Der Begriff „Wachstum“ gehört zu den schillernden Schlagwörtern des politischen Alltags.2 Wachstum ist gut, und vieles scheint in Gefahr, wenn Wachstum ausbleibt. So führt Bundeskanzlerin Merkel in ihrer Regierungserklärung vom 10. November 2009 zum Beginn der neuen Legislaturperiode...

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...

Today efficient states can be represented as sovereign authorities governing successful economies that provide high, stable and rising standards of welfare for their citizens. Such states emerged slowly and painfully over centuries of geopolitical rivalry and conflict among aristocracies for...

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest among growth economists in General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). A GPT can be defined as "a technology that initially has much scope for improvement and evntually comes to be widely used, to have many uses, and to have many Hicksian and...

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...

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...