Founded by the late Karl Brunner in 1970, the Konstanz Seminar celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1999. Brunner started the Seminar with two objectives, to close the gap in the quality of research and teaching of economics between the United States and Europe, Germany and Switzerland in...

The great depression of 1929 and the great financial crisis of 2008 have been the two big events of the last 75 years. Not only have they produced serious economic consequences but they also changed our view of economics and policymaking. The aim of this work is to compare these two great crises...

To reconcile the mixed empirical results, we develop a theoretical model whose main implication is a concave impact of regulation on the probability of a crisis. We test this relationship by applying a Probit model of a non-linear specification to annual data from 1999 to 2011 drawn from 132...

One of the most evident consequences of the Great Financial Crisis has been a rapid expansion of banking regulation. We argue that the burden of the new regulatory system is asymmetric, driving small banks to the "too-small-to-survive" zone, while reinforcing the "too-big-to-fail" protection for...

Neue Wachstumstheorie: Überblick aus politischer Perspektive Die Hauptbotschaft der neuen Wachstumstheorie besteht darin, daß Wachstum nicht einfach durch die Ansammlung von Kapital erklärt werden kann. Technische Verbesserungen, neue Erzeugnisse und Humankapital sind endogene Kräfte, die...

Did the city-states of Genoa and Venice kick a financial revolution all the way back in the Quattrocento, much sooner than the financial revolutions of the Netherlands, England and America? To answer this question we analyze the classic revolutions in terms of three key criteria: credibility of...