Thema Konjunktur

Der Abstand zum Bund schrumpft

Capital Accumulation, Labour Market Institutions, and Unemployment in the Medium Run

According to the mainstream view, labour market institutions (LMI) are the key determinants of unemployment in the medium run. The actual empirical explanatory power of measures for labour market institutions, however, has been called into question recently (Baker et al 2005, Baccaro and Rei 2007). The Keynesian view holds periods of high real interest rates and insufficient capital accumulation responsible ...

Shocking! Do Forecasters Share a Common Belief?

We evaluate the interaction of inflation and growth forecast errors based on 17 distinct forecasts for the German economy for the period from 1970 to 2004. The forecasts were produced by 14 institutions. Our findings show that, in general, the forecasters did not share a common belief about the shocks driving the economy at the time at which they made their forecasts. We use a standard textbook aggregate-demand/aggregate-supply ...

Sticky Information Phillips Curves: European Evidence

We estimate the Sticky Information Phillips Curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, while in Italy, about once each 6 months.

From Transition to Competition: Dynamic Efficiency Analysis of Polish Electricity Distribution Companies

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the economic transition toward a market economy increases the efficiency of firms. We study 32 Polish electricity distribution companies between 1997 and 2002, by applying common benchmarking methods to the panel: the non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA), the free disposal hull (FDH), and, as a parametric approach, the stochastic frontier analysis ...

Finanzkrise und die Folgen für den Arbeitsmarkt

Does the Dispersion of Unit Labor Cost Dynamics in the EMU Imply Long-Run Divergence? Results from a Comparison with the USA and Germany

Am Puls der Logistik

Persistence and Determinants of Firm Profit in Emerging Markets

The paper studies the persistence of profit and its determinants in emerging markets. We apply Markov chain analysis, dynamic panel GMM estimation, and quantile regression techniques to a panel of approximately 3,000 Ukrainian companies. The empirical results show a moderate level of profit persistence, as well as a relatively low speed of adjustment to the steady-state profit level, thus providing ...

Strategic Investment in International Gas-Transport Systems: A Dynamic Analysis of the Hold-up Problem

We develop a dynamic model of strategic investment in a transnational pipeline system. In the absence of international contract enforcement, countries may distort investment in order to increase their bargaining power, resulting in overinvestment in expensive and underinvestment in cheap pipelines. With repeated interaction, however, there is a potential to increase efficiency through dynamic collusion. ...