Political Economy of the Swiss National Bank examines whether there exists any systematic political influence on Swiss monetary policy. A partial adjustment model is used to derive the reaction functions. Models of political business cycles and the theory of legislative control are for the first...

This book presents interdisciplinary approaches towards achieving regional sustainability. The relevance of interdisciplinary research and its consequences for economic research into the environment are elaborated, and new approaches are developed to integrate knowledge from ecological and...

The book deals with the calculation of costs for road infrastructure and congestion and the allocation of these costs to vehicle types. It focusses on heavy goods vehicles. The most important features of the book are i) the review of the state of the art, ii) a discussion of the theoretical...

This book investigates two issues that have been slowing down the development of equity capital markets in transition economies - slow progress with privatisation and the lack of shareholder rights. Both problems are illustrated with data for the largest publicly traded Russian firms....

With the abolition of exchange rates the role of wage formation in the European Monetary Union changes fundamentally and national economic policy in particular fiscal policy faces new restrictions. These are analysed in the first two chapters. A major impact is expected for wage formation. To...

The book is the first one to analyse the "Equity Premium Puzzle" and the "Risk-free Rate Puzzle" in the German capital market. It starts with a thorough discussion of the available theoretical models and then goes on to perform various empirical studies, applying two recent approaches for the...

This book explores the new macroeconomics of the European Monetary Union. It carefully discusses the effects of shocks and policy measures on employment, prices, and the current account. Take for instance a shock or a policy measure in a specific union country. Then what will be the results in...

New analysis and empirical evidence on several topics such as the determinants of shape and nature of the vertical relationships in the food system, the determinants of vertical co-ordination and competition, types and mechanisms of co-ordination as well as the consequences for competitiveness,...

The long-run effects of regional integration are analyzed in this book. On the basis of the development of a model of endogenous regional growth (which combines an endogenous growth model with aspects of "new" economic geography) and an empirical analysis of stylized facts for the European case,...

This microeconomics text presents the traditional economic theories about utility and production. But it contains new theoretical functions created from specific optimization procedures. Moreover, it details clearly the common function expression forms such as Cobb-Douglas and CES in which the...