there was still a worrisome increase in protectionist measures, in an attempt to mitigate the economic downturn. Protectionism can have many different faces. It can...

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...

This paper uses a toy financial system to study systemic risk in scale-free interbank networks. Networks are produced according to a fitness algorithm, combined with a representation of the balance sheets of the banks. Our generating processes for interbank networks are designed in a way to...

During the last two decades, the degree of openness of national financial systems has increased substantially. At the same time, asymmetries in information and other financial market frictions have remain prevalent. We study both empirically and theoretically the implications of the opening up...

This article investigates the empirical relationship between monetary policy in the United States (US) and international equity, bond and real estate security markets for the sample period 01/1994 to 12/2007. The empirical results suggest that equity markets close to the US have a statistically...

Macro-stress testing studies often rely on rather short sample periods due to the limited availability of banking data. They may fail to appropriately account for the cyclicality in the interaction between the banking system and macroeconomic developments. In this paper we use a newly...