Am 19. Dezember stellte das ifo Institut im Rahmen seines vorweihnachtlichen Pressegesprächs seine Prognose für das Jahr 2003 vor. Die Expansion der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Produktion dürfte im ersten Quartal 2003 nahezu zum Stillstand kommen. Erst im weiteren Jahresverlauf ist nach und nach...

Following Max Weber, many theories have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With its religious heterogeneity, the Holy Roman Empire presents an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. Using population figures of 272 cities in the years 1300–1900, I find...

Abstract Englisch Apparently the European economic model being subjected to a double competition problem. On the one hand, there are enormous differences in the level of competitiveness of the various member countries of the euro area and the EU among themselves. In the long term this Problem...

Citizens of Southern Europe have been presented by the German media and politicians as lazy and work aversive. First, it is checked whether and to what extent those characterizations do reflect reality, and then, in view of the Greek economic crisis, it is shown that crises and not laziness...

The aim of the paper is to unbundle the main economic variables involved in the European Crisis and clarify their reciprocal relationship. The variable considered are: unemployment, inflation, consumptions, investments and current accounts. We use annual, quarterly and monthly data, until 2012,...

This two-part working paper series represents a distillation of practical approaches with regard to the successful management of so-called “legacy assets” which include both impaired as well as non-performing loans, particularly in those in the real estate and property sectors. This two-part...

German and United States data from the Luxembourg Income Study are used to compare the relative economic well-being of Germans and Americans in the 1980s. In our analysis we use both official equivalence scales and consumption-based country-specific equivalence scales developed for Germany and...

Equivalence scales are a prerequisite for any economic well-being comparison with measures on income distribution, inequality and poverty. This paper provides equivalence scales based on revealed preference consumption microdata for West Germany 1983. It is a part of a joint US and German...

One proposal frequently raised to increase flexibility of the German labour market is the liberalization of the job protection law. It applies to those establishments with more than a cut-off number of employees. The argument examined in this paper is that this step in legal regulation hinders...

This comparative analysis discusses the differences between the structure and systems of bank regulation operating in the UK, Germany, Italy and the US. The importance of harmonisation in achieving stated supervisory objectives is also emphasised. The main objective of this chapter is to...