TY - THES A1 - Eydam, Ulrich T1 - Essays on Macroeconomics N2 - This dissertation consists of four self-contained papers. Each paper deals with a specific macroeconomic question. The first paper assesses the distributional implications of environmental policies from a general equilibrium macroeconomic perspective. I develop a New-Keynesian model with several types of uncertainties and frictions that incorporates liquidity constrained households. The model is calibrated to match the German economy and the numerical results show that climate policy instruments can be associated with regressive welfare effects. Furthermore, the analysis shows that these effects can be mitigated through an appropriate revenue recycling scheme. The second paper deals with short-run inequality dynamics within a real business cycle model. An empirical evaluation shows that the cyclical components of income inequality, the capital share and real GDP are correlated. We develop tractable representation of common inequality indicators in the general equilibrium model and show that the observed pattern is driven by innovations in the capital share. A Bayesian estimation of the model for the United States with data for the period 1948 to 2017 indicates that the model provides a reasonable fit for the data and successfully replicates the observed pattern of cyclical correlations. The third paper empirically examines the effects of banking regulation on the risk-relationship between sovereigns and banks. Based on a comprehensive data set of the European banking sector, we find that the implementation of the novel European banking regulation framework significantly contributed to a weakening of the risk-link between sovereigns and banks.The fourth paper empirically examines the role of institutional experience for institutional development in transition economies. To capture institutional experience, we develop a novel index, based on historical country records. The results of cross-sectional and panel estimations suggest that institutional experience helps to explain the divergent economic and institutional development in transition economies after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. KW - Macroeconomic Dynamics KW - Environmental Policy KW - Inequality KW - Policy Design KW - Business Cycle KW - Income and Wealth Inequality KW - Distributive Shocks KW - Financial Stability KW - Sovereign Bail-out KW - Bail-in Tool KW - Doom Loop KW - European Banking Union KW - Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive KW - Institutions KW - Comparative Development KW - Transition Economies KW - Post-Soviet Space KW - Collective Memory Y1 - 2021 ER -