Sowohl in Expertenkreisen als auch in der Öffentlichkeit wird schon länger kontrovers über die anhaltenden Niedrigzinsen diskutiert. Liegt die Ursache dieser Niedrigzinsphase an der ultralockeren Geldpolitik der Zentralbanken oder sind die Zentralbanken selbst Getriebene einer bereits länger...

In the second part of the 80s, Japan was under political pressure to expand aggregate demand. It followed suit in increasing its money supply. This caused severe inflation and the financial bubble which collapsed in 1990 resulting in capital losses and in a sizable loss of GDP. This paper draws...

This paper presents a positive model which shows that institutional setups on capital and labor markets might be intertwined by politicoeconomic forces. Two politicoeconomic equilibria arise from our model, one with little protection of insiders on capital and labor markets, and another one with...

In several studies, hedonic methods have been used successfully for the ex post assessment of the accuracy of inflation measurement. Most of those studies relate to high-tech products, with respect to which traditional methods of compiling price indices often fail. We apply hedonic methods to...

Conventional wisdom says that commitment eliminates the inflationary bias of monetary policy. However, this paper shows that the inflation bias can persist even when the central bank commits. A simple model is presented in which the central bank precommits by setting the policy instrument, and...

Regarding inflation as being a monetary phenomenon in the long-run is a widely-held view in modern macro economics. We analyse this topic by means of a P-star model. Based on the quantity theory of money, this approach explains inflation via a supposed equilibrium price level (P-star), which...