Amongst the South Pacific's least developed small island countries, Samoa has emerged as a successful economy. Its achievements of low inflation and high growth rates have been due to sustained fiscal adjustment programmes and appropriate monetary policy measures. This paper undertakes an...

Recent research has generated support of the notion that the real exchange rate adjustment is nonlinear and that the PPP half-life is faster than the puzzling 3 to 5 years based on linear models. While different nonlinear models survive the specification tests against linear ones, there is...

This paper considers the specification of a production function, using crop-yield response to agricultural lime as an example. The paper first reviews neoclassical production theory, observing that this theory specifies neither the form nor the arguments of a production function. Several...

Since the beginning of the 1990s the shareholder value concept is discussed intensively as being amanagement concept especially for listed enterprises. In contrast to the immense relevance of smalland medium enterprises (SME) for the German economy, value orientation of the management ofSMEs is...

Vector autoregressive models are often used in Macroeconomics to draw conclusions about the effects of policy innovations. However, those results depend on the researcher’s priors about the particular ordering of the variables. As an alternative, this paper presents a simple rule based on the...

Recent theoretical and empirical research in international macroeconomics has rediscovered the problem of purchasing power parity (PPP). Empirically, PPP is a bad approximation of both the short-term and medium-term properties of the data. Economists have had difficulties in explaining the...