Most German economists show strong patterns of professional specialisation. In their work, they either focus on basic research or on policy consultancy. The evidence provided by Haucap und Mödl has been used to question work incentives in academia. The suggestion to change work incentives,...

The German government plans to introduce a minimum wage from 2015. This must be understood as a response to the decline in collective bargaining coverage and the marked increase in employment in the low-wage sector. The authors discuss how many workers are affected by this new regulation and...

The European Central Bank (ECB) recently announced its willingness to do whatever is needed to save the euro. This has raised the question whether such a role of the ECB must lead to higher rates of infl ation. Under current recessive macroeconomic conditions in the eurozone, the ECB’s...

Looking around the world, one realizes that national minimum wages are not uncommon. Yet it is still very difficult to estimate what effects a minimum wage might have in Germany. This is not just a question of how high the minimum wage should be — its impacts would also depend on many details...

The traditional exception to the welfare reducing character of protectionism is based on the optimum tariff argument. If in addition the market power can be traced back to control of a necessary, cero substitution natural resource type input, then the corresponding trade tax and the shadow price...

During the last two centuries Chile had three official monetary units of account, where changes from one to the other can be seen as related to price level variations stretching over many years . For description and analysis this prolonged but also highly variable inflation environment will...