Germany’s capital market relies on bank-intermediated products and not so much on capital market processes. Two of the pillars in Germany’s three-pillar banking system, the savings banks and the cooperative banks, have special statutes and are not exposed to the control of the capital market...

This paper answers the question which developing countries have gained and which have lost in the international division of labor during the last thirty years. The indicators used are GDP per capita in constant purchasing power parity and relative distance to the United States. Nearly all...

This paper analyzes rules for international factor movements, i.e. real capital flows together with the relocation of firms, the flow of technology and the migration of people. These rules have to make sure that individuals, individual countries as well as the world economy benefit from factor...

This paper analyzes how international rules are established and stabilized, i.e. how an international institutional order develops. Rules emerge mainly through learning from negative experience and serve to reduce transaction costs. The paper looks at mechanisms that stabilize rule systems, at...

Germany remains Europe's largest and most diversified source of new technology, but still lags in the fastest growing areas of today's high technology. After World War II, West-German technology policy sought to rebuild the institutions which had supported Germany's leadership in the high-tech...

This paper studies the major institutional changes at the root of the increase in the west European unemployment trade in the last quarter century from below 3 percent to 11 percent. The institutional characteristics of wage bargaining and the legal rules hamper the self-equilibrating function...