This paper compares the depth and length of the recent crisis with the Great Depression in the 1930s. It claims that economic policy played a crucial role in shortening and curtailing the recent crisis. We analyse which policies were applied during the recent crisis and which measures worked. We...

The methodological individualism and subjectivism of the Austrian tradition in economics is often associated with a methodological dualism, i.e. the claim that the nature of its subject matter, namely purposeful and intentional human action, requires economics to adopt a methodology that is...

Israel M. Kirzner is the 2006 winner of The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. In this essay, we present and evaluate his main contributions to the economics of entrepreneurship. The focus is on how Kirzner defines the entrepreneurial function. In order to...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where workers can engage in search while on the job. We show that on-the-job search is a key component in explaining labor market dynamics in models of equilibrium unemployment. The model predicts fluctuations of unemployment, vacancies, and labor...

While the volatility of job creations has been studied extensively, the survival chances of new jobs are less researched. The question when and how to expand a firm is of importance, both from the firm's and from a macro perspective. Adjustment cost theories and arguments about option values of...

In this paper we analyze how the availability of credit influences the relationship between government size as a proxy for fiscal stabilization policy and the amplitude of business cycle fluctuations in a sample of advanced OECD countries. Interpreting relatively low loan-tovalue ratios as an...

While the volatility of job creations has been studied extensively, the survival chances of new jobs are less researched. The question when and how to expand a firm is of importance, both from the firm’s and from a macro perspective. Adjustment cost theories and arguments about option values...

Bond yield and retail interest rate spreads are presumed to lead real activity on the basis of financial accelerator mechanisms, markup cyclicality or simply because they are forward-looking. Empirical results for Austria show that retail rate spreads outperform many other indicators in this...

Recent work on policy rules under uncertainty have highlighted the impact of output gap measurement errors on economic outcomes and their importance in the formulation of appropriate policy rules. This paper investigates the reliability of current estimates of the output gap in Canada. We begin...