We argue that the COVID epidemic disproportionately affected the economic well-being and health of poor people. To disentangle the forces that generated this outcome, we construct a model that is consistent with the heterogeneous impact of the COVID recession on low- and high-income people. According to our model, two-thirds of the inequality in COVID deaths reflect preexisting inequality in comorbidity rates and access to quality health care. The remaining third stems from the fact that low-income people work in occupations where the risk of infection is high. Our model also implies that the rise in income inequality generated by the COVID epidemic reflects the nature of the goods that low-income people produce. Finally, we assess the health-income trade-offs associated with fiscal transfers to the poor and mandatory containment policies.

A resolution of the missing deflation puzzle is proposed. Our resolution stresses the importance of nonlinearities in price- and wage-setting when the economy is exposed to large shocks. We show that a nonlinear macroeconomic model with real rigidities resolves the missing deflation puzzle, while a linearized version of the same underlying nonlinear model fails to do so. In addition, our nonlinear model reproduces the skewness of inflation and other macroeconomic variables observed in post-war U.S. data. All told, our results caution against the common practice of using linearized models to study inflation and output dynamics.

In the fight against global warming, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a major objective. In particular, a decrease in electricity generation by coal could contribute to reducing CO2 emissions. We study potential economic consequences of a coal phase-out in Germany, using a multi-region dynamic general equilibrium model. Four regional phase-out scenarios before the end of 2040 are simulated. We find that the worst case phase-out scenario would lead to an increase in the aggregate unemployment rate by about 0.13 [0.09 minimum; 0.18 maximum] percentage points from 2020 to 2040. The effect on regional unemployment rates varies between 0.18 [0.13; 0.22] and 1.07 [1.00; 1.13] percentage points in the lignite regions. A faster coal phase-out can lead to a faster recovery. The coal phase-out leads to migration from German lignite regions to German non-lignite regions and reduces the labour force in the lignite regions by 10,100 [6300; 12,300] people by 2040. A coal phase-out until 2035 is not worse in terms of welfare, consumption and employment compared to a coal-exit until 2040.

We analyze whether, and since when, East and West German business cycles are synchronised. We investigate real GDP, unemployment rates and survey data as business cycle indicators and we employ several empirical methods. Overall, we find that the regional business cycles have synchronised over time. GDP-based indicators and survey data show a higher degree of synchronisation than the indicators based on unemployment rates. However, synchronisation among East and West German business cycles seems to have become weaker again recently.

The paper analyzes how actual monetary policy changed following the official adoption of inflation targeting in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland and how it affected the volatilities of important macroeconomic variables in the years thereafter. To disentangle the effects of the policy shift from exogenous changes in the volatilities of these variables, a Markov-switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model is estimated that allows for regime switches in the policy parameters and the volatilities of shocks hitting the economies. Whereas estimation results reveal periods of high and low volatility for all three economies, the presence of different policy regimes is supported by the underlying data for the Czech Republic and Poland, only. In both economies, monetary policy switched from weak and unsystematic to strong and systematic responses to inflation dynamics. Simulation results suggest that the policy shifts of both central banks successfully reduced inflation volatility in the following years. The observed reduction in output volatility, on the other hand, is attributed more to a reduction in the size of external shocks.

Many economic decisions implicitly or explicitly rely on a projection of the medium- or long-term economic development of a country or region. In this paper, we provide a federal long-run projection model for Germany and the German states. The model fea-tures a top-down approach and, as major contribution, uses error correction models to estimate the regional economic development dependent on the national projection. For the medium- and long-term projection of economic activity, we apply a production function approach. We provide a detailed robustness analysis by systematically varying assumptions of the model. Additionally, we explore the effects of different demographic trends on economic development.

In the tradition of Romer and Romer (2000), this paper compares staff forecasts of the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) for inflation and output with corresponding private forecasts. Standard tests show that the Fed and less so the ECB have a considerable information advantage about inflation and output. Using novel tests for conditional predictive ability and forecast stability for the US, we identify the driving forces of the narrowing of the information advantage of Greenbook forecasts coinciding with the Great Moderation.

This paper assesses whether the economy of East Germany is catching up with the West German region in terms of welfare. While the primary measure for convergence and catching up is per capita output, we also look at other macroeconomic indicators such as unemployment rates, wage rates, and production levels in the manufacturingsector. In contrast to existing studies of convergence between regions of reunified Germany, our approach is purely based upon the time series dimension and is thus directly focused on the catching up process in East Germany as a region. Our testing setup includes standard ADF unit root tests as well as unit root tests that endogenously allow for a break in the deterministic component of the process. In our analysis, we find evidence of catching up for East Germany for most of the indicators. However, convergence speed is slow, and thus it can be expected that the catching up process will take further decades until the regional gap is closed.