The paper analyses the development of trafficking in human beings (THB) as an economic crime and as a severe violation of human rights by focusing on the different actors' involved in counter-trafficking efforts. The paper outlines how the crime evolved in Austria, Germany and the United States...

Economists have long debated the relationship of bank credit to the business cycle. The attribution of economic cycles to the "inherent instability" of fractional-reserve banking has been advanced not only by Austrian scholars in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, but also by a number of...

Jürgen Habermas has recently warned that the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is transforming democratic governments into ‘economic government' threatening not only economic disaster but the end of the world's first supranational project — the European Union. And, according to Habermas,...

During the 1920s, two proposals for regulated competition competed in the United States. The first, inspired by trade associations, was advocated by Herbert Hoover. This approach echoes a managerialist view of coordinated competition under state support. The second - promoted by Justice Louis...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium "States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy" at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different...

Unpaid work, such as caring for children, the elderly, and household chores represents a significant share of economic activity but is not counted as part of GDP. Women disproportionately shoulder the burden of unpaid work: on average, women do two more hours of unpaid work per day than men,...

Public interest in the gender pay gap has risen significantly over the past years in Germany, but the size of the gender pay gap has barely changed. A comparison across European countries shows that a lower female labor force participation rate is associated with a smaller gender pay gap. The...

This paper explores the possible job creation effect of innovation activity. We analyze a unique panel dataset covering almost 20,000 patenting firms from Europe over the period 2003-2012. The main outcome from the proposed GMM-SYS estimations is the labour-friendly nature of innovation, which...