Cette contribution a pour objet d’élaborer un modèle mettant en relation la variable q de Tobin corrigée pour la fiscalité avec le taux d’accumulation du capital dans le but d’évaluer l’effet de l’incitation fiscale sur l’investissement privé en Suisse. L’estimation du modèle sur la base des données portant sur la période d’après-guerre révèle le rô1e mineur joué par la fiscalité dans le processus d’investissement en Suisse. Par ailleurs, d’après les rèsultats de la simulation du modèle sous divers scénarios de réforme fiscale, les instruments fiscaux employés en Suisse, à savoir la manipulation du taux d’imposition des bénéfices et des taux de dépréciation fiscalement admis paraissent relativement inefficaces. Par contre, un instrument direct comme le crédit d’impôt, jamais encore utilisé, témoigne d’une assez grande efficacité.

The paper extends the framework of the EUP to cover the effects of changes in the number of working hours. Beside this, a measure for the structural imbalances not only for the labour market (structural unemployment rate at equilibrium) but also for the goods market are presented. The empirical implementation introduces the concept of feasible working hours, which account for the maximal amount of overtime hours in the labour constraint. Simulation studies analyse the consequences of the present policy of German trade unions which bargain for a reduction of standard working hours. The main conclusions are: (i) The increasing mismatch on the goods market that is reported, basically results from an increasing mismatch on the labour market; (ii) reducing standard working hours might be a short-sighted policy; it may increase unemployment due to some induced substitution of workers by overtime work, and, moreover, due to the induced reduction of feasible working hours.

In this article, we concern ourselves with the modelling of macroeconomic time series within the unit-roots framework. We apply two approaches which seem to be well suited to model business cycles and long-run growth phenomena. First, we apply the Markov-switching model which is built around the idea that a variable may be associated with different regimes. We extend this approach to allow for asymmetries in business cycles and find that with this modification the model identifies regimes which cannot be associated with notions of the business cycle. Second, in a cointegration analysis we examine common stochastic trends and international transmission of macroeconomic shocks. The results show that transient shocks do not vanish, but have long persistent effects. Furthermore, we supplement the cointegration approach with an impulse response analysis and find that there exists a transmission of shocks between countries which indicates great international dependencies in economic activity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether shocks to output and employment had permanent or transitory effects during the period from 1961 to 1990 in the Federal Republic of Germany. There are a lot of parametric and non-parametric approaches which can be used for data generating processes which are difference-stationary or trend-stationary. But especially output and employment time series show very strong seasonal movements. Before employing usual persistence measures one has to test for seasonal integration. The application of seasonal adjustment procedures which are typically used in practice lead to different degrees of persistence, so one has to be very careful in interpreting the results.

The non-stationarity of many macroeconomic time-series has lead to an increased demand for economic models that are able to generate fragile equilibria. For instance, the natural unemployment rate is allowed to shift over time depending on past unemployment. Actually, many European unemployment series seem to exhibit a unit root or persistence. This view is questioned in the paper using German data on unemployment. A new class of time-series models, the fractionally integrated ARMA model, that allows the difference parameter to take real values, enables the researcher to separate long memory and short memory in the data. It is shown that using this approach the unit root hypothesis is rejected but unemployment exhibits long memory.

L'existence d'une relation d'équilibre de long-terme entre le stock réel de monnaie, la production en volume et le taux de intérêt, joue un rôle important dans la théorie économique et la politique monétaire. Le principal objectif de cet article est de détecter l'existence une telle relation de long terme en Allemagne, au vu des changements de régiment dans la politique monétaire dans le milieu des années 1970. A cette fin, nous utilisons un test de co-intégration mis au point par Johansen (1988). La preuve empirique est très fragile et dépend fortement de la période considérée.

In recent years there is evidence in the literature that various time series like GNP or production may be nonlinear. In this paper the question is examined whether there are non-linearities in the net production index for the producing sector of the FRG. Three different non-linearity tests are applied on the stationary series and two exhibit clear nonlinearities. Therefore a SETAR-model was estimated and it was able to capture all the previous inherent non-linearities.