Most central banks around the globe have the primary task to fight inflation. In the light of the fact that at least moderate inflation turns out to have little effect on the economy this is somewhat surprising. In order to understand why many countries have installed central banks which (almost...

In command economies, inflation is either absent or at least unrelated to supply and demand. However, when the economies in Eastern Europe started transforming into market economies, they suddenly experienced high and volatile inflation rates. Transformation countries are therefore interesting...

Im Jahr 2012 stiegen die Verbraucherpreise in Deutschland um 2,1%. Insgesamt sind die Preise seit der Wiedervereinigung im Durchschnitt um 2,0% und seit der Euro-Einführung sogar nur um 1,6% gestiegen. Abgesehen von wenigen Ausnahmen können sich die Deutschen daher über mangelnde...

This article focuses on the role of unionized members of the parliament. Referring to the famous study by Freeman and Medoff (1984) and considering the more recent literature we first review unions' political power at the example of the US. We conclude that trade unions have not been very...

According to the game-theoretic model of monetary policy, inflation is the consequence of time-inconsistent behavior of the monetary authority. The inflation bias can be eased by handing over the responsibility for monetary policy to an independent central bank and appointing a...