The development of the constitution must be based on the rule of law. Direct democratic rights allow citizens to participate in the amendment process. The direct democratic process of institutional change is theoretically and empirically analyzed. A number of counter arguments and issues for a...

This paper studies the signalling effect of the consumption-wealth ratio (cay) on German stock returns via vector error correction models (VECMs). The effect of cay on U.S. stock returns has been recently confirmed by Lettau and Ludvigson with a two-stage method. In this paper, performances of...

This paper studies the international coordination of monetary policies in the world economy. It carefully discusses the process of policy competition and the structure of policy cooperation. As to policy competition, the focus is on monetary competition between Europe and America. Similarly, as...

In this paper bilateral models formalizing monthly growth of US imports and exports are employed to investigate the potential of nonlinear relationships linking exchange rate uncertainty and trade growth. Parametric linear and nonlinear as well as semiparametric time series models are evaluated...

The 1990s were the most prosperous decade in U.S. economic history. The paper analyses to which extent this period fits into preceding cyclical experience. This is done by classifying the period 1991-12 to 2000-12 with the help of a 4-phase classification scheme based on multivariate...

Trust or likewise "confidence" (the term preferred in this paper) are notions which have received considerable attention by economists in the last 8-10 years. In this contribution, much emphasis is put on the understanding what we really mean by "confidence", what the differences between...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

This paper uses an empirical connection between real stock market indices of Germany and the USA for forecasting corresponding returns. We are starting from the random walk as the traditional forecasting model in stock market applications, extending it by co-integration. Since the cointegrating...

Knowledge flows within and across countries should be carriers of important learning spillovers. We use data on 1.5 million patents and 4.5 million citations to analyze knowledge flows across 147 subnational regions. We estimate that only 15% of average knowledge is learned outside the average...

Dieses Papier untersucht, inwieweit Multifaktormodelle nach Fama/French (1993) am deutschen Aktienmarkt die zeitliche Streuung von Renditen abbilden und Portfolio-Renditen im Querschnitt erklären können. Analog zu vergleichbar angelegten Studien am US-amerikanischen, kanadischen und britischen...