Die Zugehörigkeit Griechenlands zur Währungsunion beruht nicht auf einer Zwangsmitgliedschaft. Griechenland steht es frei, jederzeit seine Mitgliedschaft in der Europäischen Union aufzugeben. Die anderen Mitgliedstaaten dürfen Griechenland von einem Austritt aus der Europäischen Union nicht...

Das Bundesverfassungsgericht - nicht aller Deutschen liebste Institution - sichert nicht nur als seine Hauptaufgabe die Geltung und Wahrung des Grundgesetzes durch alle staatlichen Organe. Im Zuge der Einbindung Deutschlands in den europäischen Integrationsprozess ist ihm zusätzlich die Rolle...

Despite the fact that banks in Central Europe are burdened by extraordinarily high bad loan ratios, the recent financial crisis in South East Asia and Russia, has not led to a massive failure of banks in the region. In this paper, we study economic trends and policies that may have helped to...

The present paper investigates the effectiveness of public subsidies to business enterprise research in a panel of OECD countries. We contribute to the literature by explicitly distinguishing between effects of a subsidy on R&D employment and expenditure, thereby accounting for a potential...

German public finances are currently subject to considerable changes in the macro-economic environment and this is probably only the beginning of more far-reaching developments in the future. Like many other European countries, Germany, on the one hand, faces the fiscal problems emerging from an...

This paper studies the inflation and interest rate performances since the late 1970s for six former highinflation countries that adopted inflation targeting (IT) in the early 1990’s. Using Germany, Switzerland and the US for comparison, we look at various aspects of central bank performance in...

We provide empirical estimates of the risksharing and redistributive properties of fiscal equalization among the states of the German federation. Fiscal equalization serves as a mechanism to insure state budgets against asymmetric revenue shocks, but provides almost no insurance against regional...

For an effective and smooth monetary policy, it is important that interest rate expectations are in line with central bank policy intentions. The predictability of money market interest rates is, therefore, an indicator of transparency and clarity in the communication of monetary policy and of...