Topic Business Cycles

Investments in Climate-Friendly Materials to Strengthen the Recovery Package

Waiting for My Sentence: Air Pollution and the Productivity of Court Rulings

I assert that air pollution from nitrogen oxides affects the productivity of employees in Mexican court hearings. This is the first article analyzing this connection and the first to disentangle work-breaks from the productivity of white-collar workers. I merge hourly pollution with granular hearing data under the assumption that the length of the hearing approximates productivity and identify ...

European Green Deal: Using Ambitious Climate Targets and Renewable Energy to Climb out of the Economic Crisis

The European Green Deal, initiated by the EU Commission, is a package of measures aimed at decarbonization and sustainable economic development with the goal of making the European Union climate neutral by 2050. To achieve this goal, the emission reductions target must be increased from 40 percent to 65 percent compared to 1990 levels, as the model calculations in this Weekly Report show. Fossil and ...

Hellas: From the Economic Crisis to the Corona Crisis without a Pause

Greece cannot take on another decade of slow economic progress. Professor Alexander S. Kritikos in this article points out that the current economic break, as terrible as it also is for all economic life, is a second chance for Greece. Now is the time to break up structures and put the country on a new economic foundation. To make Greece more competitive and innovative, not only are investments needed ...

Identifying Effective Combinations of Economic Policy Measures for the Coronavirus Recession in Europe

As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe in early 2020, the European Central Bank as well as national governments in the euro area enacted or announced numerous economic policy measures to counteract the severe economic consequences of the resulting lockdowns. In this paper, the immediate effect of the announcements on government bond and stock markets are estimated in a panel study. The ...

Economic Downturns and Mental Wellbeing

We study the impact of the business cycle on mental wellbeing by linking rich German survey data to over a decade of detailed gross domestic product information. Endogeneity concerns are tackled using a shift-share instrumental variables approach in which exposure to macroeconomic fluctuations is estimated from regional variations in historical industry sector composition. Estimation results ...

Germany Hit Hard by the Global Recession as Uncertainty Weighs Heavy: Editorial

Coronavirus Pandemic Plunging Global Economy into a Serious Recession: DIW Economic Outlook

The consequences of the ongoing 2020 coronavirus pandemic are leaving deep marks on the global economy. In the first quarter of 2020, global production sank by 15.5 percent over the course of the worldwide lockdown. Since containment measures in many countries were mainly implemented during the second quarter of 2020, the slump in the first half of 2020 is likely to be even more severe overall. Due ...

German Economy Slowly Recovering Following a Deep Slump: DIW Economic Outlook

The coronavirus recession has left deep marks on the German economy and despite economic policy action, it is likely to heal only slowly. The partial easing of the lockdown and a gradual revival of global value chains are generating positive stimuli, but massive income losses will curb demand for some time to come. The German Federal Government was able to avoid the worst by implementing measures to ...

Active, or Passive? Revisiting the Role of Fiscal Policy in the Great Inflation

We reexamine whether pre-Volcker U.S. fiscal policy was active or passive. To do so, we estimate a DSGE model with monetary and fiscal policy interactions employing a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm (SMC) for posterior evaluation. Unlike existing studies, we do not have to treat each policy regime as distinct, separately estimated, models. Rather, SMC enables us to estimate the DSGE model ...