The assumption that national labor markets are homogenous across tradable and non-tradable goods is common in multisector (open-economy) macro models and crucial for the prominent Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis. This study tests it with a novel method to distinguish the tradable and non-tradable...

Im Mittelpunkt der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft steht die individuelle Freiheit der Gesellschaftsmitglieder. Die Verwirklichung individueller Ziele kann über die in der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft bestehende Wettbewerbsordnung erreicht werden, weil auf dem Markt freiwilligen Tauschhandlungen vollzogen...

Im Rahmen der Beitragssysteme der Europäischen Freihandelszone (EFTA) und des Europäischen Währungsraums (EWR) wird die relative Leistungsfähigkeit eines Mitgliedslandes nach Massgabe des nationalen Bruttoinlandprodukts (BIP) festgelegt. Ca. 59% der Beitragszahlungen, die das Fürstentum...

Profit taxes are widely acknowledged to influence the location of firms' headquarters. This paper sheds light on the role of aspects of labor taxation for the international location of headquarters. While profit taxes can be avoided in various ways, it is much harder for firms to manipulate the...

We test the hypothesis that the government bond markets in the Eurozone are more fragile and more susceptible to self-fulfilling liquidity crises than in stand-alone countries. We find evidence that a significant part of the surge in the spreads of the PIGS countries in the Eurozone during...

Bei der derzeitigen Finanzkrise handelt es sich nicht um eine "einfache" Vertrauenskrise, sondern um das Ergebnis längerfristiger Fehlentwicklungen. Wo liegen die Ursachen für diese Fehlentwicklungen? Warum sind dadurch viele Wirtschaftssubjekte schlechter gestellt? Welche Maßnahmen wurden...

Foreign currency debt is widely believed to increase risks of financial crisis, especially after being implicated as a cause of the East Asian crisis in the late 1990s. In this paper, we study the effects of foreign currency debt on currency and debt crises and its indirect effects on short-term...

We draw on stylized facts from the finance literature to build a model where altering the relative costs of bank and bond financing changes the entire distribution of firm size, with implications for the aggregate capital stock, output, and welfare.

This paper presents novel evidence of price discrimination, using prices of identical goods in 28 countries. I explain the observed phenomenon via non-homothetic preferences, in a model of trade with product differentiation and firm productivity heterogeneity. The model brings theory and data...

It is widely argued that declining fertility slows the pace of economic growth in industrialized countries through its negative effect on labor supply. There are, however, theoretical arguments suggesting that the effect of falling fertility on effective labor supply can be offset by associated...