In the process of globalization, international convergence of competition legislation has steadily gained importance. Yet, specific aspects of European history gave capital markets, corporate governance and competition policies a special flavor. Historically grown peculiarities have to be taken...

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 remains one of the biggest urban disasters in American history. This paper gives a comprehensive overview of how the city coped with the immediate consequences of the catastrophe and quickly rebuilt. It analyzes the tense political situation of San Francisco...

This research project of the Research Institute for Social and Economic History at the University of Cologne is to clarify the process and causes of the theft of precious metals by the Nazis as well as explaining the economic utilization of the stolen property between 1938 and 1945, giving...

The law on Foreign Exchange Control, which had been passed as early as 1931 in oder to fight the scarcity of foreign currency, was used to impede the transfer of Jewish property abroad immediately after the Nazis came to power. However, only from 1935 on, legislation on foreign currency aimed at...

Following the economic and political reforms international private capital started flowing into the emerging market economies of Central and Eastern Europe reducing the official capital flows to the region. The composition of private capital flows showed continuous dominance of direct equity...

The nineties has been a period of increasing migratory flows from less developed countries to industrialized nations. It is instructive to compare the two largest economies in the world, the European Union and the United States, in terms of the magnitude, trends and composition of their...

This paper locates the collapse of East German communism in Marxist-Leninist monetary theory. By exploring the economic and cultural functions of money in East Germany, it argues that the communist party failed to reconcile its ideological aspirations ­ a society free of the social alienation...

"...It is impossible for any community to have very full employment and completely free collective bargaining and stable prices. Either one of the three will be completely sacrificed, or else all three will have to be modified." "...In the last resort the answer will be given not by economists...

Europe’s single currency is widely invoked as a potential solution to the monetary and exchange rate problems of other regions, including Asia, Latin America, North America and even Africa. This lecture asks whether the Europe’s experience in creating the euro is exportable. It...

Now that the decision has been taken to admit to the European Union eight of what were once called the transition economies, attention has naturally turned to whether these countries should also join Europe’s monetary union. But where is a consensus that joining the EU, while posing...