Die vergangenen Jahrzehnte waren weltweit durch eine Zunahme der außenwirtschaftlichen Ungleichgewichte gekennzeichnet. Den Leistungsbilanzüberschussländern, insbesondere Deutschland, wird in diesem Zusammenhang zunehmend vorgeworfen, durch zu moderate Lohnsteigerungen wesentlich zum Aufbau...

This paper highlights the economic meaning of the size of the state for members of the European Union, thereby making the economic success of EU states statistically tangible. Firstly, we show in descriptive illustrations that the theoretically expected characteristics of small countries clearly...

The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the development of Industrial Localization and Countries' Specialization Patterns in the European Union, to explain the driving forces behind and to find out dynamic tendencies. We extend existing research work by using a broader data set,...

Is government ideology important for fiscal policy? I study this question with data from all German States over the period 1975-2005. To identify the effect of ideology, I rely on a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. I find that left-wing state governments spend more than state governments...

Services sectors' agglomeration in the European Union, its development over time, its driving factors and dynamic tendencies will be empirically investigated in this study. Locational gini coefficients are computed taking EU-KLEMS data for 14 European countries covering 22 services sectors over...

In this paper we develop empirical measures for the strength of spillover effects. Modifying and extending the framework by Diebold and Yilmaz (2011), we quantify spillovers between sovereign credit markets and banks in the euro area. Spillovers are estimated recursively from a vector...

The complexity resulting from intertwined uncertainties regarding model misspecification and mismeasurement of the state of the economy defines the monetary policy landscape. Using the euro area as laboratory this paper explores the design of robust policy guides aiming to maintain stability in...

This paper aims to assess the relationship among fiscal variables (government revenue and expenditure) in Sub-Saharan African countries. Using yearly data for the period between 1980 and 2011 in fifteen ECOWAS countries, a weak long-run relationship between government expenditure and revenue...

This paper examines changes in the balance sheets of the banking system in five East Asian economies which were affected by the 1997 Asian Crisis. These countries have persistently accumulated international reserves since the crisis. This paper estimates the impact of reserve accumulation on...

In this paper we study income polarization by first comparing the efficiency of two statistical models to identify the number of poles in the income distribution empirically. The statistical models used are a multi-resolution analysis (MRA) and a log-normal approach (LNA). We then apply the...