Since the mid-seventies, the general public of some European countries has been listening to a growing chorus of economists and politicians who lament the rising regional imbalances of unemployment. The chorus is especially large in Britain and West Germany where both an approximate north-south...

This paper characterizes the wage setting behavior in a totally unionized economy under different monetary policy rules. The wage formation strategy of the union can be either aggressive or cooperative.. As long as the union is fully cooperative and in the absence of shocks, the government can...

Trade between Eastern and Western Europe has increased considerably in the last years. Given this market-induced development, why should it be necessary to advance institutional integration? This paper argues that Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) can potentially enhance the...

This paper is no more than a critical note on the mismatch philosophy. Its main point is that, under empirically acceptable assumptions, all measures developed so far - and probably all measures likely to emerge from refining the mismatch tools - are bound to seriously underestimate the extent...

A theoretical model is developed to describe the behavior of dependent and independent central banks. In an empirical test, the reaction functions of six central banks of industrial countries with different degrees of independence are estimated using an error correction framework. In shock...

Mit diesem theoretischen Überblick wird die These vertreten, daß sowohl die Methode als auch die Organisation der Privatisierung aus polit-ökonomischen Erwägungen von den jeweiligen Politikern ausgewählt bzw. strukturiert wird, und nicht aus transaktionskostenökonomischen oder...

It has been argued in the literature that, interjurisdictional competition forces the public sector to increase its efficiency and thus helps to tame Leviathan governments. The paper addresses this hypothesis by means of a simple taxcompetition model with a Leviathan state. It is seen that the...