External refereed essays

Modeling the Impacts of International Climate Change Policies in a CGE Context: The Use of the GTAP-E Model

The anticipated implications of international environmental policy strategies are critical for the success or failure of international negotiations on climate change policies. In this paper, we discuss the complex modeling issues related to the incorporation of international environmental policy measures in one of the popular applied general equilibrium models for international trade, the so-called ...

Creating Low Skilled Jobs by Subsidising Market-Contracted Household Work

The paper analyses the determinants of household work contracted in the German shadow economy. The German socio-economic household panel, which enumerates casual domestic employment, is used to estimate the demand for such household work. The regressors include regional wage rates, household income and several control variables for household composition. It is found that the demand for household work ...

Do Eurozone Countries Cheat with Their Budget Deficit Forecasts?

The authors assess the political economy determinants of budget deficit forecast errors. Their econometric analysis indicates that Eurozone governments have manipulated deficit forecasts before elections since the introduction of the Stability and Growth Pact. The left-right position and the institutional design of governments also affect the quality of deficit forecasts.

Wie wirkt sich Outsourcing auf den Unternehmenserfolg aus? Neue Evidenz

Neue Produkte, Unternehmenserfolg und Entlohnung: Auswertungspotentiale der Mikrodaten der amtlichen Statistik durch Nutzung der Forschungsdatenzentren

Unpaid Overtime in Germany: Differences between East and West

Declining Output Volatility in Germany: Impulses, Propagation and the Role of Monetary Policy

The decline in output volatility in Germany is analysed. A lower level of variance in an autoregressive model of output growth can be either due to a change in the structure of the economy (a change in the propagation mechanism) or a reduced error term variance (reduced impulses). In Germany the decline output volatility is due to a decline in the persistence of the growth process. This is in contrast ...

Measuring and Predicting Turning Points Using a Dynamic Bi-Factor Model

In this paper a dynamic bi-factor model with Markov-switching is developed to measure and predict turning points. Both common factors, namely composite leading index (CLI) and composite coincident index (CCI) respectively, have their own cyclical dynamics, and their lead-lag relationships are reflected in the transition probabilities matrix. The model is applied to four coincident and four selected ...

Ökonomie(sierung) und Bildung: Plädoyer für ein entspannteres Verhältnis

Panel Seasonal Unit Root Test: Further Simulation Results and an Application to Unemployment Data

On the Forecasting Properties of the Alternative Leading Indicators for the German GDP: Recent Evidence

In this paper we perform a comparative study of the forecasting properties of the about 30 alternative leading indicators for Germany using the growth rates of German real GDP. In addition to them, we have constructed a diffusion index based on the principal component analysis and including 145 component series that reflect all the facets of German economy. We use the post-unification data which cover ...

Estimating and Forecasting European Migration: Methods, Problems and Results

Convergence of European Spot Market Prices for Natural Gas? A Real-Time Analysis of Market Integration Using the Kalman Filter

This letter provides a textbook example of an econometric analysis of the integration between two commodity markets and the subsequent price convergence or absence thereof. Price relations between spot markets are analysed for natural gas in Europe. The European market for natural gas is currently undergoing a liberalization process with the aim of creating a single, unified market. Time-varying coefficient ...

Long-Run Money Demand in the New EU Member States with Exchange Rate Effects

Within a wide range of other economic and financial indicators, money is highly relevant to the two-pillar monetary strategy of the European Central Bank for detecting risks to price stability over the medium term. Money demand models are a natural benchmark for assessing monetary developments. The existence of a well-specified and stable relation between money and prices can be perceived as a prerequisite ...

Consumption and Disposable Income in the EU Countries: The Role of Wealth Effects

Regional Productivity and Income Convergence in the Unified Germany, 1992 - 2000

This paper investigates regional convergence of labour productivity and income per capita in the period 1992-2000 for the unified Germany using spatial econometric techniques. Up to now only first-order spatial models have been employed in investigating convergence across regions and countries. An exploratory data analysis reveals, however, that the fundamental variables of the convergence equation ...

Thresholds for Employment and Unemployment: A Spatial Analysis of German Regional Labour Markets, 1992-2000

This paper applies Verdoorn's and Okun's law to derive efficient estimates of the employment and unemployment threshold in the Unified Germany. The analysis is built on a disaggregated dataset of regional labour markets, where spatial dependencies are taken into account. Especially, a spatial SUR model is proposed utilising the eigenfunction decomposition approach suggested by Griffith (1996, 2000). ...

A Macroeconometric Model for the Euro Economy

In this paper a structural macroeconometric model for the Euro area is presented. In contrast to the multi-country modelling approach, the model relies on aggregate data on the supra-national level. Due to non-stationarity, all equations are estimated in error correction form. The cointegrating relations are derived jointly with the short-run dynamics, avoiding the finite sample bias of the two-step ...

Export-Led Growth Hypothesis: Evidence for Chile

This study examines the export-led growth hypothesis using annual time series data from Chile. It addresses the problem of specification bias under which previous studies have suffered and focuses on the impact of manufactured and primary exports on the economic growth. In order to investigate if and how manufactured and primary exports affect economic growth via increases in productivity, the study ...

Multicointegration in US Consumption Data

The present study tests for the existence of multicointegration between real per capita private consumption expenditure and real per capita disposable personal income in the USA. In doing so, the study exploits the fact that the flows of disposable income and consumption expenditure on the one hand, and the stock of consumers' wealth, which can be considered as cumulative past discrepancies between ...