Im vorliegenden Text wird dargelegt, warum in die moderne Wirtschaft ein Wachstumszwang und Wachstumsdrang eingebaut sind. Wird eine globale minimale Wachstumsrate unterschritten, kommt es zur Krise.

The 2010 European debt crisis has revived the discussion concerning the optimum adjustment strategy in the face of asymmetric shocks. Whereas Mundell's (1961) seminal theory on optimum currency areas suggests depreciation in the face of crisis, the most recent emergence of competitive...

We raise fundamental questions about macroeconomics relevant to escaping the financial and economic crisis and shifting to a sustainable economy. First, the feasibility of decoupling environmental pressure from aggregate income is considered. Decoupling as a single environmental strategy is...

Because of the uncertainty about how to model the growth process of our economy, there is still much confusion about which discount rates should be used to evaluate actions having long-lasting impacts, as in the contexts of climate change, social security reforms or large public infrastructures...

The current crisis is like an earthquake for the theoretical foundations of economic policies, which have guided governments and central banks for the last few decades. The efficient market hypothesis and its application to labor markets -'natural rate theory'- dominated interpretations of...

This paper provides derivations necessary for solving an optimal consumption problem with multiplicative habits and a CRRA 'outer' utility function either for a microeconomic problem with both labor income risk and rate-of-return risk or for a macroeoconomic representative agent model.

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population's wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...

In this paper, we address the question of optimal wage and income dispersion in a growing economy. If already in the two-persons-case we have to deal with the fact of different marginal products of labor, there are two solutions in principle. Either two different wages are paid (at unanimous...