This paper uses the European Monetary Union (EMU) as a natural experiment to investigate whether more effective monetary policy reduces the persistence of inflation. Taking into account the fractional integration of inflation, we confirm that inflation dynamics differed considerably across Euro area countries before the start of EMU. Since 1999, however, results obtained from panel estimation indicate that the degree of long run inflation persistence has converged. In line with theoretical predictions, we find that the persistence of inflation has significantly decreased in the Euro area probably as a result of the more effective monetary policy of the ECB.

This study analyzes the effects of right-wing extremism on the well-being of immigrants based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1984 to 2006 merged with state-level information on election outcomes. The results show that the life satisfaction of immigrants is significantly reduced if right-wing extremism in the native population increases. Moreover, the life satisfaction of highly educated immigrants is affected more strongly than that of low-skilled immigrants. This supports the view that policies aimed at making immigration more attractive to the high-skilled have to include measures that reduce xenophobic attitudes in the native population.

This paper extends the model of Engler et al. (2007) on the adjustment of the US current account to a three-country world economy. This allows an analysis of the differential impact of a reversal of the US current account on Europe and Asia. In particular, the outcomes under different exchange rate policies are analysed. The main finding is that large factor re-allocations from non- tradables to tradables will be necessary in the US. The direction of factor re-allocation in Asia depends on whether the "Bretton-Woods-II" regime of unilaterally fixed or manipulated exchange rates in Asia is continued. If this is the case, the tradables sector and the current account surplus will continue to grow even when the US deficit closes. The flip side of this result is that Europe will face a huge real appreciation and an enormous current account deficit. With floating exchange rates worldwide, the impact on Europe will be limited while Asia´s tradables sector will shrink

Controllability of longer-term interest rates requires that the persis- tence of their deviations from the central bank's policy rate (i.e. the policy spreads) remains sufficiently low. This paper applies fractional integration techniques to assess the persistence of policy spreads of euro area money market rates along the yield curve. Independently from anticipated policy rate changes, there is strong evidence for all maturities that policy spreads exhibit long memory. We show that recent changes in the operational framework and the communication strategy of the European Central Bank have significantly decreased the persistence of euro area policy spreads and, thus, have enhanced the central bank's in uence on longer-term money market rates.

In oligopolistic industries that are unionised and may be affected by offshoring, falling offshoring costs have a moderating effect on trade unions. They will accept lower sector wages in order to discourage mobile firms from leaving the country. Since such wages are independent of the workers' domestic outside opportunities, wage moderation - induced by deeper economic integration - creates leeway for the government to engage in redistributive policies even if this improves the workers' domestic outside options. Only if the latter become suffciently attractive will redistribution induce some offshoring, and it is only at that level that further economic integration will lead to both wage moderation and offshoring activities. Therefore, our analysis suggests that rather than provoking a downsizing of the welfare state, offshoring defines an upper limit for the generosity of the welfare state below which redistribution becomes less instead of more distortive.

We apply the Day Reconstruction Method to compare unemployed and employed people with respect to their subjective assessment of emotional affects, differences in the composition and duration of activities during the course of a day, and their self-reported life satisfaction. Employed persons are more satisfied with their life than the unemployed and report more positive feelings when engaged in similar activities. Weighting these activities with their duration shows, however, that average experienced utility does not differ between the two groups. Although the unemployed feel sadder when engaged in similar activities, they can compensate this by using the time the employed are at work in more enjoyable ways. Our finding that unemployment affects life satisfaction and experienced utility differently may be explained by the fact that people do not adjust their aspirations when becoming unemployed but face hedonic adaptation to changing life circumstances, triggered by the opportunity to use the time in a way that yields higher levels of satisfaction than working.

In Folge der starken Rezession kommt es durch diskretionäre Maßnahmen der Bun- desregierung und die Auswirkung der automatischen Stabilisatoren zu einem erheblichen Anstieg des Staatsde zits. Im Ergebnis wird das Niveau der ö¤entlichen Verschuldung bei Rückkehr zur wirtschaftlichen Normalität erheblich höher ausfallen als vor der Krise. Dieses Papier untersucht aus wohlfahrtsökonomischer Sicht den daraus resultierenden - nanzpolitischen Handlungsbedarf.

We study inter-temporal changes in poverty for Germany from year 1978 to 2003, and we employ the bootstrap method to test for statistical significance of results. All results are decomposed by household type and region. Poverty estimates are particularly high for single parents. Most striking, however, is the poverty divide between the old and newly-formed German Federal States, with poverty being significantly higher in the latter. We conduct a nonlinear Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to quantify the separate contribution of regional differences in households’ characteristics to the probability of being poor.

This paper studies investment incentives in the steady state of a dynamic bilateral matching market. Because of search frictions, both parties in a match are partially locked-in when they bargain over the joint surplus from their sunk investments. The associated holdup problem depends on market conditions and is more important for the long side of the market. In the case of investments in homogenous capital only the agents on the short side acquire ownership of capital. There is always underinvestment on both sides of the market. But when market frictions become negligible, the equilibrium investment levels tend towards the first-best.

This paper studies the innovation dynamics of an oligopolistic in- dustry. The firms compete not only in the output market but also by engaging in productivity enhancing innovations to reduce labor costs. Rent sharing may generate productivity dependent wage differentials. Productivity growth creates intertemporal spill–over effects, which af- fect the incentives for innovation at subsequent dates. Over time the industry equilibrium approaches a steady state. The paper character- izes the evolution of the industry’s innovation behavior and its market structure on the adjustment path.

Our paper analyses the relationship of tax compliance costs and business strategy. Due to instruments, like information technology, simplified cash accounting or outsourcing compliance activities to tax advisers, private businesses have a set of strategies to optimize their tax compliance cost burden. Under the assumption of rational choice a private business chooses a cost-optimal administration strategy. Nevertheless we find empirical evidence for small German businesses using only insufficiently the support of external tax advisers. Therefore a considerable number of small businesses in Germany would be able to reduce their compliance cost burden by a higher degree of outsourcing tax processes. By contrast we find no significant evidence for a cost reduction by an electronic data interchange with the tax and social insurance authorities or by a simplified cash accounting method for tax purposes. The insufficient use of external advice may be explained by bounded rationality arguments, like an overconfidence of the taxpayer as well as a cost perception deficit. An alternative motivation could be a mistrust of the taxpayer against an external tax adviser.

We reexamine the claim that the effect of income on subjective well-being suffers from a systematic downward bias if one ignores that higher income is typically associated with more work effort. We analyze this claim using German panel data, controlling for individual unobserved heterogeneity, and specifying the impact of working hours in a non-monotonic form. Our results suggest that the impact of working hours on happiness is rather small and exhibits an inverse U-shape. We do not find evidence that leaving working hours out of the analysis leads to an underestimation of the income effect.

Acknowledging the fact that the growth experience of countries is seldom well described by the average growth rate, this paper aims at identifying countries that are similar in terms of their growth process, thus emphasizing the dynamics of growth rates. To that end, the growth experience of countries is interpreted as a Markov switching process with countries switching between four distinct growth regimes: crisis, stagnation, stable growth, and miracle growth. In the model, different growth patterns arise because countries switch between the growth regimes with different frequencies. In order to account for the distinct dynamics, the traditional Markov switching model is extended by a classification mechanism that endogenously assigns countries exhibiting similar dynamics into the same, and countries exhibiting distinct dynamics into different clusters. Three distinct growth clusters are obtained: the first cluster consists of countries that have achieved relatively fast and steady growth mainly by spending time in the stable and the miracle growth regime. Countries in the second cluster have achieved only moderate growth and often found themselves in stagnation for longer periods. The third cluster might be referred as a growth failure cluster because the countries associated with this cluster have suffered from small growth rates and frequent crises. It appears that developing countries can avoid falling into the growth failure cluster by securing a minimum amount of human capital. In contrast to that, the most distinguishing feature of the countries in the successful growth cluster is their reasonable quality of institutions.

Climate protection should use environmental policy instruments that raise revenues, which can be used, for instance, to cut labour taxes to alleviate unemployment in economies suffering from high and persistent unemployment. This paper elaborates the possibilities of an employment dividend of climate policies and shows the potential importance of such a second dividend for a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of climate policy. It is argued that national attempts to reap such a double dividend may be bound to fail if resource suppliers can respond in a way that leads to a large-scale international reallocation of environmental rents. Only a internationally coordinated uniform base tax on CO2 that complements already existing emission trading systems could keep revenues from climate policy in those countries bearing the cost of fighting global warming and thus leave them with the option on a second dividend.

We introduce a dynamic panel threshold model to shed new light on the impact of inflation on long-term economic growth. The empirical analysis is based on a large panel-data set including 124 countries during the period from 1950 to 2004. For industrialized countries, our results confirm the inflation targets of about 2% set by many central banks. For non-industrialized countries, we estimate that inflation hampers growth if it exceeds 17%. Below this threshold, however, the impact of inflation on growth remains insignificant. Therefore, our results do not support growth-enhancing effects of inflation in developing countries.