We examine how labor immigration affects public pensions under centralized wage setting. We show that immigration improves the sustainability of pay-as-you-go pensions if and only if total employment declines. This occurs if the labor demand elasticity exceeds the unemployment rate.

We address the problem how to estimate default probabilities for sovereign countries based on market data of traded debt. A structural Merton-type model is applied to a sample of emerging market and transition countries. In this context, only few and heterogeneous default probabilities are...

Dieser Beitrag geht davon aus, daß Goethes "Faust"-Drama in seinen beiden Teilen nicht bloß ein Bildungsgut aus dem 19. Jahrhundert darstellt, das viel zitiert, aber selten gründlich gelesen wird, sondern daß es eine weitreichende Bedeutung als moderne, ja sogar als hochaktuelle Dichtung...

This study aims at the analysis of the possible self-referential effects of economic theories and models on its own subject and of the mechanisms through which bounded rational actors perceive the self-referential nature of economic theories and might absorb their prescriptions. Thus, the focus...

This paper examines the impacts of globalization on small countries, covering the main features of globalization, the quality of national economic and commercial environment, main characteristics of small countries including important facts and concrete indicators for their development, and...

Current explanations why a growing economy necessarily goes through booms and recessions predict countercyclical R&D investment. As this is very controversial from an empirical perspective, a stochastic Poissonmodel of endogenous business cycles and growth is presented where the determinants of...

The paper describes tests of hypotheses from economic history concerning the significance of financial development as a determinant of economic growth. It goes beyond the existing studies in drawing on a large panel data set covering 93 countries from 1970-90 and includes a new proxy for the...

Bei Unsicherheit über die zukünftige Entwicklung des Wechselkurses sind international tätige Unternehmen nicht indifferent in Bezug auf die Wahl der Währung ihrer Preissetzung. Denn die bei der Fakturierung festgelegte Währung kann die Ertragssituation des Unternehmens erheblich...

Economic History and the History of Economic Thought haven been relegated increasingly from the teaching and research curricula of economics in recent years. The paper starts off arguing that this trend is due to the mechanistic ontology of mainstream economics, and it continues setting out an...

Gravity Equations are broadly used to estimate the impacts of trade impediments on trade flows. It is often stated that results are implausibly high. In theoretical foundations of the gravity equation, trade costs usually enter as icebergmelting-costs. This paper offers an alternative approach...