Abstract It is often argued that the globalisation of the world economy might have contributed to an increased instability of real economic activity, in particular for small open economies. At the same time, there is evidence that the volatility of real economic activity might in fact have been...

Summary The paper uses German annual data covering the period 1969-2000 to present evidence on the link between aggregate inflation and the skewness of the distribution of relative price changes. Our empirical results are mixed. Our regression-based analyses suggest that the skewness of the...

Summary Exchange rates have been found to be more volatile than underlying macroeconomic fundamentals. Researchers have argued that the empirically observed high exchange-rate volatility may result from herd behavior of foreign-exchange traders and forecasters. We sketch a standard model that...

Abstract Economists use three types of models to describe volunteer labour supply: the public-goods model, the private-consumption model, and the human-capital model. We used data from an online survey questionnaire of volunteers working for the German Red Cross to study the extent to which...

Abstract The latest financial crisis has been caused by a mixture of state and market failure, argues Otmar Issing. To avoid future crises, more transparency is needed - not by gathering more information, but by gathering it systematically and thereby creating “intelligent transparency”....