The German economy is steering through difficult waters and faces the highest inflation rates in decades. In their spring report, the leading German economic research institutes revise their outlook for this year significantly downward. The recovery from the COVID-19 crisis is slowing down as a result of the war in Ukraine, but remains on track. The institutes expect GDP to increase by 2.7 and 3.1 ...
This paper provides novel empirical results on the welfare impact of sanctions when countries coordinate their sanctions packages. To do so, weconduct simulations with the Caliendo and Parro (2015) CGE model of the world economy that provides changes in welfare under different hypothetical setups of sanctions coalitions. Focusing on the 2012 wave of sanctions against Iran and the 2014 sanctions...
How are individual and collective memories of extreme economic moments produced in a community? How do these memories translate into the political economy and shape the realm of possibility of macroeconomic policies? Why is some statistical data and economic policy represented more factual than other in the historical narration of national economies? How do some economic indicators become more...
As the German economy and the EU are emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus is shifting to questions of long-term transformation. How can we transform our economies while also limiting climate change and preparing for its impact? The pandemic has accelerated digitalization of German firms and many have already invested to deal with climate change. At the same time, concerns about the...
After the end of World War II in 1945, millions of refugees arrived in what in 1949 became the Federal Republic of Germany. We examine their effect on today’s productivity, wages, income, rents, education, and population density at the municipality level. Our identification strategy is based on a spatial discontinuity in refugee settlement at the border between the French and US occupation zones in ...
This paper revives the question of whether a temporary VAT change is an adequate instrument for crisis stabilization. In empirical assessments, we find that durable goods consumption fluctuates strongly over the business cycle and that VAT rate changes affect durable goods in particular. Therefore, we build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that is capable of addressing this major ...
This paper examines how wealth and income inequality dynamics are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution over the business cycle. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016, although inequality is, on average countercyclical and significantly associated with the capital share, one-third of the countries display a pro- or noncyclical relationship. To analyze ...
The EU Taxonomy is the first standardised and comprehensive classification system for sustainable economic activities. It covers activities responsible for up to 80% of EU greenhouse gas emissions and may play an important role in channelling investments into low-carbon technologies by helping investors to make informed decisions. However, especially in transition sectors much depends on the stringency ...