Thomas A. Knetsch Livres

The paper studies the short-term effects of energy price hikes on the supply of industrial goods and transport services including the repercussions on remuneration of input factors. While industry had suffered more strongly from the oil price shock of the late 1970s compared with the one of the early 1970s and the 2004-08 upsurge, evidence is reverse for transportation. Regarding the impact on the income distribution, both sectors share the pattern that in the recent episode rising energy costs were more than compensated by falling unit labor costs while in the 1970s cost structures had been strained by expansive wage policy in addition to the oil price shocks. -- Energy prices ; supply of goods and services ; income distribution

A method is proposed to measure capital services in production. This means that productive assets are weighted according to their user costs. The user costs of the individual asset classes are estimated based on data from the national accounts and other sources. The results show that, in the observation period between 1991 and 2010, enterprises' capital services expand faster than the offcially published capital stock. For the economy as a whole, this applies only to phases of cyclical expansion. As the capital stock is aggregated using asset prices, the differences can be explained by the dfferent weighting methods in conjunction with the varying speeds at which the individual asset types have accumulated over time. In growth accounting, different estimates of total factor productivity emerge. The methodological difference, however, does not significantly affect the estimates of parametric production function specifications.

While the positive return differential of the United States has attracted a lot of attention in the literature, the factors underlying the dynamics of the investment income balance have so far not been systematically investigated. Here, we propose a novel decomposition framework that accounts for the changes in net investment income. This allows us to disentangle contributions of changes in yield level and yield spread from those of changes in stocks as well as composition and portfolio effects. The analysis contributes conceptually to the question of how investment income might facilitate international risk sharing. We apply our decomposition framework to a rich German dataset spanning 11 different investment classes and provide a forensic account of the increase in the German investment income balance between 1999 and 2014. Focusing exclusively on the aggregate development of external assets and liabilities falls short of explaining the growth in German net investment income and around 40% of the increase is explained by changes in yields. Furthermore, our results highlight the importance of considering the composition of external assets and liabilities as well as portfolio changes in order to understand the dynamics of the investment income balance.

We propose a concept of potential labour force in full-time equivalents which can be used to measure aggregate labour supply in terms of hours worked. It is designed to calculate labour input in production function estimates of medium-run potential output. Particular attention is paid to the in uence of immigration and the interde- pendency between labour force participation and working-time decisions. Assuming that participation in working life among older people and women will increase, and if migration surpluses remain high, the potential labour force is likely to be stabilised until 2020 despite the evident curbing impact of the age cohort eect. However, a decline is to be expected in full-time equivalents due to the negative repercussions of rising labour force participation on working hours.

Real residential investment in Germany is found to be cointegrated with population, real national income per capita and real house prices. This evidence is consistent with a model where the trend in housing demand is determined by demographic factors and economic well-being to which supply adjusts so slowly that real house prices are affected persistently. Reunification seems to have induced two structural changes in the empirical housing market model. First, the speed of equilibrium adjustment via residential investment slowed down substantially and real house prices lost the capacity to contribute to the adjustment process. Second, the degree of persistence in the error correction term increased a lot. The changing features are key to explain significant differences in alternative trend-cycle decompositions of residential investment. -- Residential investment ; vector autoregression ; trend-cycle decomposition ; Germany

The paper presents empirical work on short-run and long-run comovement between the German, French and Italian aggregates of private consumption, business investment, exports, imports, GDP, and changes in inventories. In country-specific data sets, cointegration analyses are carried out both to identify long-run economic relationships and to remove the trend components from the nonstationary series. Analytically, this is done by reparametrizing the vector error correction model in its common trends representation. The resulting (Beveridge-Nelson) trend and cycle components as well as the series of changes in inventories are analyzed with a focus on synchronicity. To measure crosscountry comovement at different frequencies, "cohesion", a summary statistic developed by Croux et al. [2001], is applied. Sampling variability and parameter uncertainty are captured by bootstrapped confidence intervals

Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo business survey contains information on the assessments of inventory stocks in manufacturing as well as in retail and wholesale trade. Static factor analysis and a method building on canonical correlations are applied to construct a composite index of inventory fluctuations. Based on recursive estimates, the different variants are assessed as regards the stability of the weighting schemes and the ability to forecast the trueʺ inventory fluctuations better than the preliminary official releases.

Using aggregate data, the paper analyzes the importance of inventory investment for German business cycles since 1960. In contrast to U.S. experience, the traditional productionsmoothing/ buffer-stock model is not rejected by empirical evidence. Preliminary national accounts data of inventory investment have particularly poor quality. In order to be able to analyze recent stockbuilding trends in Germany, we propose a composite index aggregating information drawn from monthly production and sales statistics as well as from the Ifo business survey