While it is widely agreed that Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) holds as a long-run concept the specific dynamic driving the process is largely build upon a priori economic belief rather than a thorough statistical modeling procedure. The two prevailing time series models, i.e. the exponential...

In assessing Alexander Swoboda's great influence on economics, two themes stand out: the determinants of global inflation, particularly in the 1970s, and the choice of an exchange rate regime consistent with domestic monetary and fiscal policies. Although seemingly narrowly focused on China, our...

Since 2004, China has been backed into a situation where the renminbi is expected to go ever higher against the dollar, and this one-way bet has led to a loss of domestic monetary control. Combined with a more general flight from the U.S. dollar, the resulting monetary explosion in China...

This paper illustrates different scenarios of implementing an emissions trading scheme and investigates the economic implications of diverse baseline development paths and an additional limitation or ceiling on emissions trading. The analysis focuses on the impacts of dissimilar emissions...

This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of in- come and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...

This paper examines the post-War Summer and Winter Olympic Games in order to determine the economic and political determinants of national participation, of female participation in particular, and of success at the Games (i.e., medal counts). Compared to the Summer Games, Winter participation...

Das Papier untersucht die Rolle von IWF, Weltbank und WTO und ihre Arbeitsteilung. Ich diskutiere die Gründe für ihre Existenz und ihre ursprünglichen Aufgaben und frage, inwieweit es ihnen gelungen ist, sich den veränderten Bedingungen und ihren neuen Aufgaben anzupassen....

The choice between foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports has been a recurrent theme in the literature on international trade, yet few studies have analysed this choice at the level of the individual firm. This paper uses a new dataset to study the FDI-versus-exports decision for banks. We...

This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of income and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...

Geistige Eigentumsrechte gewinnen in Zuge der Globalisierung eine immer grössere Bedeutung. Neue Produktionstechniken, schnellere Kommunikationswege und nicht zuletzt die rasante Entwicklung der neuen Medien erleichtern zunehmend Imitationen, Kopien und Piraterie. Im Jahre 1995 wurde mit der...