In this paper six authors propose guidelines for German labor market policy, to overcome current discouragement and lead to a new balance of social security and individual competetiveness. Crucial aspects in this regard should be a reformed tax system based on excise instead of income taxes, and...

The forward premium puzzle (FPP) is the negative correlation between the forward premium and the realized exchange rate return at maturities of a month and beyond. Some recent evidence shows that at maturities of multiple years and at the highest intra day frequency the correlation is positive...

This paper provides an empirical investigation on the discrepancies between official exchange rate regimes and de facto exchange rate policies in transition economies. Since official and de facto regime choices are not independent of each other, we adopt a bivariate probit model to describe the...

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...

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...

A general feature of national fiscal systems is that they provide buffers against regional fluctuations in output and employment by redistributing income between the different regions of a country. Recent literature in connection with European monetary integration has stressed the insurance...

This paper studies budget processes, both theoretically and experimentally. We compare the outcomes of bottom-up and top-down budget processes. It is often presumed that a top-down budget process leads to a smaller overall budget than a bottom-up budget process. We show, using structurally...