Using well-known results from public debt dynamics, it is shown that in case of degrowth a sustainable public debt is very unlikely to achieve. Degrowth requires that negative real interest rates have to be maintained which might imply accelerated inflation, or other severe goal conflicts of...

Taking the Ecological Footprint (EF) as a broad measure of environmental impact of economic activity, there is substantial progress in decoupling economic output from environmental impact. However, this progress has been too slow to compensate the negative environmental impact of economic...

The Hotelling rule is applied to the case of a fixed CO2 budget restriction which has to be met in order to reach the global warming goal according to the Paris Agreement. While the theoretical result is well-known and simple, the practical implementation under technological uncertainty suggests...

One of Keynes’ core issues in his liquidity preference theory is how fundamental uncertainty affects the propensity to hold money as a liquid asset. The paper critically assesses various formal representations of fundamental uncertainty and provides an argument for a more bounded rational...

This brief note rises doubts on the argument that nudging will help people to behave more rational in terms of their own preferences. This justification of soft paternalism overlooks some methodological problems of expected utility theory which are one of the roots of behavioral economics.

In case of digital goods such like music, intellectual property rights are typically not exerted by the creators (artists) but by intermediaries. Their profits, and therefore also the income of the artists, are endangered by copyright infringements (piracy). It is well known from static welfare...

Empirical tests of the quantity theory and particularly the neutrality of money are based on the idea that money growth "explains", to some extent, inflation. Modern macroeconomic theory, however, considers inflation targeting central banks which use the interest rate as a policy tool, while...

With global specialization and trade, countries make directly but also indirectly use of the environment via traded goods. Based on the theory of comparative advantages, the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek approach, we are using the Ecological Footprint as a broad measure of environmental use because its...

The paper presents a simple model of banking behavior where portfolio, liquidity, and liability management determine simultaneously the demand and supply of borrowed reserves on the interbank market. As the central bank is one player in this market due to its refinancing policy, it is able to...