In this paper we study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. The data for the U.S. and for a cross section of countries make it clear that urbanization and industrialization are strongly associated with the rise of social insurance. We describe a model economy in which...

The economic effects of environmental taxes depend on the market structure. Under imperfect competition with free entry and exit, environmental taxes have an impact on economies of scale by changing the number and size of firms. Whether economies of scale rise or fall in a particular industry...

Using the statistical technique of fuzzy clustering, regimes of inflation and unemployment are explored for the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany between 1871 and 2009. We identify for each country three distinct regimes in inflation/unemployment space. There is considerable...

Ähnlich wie in den anderen MOEL hatte auch in der Slowakei der Systemwechsel Anfang der 90er Jahre drastische Folgen für den Agrar- undb Ernährungssektor. Die Konsumenten reagierten auf die Abschaffung der Verbrauchersubventionen bei Milch und Milchprodukten mit deutlicher Einschränkung...

Against the background of the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2003 the following analysis, brings into focus the responses of the agricultural sector to decoupled subsidies. In particular it addresses the impact of the Single Payment Scheme (SPS) on land sales and rent prices...

The Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis (EKC) postulates an inverted u-shaped curve between important pollutants and per capita GDP analogous to the relationship between in-come inequality and income per capita which has been analysed by Kuznets in 1955. The arti-cle focuses on an empirical...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of government spending shocks and the fiscal transmission mechanism in the euro area for the period 1980-2008. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we investigate changes in the macroeconomic impact of government spending shocks using time-varying...