Today the world economy is handling an economic crisis caused by the pandemic of a new coronavirus infection (COVID-19), announced by the WHO, as well as by fluctuations in the international energy market and by the development of "green energy". The crisis, named the "2020 crisis", is notable...

We document a Kuznets curve for construction productivity in 20th-century America. Homes built per construction worker remained stagnant between 1900 and 1940, boomed after World War II, and then plummeted after 1970. The productivity boom from 1940 to 1970 shows that nothing makes technological...

We construct an Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index for Malta based on the methodology of Baker, Bloom and Davis (2015) using articles published between 2004 and 2022 from four Maltese news portals. The index spikes during general elections and other significant local or international...

The economic tradition of ordoliberalism , understood as the theoretical and policy ideas of the Freiburg School, emerged in 1930s and 1940s Germany. In the years thereafter, it was quickly superseded by Keynesianism and other theories imported from the English-speaking world. The crisis in...

The study examines the extent to which the Legislative Branch is involved in the processing of economic policies sent by the Executive Branch, as part of the process of political delegation. It argues that, as the PT administrations adopted a developmentalist economic paradigm, increasing the...

This paper looks at the macroeconomic policy response to the Covid-19 crisis in the European Union (EU) and the prospects for long-term recovery under the Next Generation EU (NGEU) plan. It argues that, un­like what happened following the sovereign debt crisis of 2011-2012, the EU's strong...

Luisa Dörr prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy. The study was completed in February 2022 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of three distinct empirical essays...

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered renewed interest in the use of different fiscal spending and transfer programmes to address the worsening conditions and deepening inequalities within the labour markets. This paper reviews the role of specific fiscal spending and transfer programmes in shaping...

The economic tradition of ordoliberalism, understood as the theoretical and policy ideas of the Freiburg School, emerged in 1930s and 1940s Germany. In the years thereafter, it was quickly superseded by Keynesianism and other theories imported from the English-speaking world. The crisis in...