Am 11. und 12. Juni 2013 hat das Bundesverfassungsgericht Experten zur Krisenpolitik der EZB angehört. Dabei ging es um die Frage, ob oder inwieweit die EZB durch das Outright-Monetary-Transactions-Programm (OMT) Kompetenzen beansprucht, die ihr nicht übertragen worden sind. Wir...

Die Staatsanleihekäufe der EZB sind zu einem Fall für das Bundesverfassungsgericht geworden. Die Autoren des IW Köln argumentieren, dass das Outright-Monetary-Transactions-Programm noch innerhalb der Grenzen des EZB-Mandats liegt, aber wegen seiner Nachteile nur temporär eingesetzt werden...

Given the shortcomings of the current responses to the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, the author proposes utilising national gold reserves as collateral for government debt. Gold backing would be quite attractive to bond investors and would significantly ease the burden of high sovereign...

Last year, the European Commission proposed a comprehensive reform of the EU's data protection rules. The proposed regulation has been surrounded by fierce controversy and has been the subject of frenzied lobbying by global corporations, industry groups, research centres and privacy campaigners...

This paper focuses on European small- medium serial innovators at the beginning of the 1990s and provides an empirical basis to answer the following questions: who are the upstream specialized small- medium technology producers? How are they distributed across countries? Are there technologies...

In this paper, we examine the inconclusive debate on regulatory competition in Europe. We demonstrate that the recent expansion in the EU company law has created archetypal underpinning for formation of regulatory competition: the ground-breaking triptych of the ECJ on Centros, Überseering, and...