For over a decade, The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation, Washington's preeminent think tank, have tracked the march of economic freedom around the world with the influential Index of Economic Freedom. Since 1995, the Index has brought Smith's theories about liberty, prosperity and...

In this paper we question the consensus of using a binary crisisdefinition for empirical crisis models. We believe that the most severeshortcomings of the crisis models today are in the crisis definition rather than the explanatory variables ...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar’s long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. Idescribe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, withdistinguished economists’ stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar’s goal is to show howeconomists work, but also...

The robust empirical finding that exporting firms are systematically different from firms thatmerely serve domestic consumers has inspired the development of a new brand of tradetheory, the theory of heterogeneous firms and trade. The establishment of a canonical modeldue to Melitz (2003) has...

Vor etwas mehr als einem Jahr hat dasIAB seine „Wege aus der Arbeitsmarktkrise“veröffentlicht. Dabei warenHandlungsoptionen aus vier Politikbereichenauf den Prüfstand gestelltund ein gut durchdachter Policy-Mixaus Finanz-, Ordnungs-, Tarif- undArbeitsmarktpolitik zur Lösung...

[...]We begin by discussing the so-called first generation ofmodels, in which crises are viewed in the literature as theunavoidable result of unsustainable policies or fundamentalimbalances. Next, we survey the literature on the secondgeneration of models, which highlights the possibility of...

U.K. guidelines on the introduction of new regulations require that politicians and civil servants should “think small first” when deciding whether and how to introduce new regulations that affect business. Similar guidelines are currently being adopted across the EU. This paper presents the...

The paper examines challenges in effectively implementing the lender-of-last-resort function in the EUsingle financial market. Briefly highlighted are features of the EU financial landscape that could increaseEU systemic financial risk. Briefly described are the complexities of the EU’s...

[...]The task facing the Eurosystem is even morecomplex than that facing countries with stable monetaryregimes, where the measurement of the national andregional impact of policy has already proved to be extremelydifficult. The creation of the Eurosystem constitutes aregime shift in virtually...

In recent years there have been important academic and policy-related developments in thefield of ethnic-minority entrepreneurship in the UK. It is a subject that is marked by increasingtheoretical sophistication and activity on the part of policy makers and practitioners. We investigatethe...