This paper introduces the Deutsche Bundesbank's new procedure for estimating the term structure of interest rates. It describes the basic methodological approaches used (Nelson and Siegel (1987) and Svensson (1994)) and some fundamental concepts which are important for estimating and...

In the recent economic debate on the design of fiscal policy in Germany it is gene rally agreed that the total hurden of taxes and levies has to be reduced. In this paper, arguments that form the basis of this claim are evaluated within a calihrated Real Business Cycle model. The analysis shows...

In this paper we describe a theoretical model of optimal investment of various types of financially constrained firms. We show that the resulting relationship between internal funds and investment is non-monotonic. In particular, the magnitude of the cash flow sensitivity of the investment is...

The paper explains the observed asymmetric inflation response to value-added tax (VAT) changes in Hungary by calibrating a standard sectoral menu cost model on a new micro-level CPI data set. The model is able to reproduce important moments of the data, and finds that the asymmetry can be...

This paper assesses the importance for structural transformation of three features of sectoral technology: labor-augmenting technological progress, capital intensity, and substitutability between capital and labor. We estimate CES production functions for agriculture, manufacturing, and services...

By making use of the Duncan&Hoffman model, the paper estimates returns to educational mismatch using comparable microdata for 25 European countries. Our aim is to investigate the extent to which the main empirical regularities produced by other papers on the subject are confirmed by our data...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000 was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001a dispute arose, centering around the question, whether or not the later stages of the German Income Tax Reform should be brought...

We propose a novel approach to model serially dependent positive-valued variables which realize a non-trivial proportion of zero outcomes. This is a typical phenomenon in financial time series observed at high frequencies, such as cumulated trading volumes. We introduce a flexible point-mass...