Der durch die Solidarpaktgesetzgebung des Jahres 1993 neugeordnete Länderfinanzausgleich ist seit den Verfassungsklagen von Bayern und Baden- Württemberg Gegenstand öffentlicher Auseinandersetzungen geworden. Dabei stehen mögliche negative Anreizwirkungen des Finanzausgleichs im Mittelpunkt....

Sound public finances are necessary for the functioning and economic prosperity of a common currency union. The financial, economic and European sovereign debt crises revealed that financial stability and economic growth also serve as prerequisites and that all three interact in this respect....

In this paper we review the linkages between the quality of public finances, that is, the level and composition of public expenditure and its financing via revenue and deficits, and economic growth. We review the various channels through which public finances affect growth and its underlying...

The year 2010 showed how prone to crisis the Euro zone is. To a great extent this results from insufficient public policy coordination of EU member states’ public and fiscal policies. This paper discusses the main reform proposals related to fiscal, public and structural policy against the...

Information search is costly for private households, especially in relation to their wealth. This paper investigates how retail customers react to free portfolio reporting—and thus reduced search costs—in a unique experimental setting. A large German direct bank sends portfolio reports to...

Working with one of the largest brokerages in Germany, we record what happens when unbiased investment advice is offered to a random set of approximately 8,000 active retail customers out of the brokerage's several hundred thousand retail customers. We find that investors who most need the...

Why do people trade? Because they are told to! Using a unique dataset from a large German bank, we find that retail investors who report that they rely heavily on their advisors’ recommendations have a substantially higher trading volume and purchase a higher fraction of investment products...

Untersuchungsgegenstand dieser Arbeit sind Euribor-Zinssätze, zwischen denen wir fraktionale Kointegrationsbeziehungen vermuten. Dazu klären wir im ersten Schritt den Begriff der fraktionalen Integration und stellen sowohl semiparametrische als auch nicht-parametrische Verfahren zur Bestimmung...

In den letzten drei Jahrhunderten wurde mehrmals der Versuch gestartet, eine stabile Währungsunion aus souveränen Staaten zu bilden. Vier historische Beispiele sollen durch ihre Entstehungsgeschichte und ihren Zerfall Aufschluss darüber geben, welche Gründe und Ursachen die Instabilität von...