Daß die Sowjetunion zusammenbrechen und Deutschland wieder vereint werden würde, hat vor1989 eigentlich niemand geglaubt. Das Buch des russischen Dissidenten Amalrik "Kann dieSowjetunion das Jahr 1984 überleben" wurde ähnlich wie Weltuntergangsprognosen religiöserSekten belächelt, obgleich...

[...]We begin by discussing the so-called first generation ofmodels, in which crises are viewed in the literature as theunavoidable result of unsustainable policies or fundamentalimbalances. Next, we survey the literature on the secondgeneration of models, which highlights the possibility of...

The Great War of 1914-18 constituted a major rupture for the economies of Europe in several respects. It marked the end of almost a century of uninterrupted economic growth. It ended a long period of near-universal currency stability, and set in motion a painful process of de-globalisation. It...

For over a decade, The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation, Washington's preeminent think tank, have tracked the march of economic freedom around the world with the influential Index of Economic Freedom. Since 1995, the Index has brought Smith's theories about liberty, prosperity and...

In this paper we question the consensus of using a binary crisisdefinition for empirical crisis models. We believe that the most severeshortcomings of the crisis models today are in the crisis definition rather than the explanatory variables ...

There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutionsare fundamental for a country’s prosperity. The paper focuses on political events inItaly over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 hashelped insulate Italy’s financial...

This paper delineates the simultaneous impact of non-anticipated information onmean and variance of the intraday return process by including appropriate variablesaccounting for the news flow into both the mean and the variance function. This allowsus to differentiate between the consistent price...

This paper surveys selected applications of the Lorenz curve and related stochasticorders in economics and econometrics, with a bias towards problems in statisticaldistribution theory. These include characterizations of income distributions in termsof families of inequality measures, Lorenz...

Obesity has become a major health issue. Research in economics has providedimportant insights as to how technological progress reduced the relative price of food andcontributed to the increase in obesity. However, the increased availability of food might wellhave overstrained will power and led...