Ulrich Woitek

• University of Zurich

During the Great Depression, countries endowed with abundant gold reserves were not able to leave the gold standard and devalue their currencies until the mid-1930s. Instead, they were forced to go down the road of internal devaluation. We analyze the policies of the Swiss authorities by estimating a New Keynesian small open economy model. Our resu...

This paper contributes to quantifying the biological implications of short-run climatic shocks and economic fluctuations in developing countries. Relying on a unique economic, climatic and anthropometric Japanese data covering the period from 1872 to 1917 (corresponding to the early phase of Japanese industrialization), we estimate the impact of ye...

Estimates of the effect of foetal health shocks may suffer from survivorship bias. The foetal origins literature seemingly agrees that survivorship bias is innocuous in the sense that it induces a bias towards zero. Arguably, however, selective mortality can imply a bias away from zero. In the case of the 1918 flu pandemic, a suppressed immune syst...

This paper presents evidence of the irreversible consequences of exogenous climatic shocks and economic fluctuations on human welfare. We rely on a unique data set covering the period from 1872 to 1917, corresponding to the early phase of Japanese industrialization. This data includes prefecture level average temperature, precipitation, agricultura...

To better understand the quantitative implications of human capital externalities at the aggregate level, we estimate a two-sector endogenous growth model with knowledge spill-overs. To achieve this, we account for trend growth in a model consistent fashion and employ a Markov-chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to estimate the model's posterior par...

This book is the first quantitative description of Europe’s economic development at a regional level over the entire twentieth century. Based on a new and comprehensive set of data, it brings together a group of leading economic historians in order to describe and analyze the development of European regions, both for nation states and for Europe as...

When a negative shock affects a cohort in utero, two things may happen: first, the population suffers detrimental consequences in later life; and second, some will die as a consequence of the shock, either in utero or early in life. The latter effect, often referred to as culling, may induce a bias in estimates of later life outcomes. When the health s...

We analyze social mobility of decennial citizenry cohorts of Zurich born between 1780 and 1870. We categorize individuals according to their occupations and use different measures to show the level, change, and components of intergenerational mobility. Mobility was imperfect and weakly decreasing over time. Both level and change are driven by inter...

Die Lebensmittelknappheit und die daraus resultierende Teuerung während des Ersten Weltkriegs verursachten Not und Hunger in breiten Bevölkerungsschichten. Mittels Höchstpreisen, Rationierungen und Unterstützungsmassnahmen versuchten die Behörden dieser Entwicklung entgegenzuwirken. Um solche Massnahmen auf die Bedürfnisse der notleidenden Bevölker...

The article discusses Sweden's monetary policy in the 1930s, which has been hailed as the first and only example of successful price-level targeting. Our contribution is twofold. First, we argue that the crucial measure that immediately ended deflationary expectations and enabled a swift recovery was a strong and involuntary devaluation of the curr...

To assess the impact of interventions on well-being during war time, we analyze data from the birth records at the university maternity hospital of Basle in the period 1912-1920. Birth weight of children from medium SEP families decreased during the crisis years 1918 and 1919, but not for low and high SEP families. A potential explanation is access...

Objective: We analyse temporal trends and regional variation among the most recent available anthropometric data from German conscription in the years 2008-2010 and their historical contextualization since 1956. Design/setting/subjects The overall sample included German conscripts (N 13 857 313) from 1956 to 2010. Results: German conscripts chan...

Mummification leads to alteration of soft-tissue morphology. No research has focused specifically on differences in soft-tissue shrinkage depending on mummification type. This study evaluated whether soft-tissue alteration is dependent on type of mummification. A total of 17 human mummies have been investigated by computed tomography (CT). Samples...

Background: It is generally accepted that height distribution in modern populations is nearly symmetrical. However, it may deviate from symmetry when nutritional status is inadequate. Aim and subjects: This study provides an analysis of changes in the shape of the height distributions among Swiss conscripts (n = 267,829) over the past 130 years ba...

In historical accounts of the world economic crisis of the 1930s, Switzerland is known for its staunch defense of the gold standard and the rise of corporatist policies. Yet, so far, the literature has not discussed the implications of these two features. This paper tries to show how the combination of hard-currency policy and nominal rigidities in...

Rising levels of overweight and obesity are important public-health concerns worldwide. The purpose of this study is to elucidate their prevalence and trends in Switzerland by analyzing variations in Body Mass Index (BMI) of Swiss conscripts. The conscription records were provided by the Swiss Army. This study focussed on conscripts 18.5-20.5 years...

Am Zentrum für Evolutionäre Medizin (Anatomisches Institut) und am Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre der Universität Zürich werden seit einigen Jahren die historischen und modernen medizinischen Daten der Aushebungen in der Schweiz und in Deutschland untersucht. Anthropometrische Daten der Rekrutierung bieten die Möglichkeit, in repräsentativer Be...

We examine the distribution of income across Swiss primary school teachers at the end of the 19th century. To assess the income differences we use a detailed data set on income of 14000 Swiss primary school teachers in 1881 and 1894/95. In addition, we have annually aggregated test scores from pedagogical examinations at recruitment, to test for th...

This paper examines under which conditions religious denomination affects public spending on schooling and educational performance. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of public school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82 and 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of c...

Am Zentrum für Evolutionäre Medi-zin (Anatomisches Institut) und am Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre der Universität Zürich werden seit einigen Jahren die historischen und modernen medizinischen Daten der Aushebungen in der Schweiz und in Deutschland untersucht. Anthropo-metrische Daten der Rekrutierung bieten die Möglichkeit, in repräsen-tativer...

Auxology has developed from mere describing child and adolescent growth into a vivid and interdisciplinary research area encompassing human biologists, physicians, social scientists, economists and biostatisticians. The meeting illustrated the diversity in auxology, with the various social, medical, biological and biostatistical aspects in studies...

Auxology has developed from mere describing child and adolescent growth into a vivid and interdisciplinary research area encompassing human biologists, physicians, social scientists, economists and biostatisticians. The meeting illustrated the diversity in auxology, with the various social, medical, biological and biostatistical aspects in studies...

Only ten years ago the New Anthropometric History started to explore the steadily changing body morphology in Switzerland during the last 200 years. A positive secular height trend began in the birth years of the 1870s. The 19-years-old Swiss conscripts gained a total of 15 cm in average height until nowadays, the increase in stature is also observ...

This paper reconsiders the role of monetary policy in Sweden’s strong recovery from the Great Depression. The Riksbank in the 1930s is sometimes seen as an example of a central bank that was relatively innovative in terms of the conduct of monetary policy. To consider this analytically, we estimate a small-scale, structural general equilibrium mode...

Employing an endogenous growth model with human capital, this paper explores how productivity shocks in the goods and human capital producing sectors contribute to explaining aggregate fluctuations in output, consumption, investment and hours. Given the importance of accounting for both the dynamics and the trends in the data not captured by the th...

We determine the causes of secular changes in the average height of the male Swiss population for the first time by analysing an unbiased, individually measured, highly representative height-data sample of 18- and 19-year-old Swiss conscripts (N = 458,322) at the national level spanning the years 1992 to 2009. Furthermore, we add historical context...

In 1835, Edouard Mallet published a notable but today nearly forgotten study of the average height of Genevan conscripts. His individual data included 3 029 conscripts born between 1805 and 1814, examined and measured between 1826 and 1835. Mallet’s work was only the third auxological study to be based on a large sample of individual conscript data...

Overweight and obesity are considered a major burden on public health in developed countries. Underlying etiologies are enigmatic and metabolic causes have been suggested to various extents before. We analyze links of major blood parame-ters to individual body mass in a young male cohort, controlling for socio-cultural factors, in order to explore...

We aimed to extend the actual overweight discussion with new unbiased Swiss conscript data from 2005 to 2006, and to present for the first time Swiss data on body mass index (BMI) before 1950 and for the late-nineteenth century. For this study, 19-year-old Swiss male conscripts (draft army; Cantons Bern, Zurich, Basel-Stadt and Basel-Land) from the...

In the time domain, the observed cyclical behavior of the real wage hides a range of economic influences that give rise to cycles of differing lengths and strengths. This may serve to produce a distorted picture of wage cyclicality. Here, we employ frequency domain methods that allow us to assess the relative contribution of cyclical frequency band...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to examine the quantitative macroeconomic implications of counter-cyclical fiscal policy for France, Germany and the UK. The model incorporates real wage rigidity and consumption habits, as the particular market failures justifying policy intervention. We subject the model to...

Using a two-sector endogenous growth model, this paper explores how productivity shocks in the goods and human capital producing sectors contribute to explaining aggregate cycles in output, consumption, investment and hours. To contextualize our findings, we also assess whether the human capital model or the standard real business cycle (RBC) model...

This paper contributes to the on-going empirical debate regarding the role of the RBC model and in particular of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks in explaining aggregate fluctuations. To achieve this, we estimate the model's posterior density using Bayesian methods. Within this framework we first extend [33] and [35] hybrid estima...

This paper contributes to the on-going empirical debate regarding the role of the RBC model and in particular of technology shocks in explaining aggregate fluctuations. To this end we estimate the model’s posterior density using Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) methods. Within this framework we extend Ireland’s (2001, 2004) hybrid estimation approac...

The influence of the environment and genetics on individual biological characteristics such as body mass and stature is well known. Many studies of these relationships have been based on conscript data. These studies often suffer from the fact that their data cover only a part of the population. Characterized by prosperity, democratic stability and...

The paper re-examines Sweden’s price level targeting during the 1930s which is regarded as a precursor of today’s inflation targeting. According to conventional wisdom the Riksbank was the first central bank to adopt price level targeting as the guideline for its activities, although in practice giving priority to exchange rate stabilisation over p...

Overweight and obesity have developed into major illnesses in most Western societies and significantly contribute to the financial burden of modern public health systems. Almost daily, new therapeutic proposals are published in the lay press, and also the scientific literature has increased dramatically in recent years. E.g., when searching MEDLINE...

Affected by individual life style, the total cholesterol serum level is a major morbidity and mortality risk factor for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD). We present total cholesterol values and their possible aetiological factors of young Swiss conscripts. Particularly, we study varying impact of these factors depending on different lev...

Paleopathological data provide valuable information about health, longevity and mortality in earlier human populations. We investigated the incidence of spinal pathologies on 54 individuals (1045 vertebrae and 18 sacral bones) that belong to a medieval skeletal series discovered in the Dalheim monastery (Northwest Germany) and compared them with co...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to examine the quantitative macroeconomic implications of countercyclical fiscal policy for France, Germany and the UK. The model incorporates real wage rigidity which is the particular market failure justifying policy intervention. We subject the model to productivity shocks and us...

Business cycles in different industries have a tendency to synchronize with one another in what appears to be a national business cycle. Using simulation and time series techniques in the time and frequency domain, we offer econometric support for the industrial sector mode-locking hypothesis, extending recent work by Selover, Jensen and Kroll (200...

Analyzing average height of Swiss conscripts born in the period 1865-1872, we identify determinants of the biological standard of liv-ing on the district level. The stochastic frontier method allows to distinguish between differences due to variations in resource endow-ment and those due to variations in the use of that endowment. For our data, eco...

Historical time series for average human height exhibit short- and medium-term cycles that can be associated with business cycles in the 19th and 20th century. Using spectral analysis, we calculate the proportion of cyclical fluctuations in height series attributable to economic cycles. We also analyze the extent to which these cyclical phenomena c...

In this paper we study the link between elections, fiscal policy and aggregate fluctuations. The setup is a stylized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model incorporating both technology and political re-election shocks. The latter are incorporated via a two-party model with elections. The main theoretical prediction is that forward-looking in...

Empirical studies crediting 'independent and conservative central banks' with lowering inflation and inflation volatility have been criticised for their focus on policy outcomes instead of policies, and for their unsystematic conflation of independence and conservatism. We present results from time-series models for the German Bundesbank that avoid...

In this paper, we examine empirically the predictions of a range of theoretical models which give a prominent role to technology shocks in explaining business cycles. To this end, we estimate (4-digit SIC) industry-level VAR models for US manufacturing using real output, the real wage and utilization corrected measures of technology and labor input...

The systematic patterns in human adult physical stature are explored in connection with Wolf's relative sunspot numbers. This topic should be of interest to economists, physicians as well as physicists. There is a need for more than a check of any similarity of curves in variables approximating the economy and human stature and for more than the ap...

Spectral analysis of the physical stature of Americans and Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries reveals a cyclical structure similar to the traditional view of the business cycle: a longer cycle with a length of 7-10 years, and a shorter cycle with a length of 3-5 years. The correlation between height cycles and cycles of economic variables suc...

In the time domain, the observed cyclical behavior of the real wage hides a range of economic in uences that give rise to cycles of di ering lengths and strengths. This may serve to produce a distorted picture of wage cyclicality. Here, we employ and develop frequency domain meth- ods that allow us to assess the relative contribution of cyclical fr...

In this paper we study the link between elections, fiscal policy and economic growth/fluctuations. The set-up is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of growth and endogenously chosen fiscal policy, in which two political parties can alternate in power. The party in office chooses jointly how much to tax and how to allocate its total expe...

We present several new measures of gross-output-based total factor productivity (TFP) at the sectoral level for manufacturing industries in the G-7 economies. We calculate measures of both TFP growth and comparative levels. These are obtained by combining conventional Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development sectoral data on labour an...

Arguably, Germany had the world's most independent central bank. Surprisingly, however, recent work has found political business cycles in German monetary aggregates. It is hard to explain this with standard models of opportunistic government behavior. Instead, we show that the cycles originate from shifts in money demand tolerated by the Bundesban...

We analyse a newly constructed data set of monthly prices for wheat and rye in Nuremberg (1490 1855) to address the issue whether models of rational investment behaviour provide an adequate description of grain markets and grain storage in early modern Europe. Based on the empirical evidence presented here we conclude that the case for well functio...

In the time domain, the observed cyclical behavior of the real wage hides a range of economic influences that give rise to cycles of differing lengths and amplitudes. This may serve to produce a distorted picture of wage cyclicality. Here, we employ frequency domain methods that allow us decompose wages into cyclical components and to assess the re...

In this paper, we employ total factor productivity data adjusted for factor utilisation over the cycle, to model the dynamic interaction between TFP and employment. Our data spans twenty 2-digit SIC code manufacturing sectors in the US. There are two key results. First, we show that the impact of technology shocks on employment cycles is much weake...

One measure of the health of the Social Security system is the difference between the market value of the trust fund and the present value of benefits accrued to date. How should present values be computed for this calculation in light of future uncertainties? We think it is important to use market value. Since claims on accrued benefits are not cu...

In our paper we analyze the influence of climatic changes on annual price fluctuations (harvest year) of agricultural products in Germany during the 16th century price revolution. The price series under analysis are from Nuremberg, Cologne, Augsburg, and Munich. The prices are compared with quarterly climatic indices for Germany, which cover the ob...

In this paper we estimate industry-level VAR models at the 4- digit SIC level for a number of US manufacturing sectors, using TFP series which allow for variable factor utilisation over the cycle. This allows us to verify the relevance of alternative theoretical modelling approaches to the business cycle. Our results support standard RBC models, an...

Rogoff’s "conservative central banker" has received a lot of attention recently. As a rule, central bank independence and inflation seem to be negatively correlated across countries. But the cross-country approach has been criticized for its reliance on legal measures and the measures’ possible endogeneity. We present an alternative test of whether...

One measure of the health of the Social Security system is the difference between the market value of the trust fund and the present value of benefits accrued to date. How should present values be computed for this calculation in light of future uncertainties? We think it is important to use market value. Since claims on accrued benefits are not cu...

Using the citizen-candidate model, we relate the monetary policy objective to individuals' voting decisions and characterize equilibrium inflation and employment under central bank dependence and independence. We also endogenize the decisions about the labour market distortion and central bank independence. Our results are consistent with the fact...

One result of the revitalized literature on political business cycles is that there are signs in German data that elections and ideology have an impact. However, using monthly data for the period 1950-89, and standard methods of time series analysis, the authors reject both the Nordhaus hypothesis of opportunistic cycles and the partisan approaches...

Price series of agricultural products are one of the few types of time series available for the description of economic activity in the preindustrial world. Therefore, they have always attracted the interest of economic historians dealing with this period. In addition to newly constructed time series of rye prices in an important economic region in...

Our main focus in this paper is the role of Sweden's exchange rate policy in Sweden's early and strong recovery after the Great Depres-sion. We estimate a small-scale, structural general equilibrium model of a small open economy using Bayesian methods. We find that in-deed terms of trade movements are the mayor driving force for the strong recovery...

In this paper we present a method of describing the cyclical characteristics of a time series in the frequency domain by computing the spectrum of the series. Classical spectral estimation has serious deficiencies if used with economic data. For such short series, Maximum Entropy spectral estimation is more suitable. To demonstrate the method, we a...

The impact of economic growth on human stature in the long run is a well established fact. Recent research (Woitek, forthcoming; Tassenaar and Jacobs, 2002) has shown that there is also a significant link between cycles in heights and the business cycle. While these results are obtained for time series on male heights based on samples covering all...