The article treats the history of Germany’s Great Inflation from 1914 to 1923. It focusses on explaining the turning points of wholesale price trends. It demonstrates that these were mostly triggered by national and international political decisions immediately impacting the mark exchange...

Germany’s hyperinflation resulted from a confluence of several factors, all of which contributed to a temporary breakdown in state capacity and to unsustainable public sector deficits. Wartime debt deflated by 90% already in 1920. Informal wage indexation and failure to enforce collection of a...

Die deutsch-russischen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen haben sich seit den 1990er Jahren fast unbemerkt von der (medialen) Öffentlichkeit positiv weiterentwickelt. Russland wurde zwar als G8-Mitglied und eines der wichtigen Schwellenländer der BRIC-Gruppe wahrgenommen, mehr Aufmerksamkeit genoss...

We collect more than eight million German-language tweets on the war in Ukraine and use a machine learning approach toconstruct a daily index of uncertainty about the war. In an empirical model, we show that fluctuations in uncertainty have strong effectson financial markets and real economic...

Sanctions and their effectiveness are at the centre of the discussion about an appropriate response to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. At the latest since the atrocities of the war became evident and payment for gas supplies in roubles was brought into play, voices calling for a...

In this essay, I outline a method to compute the economic impact of a sudden stop of natural gas imports from Russia. First, I estimate the reduction in the short-run supply of natural gas for the economy and the industry sector. Second, I use model simulations to analyse the effect of a sudden...

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, more and more people are calling for a ban on Russian energy imports. The proponents argue that abstaining from importing billions worth of coal, oil and gas will further increase the pressure on the Kremlin. Critics, however, including German...