Clemens Fuest und Niklas Potrafke, beide ifo Institut und LMU München, diskutieren, ob die deutsche Schuldenbremse einer ökonomisch sinnvollen Staatsverschuldung im Weg stehe. Forschungsergebnisse legten nahe: Wenn die Politik Haushaltsdefizite, Verschuldungsquoten sowie Risikoprämien auf...

Seit seiner Einführung am 1. Januar 1999 hat der Euro über ein Viertel seines Außenwertes verloren. Nachdem alle auf makroökonomischen Fundamentalfaktoren basierenden Ansätze die andauernde Schwäche der europäischen Währung nicht zu erklären vermochten, hat die These, dass die Schwäche...

Die künftige Entwicklung der Wechselkurse ist für viele wirtschaftliche Entscheidungen von besonderer Bedeutung. Gerade die jüngste Aufwertung des Euro gegenüber dem US-Dollar hat deutlich vor Augen geführt, wie negativ sich unerwartete Wechselkursänderungen auswirken können. Um Risiken...

The study analyses the characteristics of professional exchange rate forecasts for the €/US$ rate. The results indicate that the quality of forecasts produced by professional economists is rather poor and incompatible with the rational expectations hypothesis. This dismal result is according...

We develop an institutional framework for central banks that try to pursue a stability-oriented monetary policy with the strategy of exchange rate targeting. Recent experience shows that a crucial element of this approach is to avoid destabilizing capital inflows. Policy makers can exert...

Due to the severity of the financial market crisis most central banks reached the limits of their traditional monetary policy instruments and relied to a very large extent on instruments of unconventional monetary policy. In our paper we develop a simple theoretical framework for the money...

The paper discusses the strong output decline in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It starts from the puzzling observation that the former CSFR, Hungary and Poland experienced a relatively similar decline in output in spite of completely different stabilization and transformation...

The first part of the paper analyzes the inflationary risks associated with price liberalization, the welfare costs of inflation and the difficulties of East European central banks in pursuing non-inflationary policies. The main obstacles are the low credibility of stabilization policies and a...

This paper develops a new framework for the process of money supply. In contrast to models like McCallum (1989) based on the money multiplier analysis or the credit market models of Brunner and Meltzer (1966, 1973) our model explicitly illustrates the interaction of non-banks, banks and the...

The paper compares the experience with shock therapies in East Germany, Poland and the CSFR. After an analysis of the individual starting conditions and economic performance since the inception of comprehensive reform programmes it focuses on the specific elements of the East German reform...