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DIW Discussion Papers 1243 / 2012
We estimate Okun coefficients for five different age cohorts for several Eurozone countries. We find a stable pattern for all countries: The relationship between business-cycle fluctuations and the unemployment rate is the strongest for the youngest cohort and gets smaller for the elderly cohorts.
2012| Oliver Hutengs, Georg Stadtmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1242 / 2012
This paper argues that counter-cyclical liquidity hoarding by financial intermediaries may strongly amplify business cycles. It develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which banks operate subject to financial frictions and idiosyncratic funding liquidity risk in their intermediation activity. Importantly, the amount of liquidity reserves held in the financial sector is determined ...
2012| Sören Radde
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DIW Discussion Papers 1232 / 2012
In this paper we examine the role of mortgage equity withdrawal in explaining the decline of the US saving rate, since when house prices rise and mortgage rates are low, homeowners have an incentive to withdraw housing equity and this may affect the saving rate. We estimate a Vector Error Correction (VEC) model including the saving rate, asset prices, equity withdrawal and interest rates and find that ...
2012| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Mauro Costantini, Antonio Paradiso
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DIW Discussion Papers 1221 / 2012
This paper examines the contemporaneous relationship between the exchange rate regime and structural economic reforms for a sample of CEEC/CIS transition countries. We investigate empirically whether structural reforms are complements or substitutes for monetary commitment in the attempt to improve macroeconomic performance. Both EBRD and EFW data suggest a negative relationship between flexible exchange ...
2012| Ansgar Belke, Lukas Vogel
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DIW Discussion Papers 1212 / 2012
In this paper, we construct a data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities from 24 countries. The data are collected in January - April 2012 from 33 websites, where the advertisements of flats for sale are placed. Using these data we investigate the determinants of the flat prices. Four factors are found to be relevant for the flats' price level: income per capita, population ...
2012| Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1211 / 2012
This paper investigates the relationship between wealth, ageing and saving behaviour of private households by using pooled cross sections of German consumption survey data. Different components of wealth are distinguished, as their impact on the savings rate is not homogeneous. On average, the effect attributed to real estate dominates the other components of wealth. In addition, the savings rate strongly ...
2012| Ansgar Belke, Christian Dreger, Richard Ochmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1207 / 2012
In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the monthly growth rates of the prices and rents for flats in 26 largest German cities. Given the small time dimension, the forecasts are done in a panel-data format. In addition, we use panel models that account for spatial dependence between the growth rates of housing prices and rents. Using a quasi out-of-sample forecasting exercise, we find that both ...
2012| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Andreas Mense
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DIW Discussion Papers 1200 / 2012
This paper analyses monthly hours worked in the US over the sample period 1939m1 - 2011m10 using a cyclical long memory model; this is based on Gegenbauer processes and characterised by autocorrelations decaying to zero cyclically and at a hyperbolic rate along with a spectral density that is unbounded at a non-zero frequency. The reason for choosing this specification is that the periodogram of the ...
2012| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana
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DIW Discussion Papers 1199 / 2012
This paper investigates the relationship between global liquidity and commodity and food prices applying a global cointegrated vector-autoregressive model. We use different measures of global liquidity and various indices of commodity and food prices for the period 1980-2011. Our results support the hypothesis that there is a positive long-run relation between global liquidity and the development of ...
2012| Ansgar Belke, Ingo G. Bordon, Ulrich Volz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1198 / 2012
We argue that a financial transaction tax complements financial market regulation. With the tax, governments have an additional instrument at hand to influence trading activity. FTT aims to reduce regulatory arbitrage, flash trading, overactive portfolio management, excessive leverage and speculative transactions of financial institutions. The focus clearly addresses these classes of activities that ...
2012| Dorothea Schäfer