Recently, F. Helmedag has made an attempt to revive the labour theory of value by trying to demonstrate the superiority of a theoretical model of the economy that uses values instead of prices of production in their traditional or in their modern form, that is Bortkiewicz- or Sraffa-prices. This...

A simple plot of seasonal adjusted quarterly data between the change of nominal wage rates and the unemployment rate for the German economy shows a picture similar to that by which Phillips was inspired to his famous discovery, that there is a long-term tendency of a negative, non-linear...

Contrary to their significance for the adjustment of econometric models, dummy variables are seldom addressed in the literature. They serve as a tool for improving the fit of the model equations to the data and with it the prognostic performance of a model, at least lastly. Referring to the...

In 2005, Germany’s system of national accounts was altered from so called fixed prices (prices of a fixed year, in the end 1995) to prices of the preceding year as basis for calculating macroeconomic time series in real terms. Compared to the previous SNA, the new system offers a wider range...

The study addresses (i) the problem of non-additivity of some time series expressed in real terms that is one of the features of Germany’s new system of national accounts since 2005, and (ii) methods of the computation of quarterly data in econometric forecasting models under this condition....

Schnabl and Freitag (2009) sketch the causal chain that produced the current account surplus in China and the current account deficit of the U.S. (as a part of global imbalances) as follows: declining interest rates in the U.S. cause a redirection of capital flows into the periphery, rising...

The mechanism of net balances – called “Saldenmechanik” in German – was the subject of a theory presented by Wolfgang Sützel in the 50ies of the last century. Stützel was “concerned with money flows between economic units and with net changes in the money holdings of these units as a...

In 2005, Germany’s national income accounting system was altered from fixed prices to previous year’s prices as basis for macroeconomic time series measured in real terms. Among other consequences, the new system offers a wider range of possibilities to interpret theoretically relevant...

A preliminary regression analysis of different versions of the Phillips Curve on the basis of yearly data of the German economy from 1952 to 2004 leads to the conclusion that the original finding might still be of empirical relevance. A simple plot of seasonal adjusted quarterly data between the...

The Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) is a major concept in (monetary) economics in predicting changes in the inflation rate. As the inflation neutral unemployment rate is an unobserved and, in the long run, a changing variable, several questions arise about its adequate...