The prior paper in this sequel, Pope (2009) introduced the concept of a nominalist heuristic, defined as a focus on prominent numbers, indices or ratios. In this paper the concept is used to show three things in how scientists and practitioners analyse and evaluate to decide (conclude). First,...

This paper's field evidence is: (1) many official sectors rapidly forget the damage of the 1982-85 exchange rate liquidity crisis and reverted to what caused that crisis, namely a closed economy clean floats perspective; and (2) the 2006-2008/9 exchange rate liquidity shock would have been more...

Opinion is divided on whether it is better to have a single world money or variable exchange rates.Pope, Selten and von Hagen (2003) propose that fresh light would be shed via an analysis that allows forseven complexity impacts on the exchange rate that are underplayed (where not entirely...

The paper traces the dangers in the closed economy perspective of a monetary policy focused on adomestic inflation goal under a clean float. Field evidence of the damage wrought from this perspective isreinforced by that from a laboratory experiment. The laboratory experiment avoids measurement...

Despite the fact that banks in Central Europe are burdened by extraordinarily high bad loan ratios, the recent financial crisis in South East Asia and Russia, has not led to a massive failure of banks in the region. In this paper, we study economic trends and policies that may have helped to...

German public finances are currently subject to considerable changes in the macro-economic environment and this is probably only the beginning of more far-reaching developments in the future. Like many other European countries, Germany, on the one hand, faces the fiscal problems emerging from an...

This paper studies the inflation and interest rate performances since the late 1970s for six former highinflation countries that adopted inflation targeting (IT) in the early 1990’s. Using Germany, Switzerland and the US for comparison, we look at various aspects of central bank performance in...

We provide empirical estimates of the risksharing and redistributive properties of fiscal equalization among the states of the German federation. Fiscal equalization serves as a mechanism to insure state budgets against asymmetric revenue shocks, but provides almost no insurance against regional...