Monetary history is characterised by crisis and reform. The paper is dedicated to an explanation of what makes monetary reforms successful. A cross-sectional econometric analysis is chosen to deal with this problem. It is based on a standard macroeconomic model of commitment and credibility. As...

This paper evaluates the performance of alternative estimation methods for multiplicative and log models with heteroskedasticity. Contrary to Santos Silva and Tenreyro (2006), the results of a simulation study indicate that the Pseudo Poisson Maximum Likelihood estimator (PPML) is not always the...

We investigate to what extent convergence in production levels per worker has been achieved in Germany since unification. To this end, we model the distribution of GDP per employee across German districts using two-component normal mixtures. While in the first year after unification, the two...

We examine the long-run relationship between fertility, mortality, and income using panel cointegration techniques and the available data for the last century. Our main result is that mortality changes and growth of income per capita account for a major part of the fertility change...

We analyze the cross-national distribution of GDP per capita and its evolution from 1970 to 2003. We argue that peaks are not a suitable measure for distinct growth regimes, because the number of peaks is not invariant under strictly monotonic transformations of the data (e.g. original vs. log...