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This paper reviews the rationale for quantitative easing when central bank policy rates reach near zero levels in light of recent announcements regarding direct asset purchases by the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. Empirical evidence from the previous period of quantitative easing in Japan between 2001 and 2006 is presented. During this earlier period the Bank of Japan was able to expand the monetary base very quickly and significantly. Quantitative easing translated into a greater and more lasting expansion of M1 relative to nominal GDP. Deflation subsided by 2005. As soon as inflation appeared to stabilize near a rate of zero, the Bank of Japan rapidly reduced the monetary base as a share of nominal income as it had announced in 2001. The Bank was able to exit from extensive quantitative easing within less than a year. Some implications for the current situation in Europe and the United States are discussed.
Recent evaluations of the fiscal stimulus packages recently enacted in the United States and Europe such as Cogan, Cwik, Taylor and Wieland (2009) and Cwik and Wieland (2009) suggest that the GDP effects will be modest due to crowding-out of private consumption and investment. Corsetti, Meier and Mueller (2009a,b) argue that spending shocks are typically followed by consolidations with substantive spending cuts, which enhance the short-run stimulus effect. This note investigates the implications of this argument for the estimated impact of recent stimulus packages and the case for discretionary fiscal policy.
»Wenn es einen Wirklichkeitssinn gibt, dann muß es« – so folgerte Robert Musil zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts – »auch einen Möglichkeitssinn geben.« Darunter versteht er die Fähigkeit, »alles, was ebenso gut [auch] sein könnte, zu denken und das, was ist, nicht wichtiger zu nehmen, als das, was nicht ist.« Mit dem Begriff des Möglichkeitssinns, der auf die Relativität und Alternativität des individuellen Denkens sowie auf die Utopie eines anderen, hypothetischen Lebens verweist, hat Robert Musil in seinem Jahrhundertroman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften dem Kontingenzbewusstsein des modernen Menschen Ausdruck gegeben, welches am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts zum Grundmodus der Existenz und der Verfasstheit des Individuums überhaupt werden sollte. Dem Begriff der Kontingenz liegt bei aller Unschärfe ein grundlegendes, auf Aristoteles zurückgehendes Verständnis zugrunde, welches Niklas Luhmann folgendermaßen definiert: Kontingent ist etwas, was weder notwendig ist, noch unmöglich ist; was also so, wie es ist (war, sein wird), sein kann, aber auch anders möglich ist. Der Begriff bezeichnet mithin Gegebenes (zu Erfahrendes, Erwartetes, Gedachtes, Phantasiertes) im Hinblick auf mögliches Anderssein; er bezeichnet Gegenstände im Horizont möglicher Abwandlungen.
European scholars, colonial administrators, missionaries, bibliophiles and others were the main collectors of Malay books in the nineteenth century, both in manuscript or printed form. Among these persons were many well-known names in the field of Malay literature and culture like Raffles, Marsden, Crawfurd, Klinkert, van der Tuuk, von Dewall, Roorda, Favre, Maxwell, Overbeck, Wilkinson and Skeat, to name only a few. Their collections were often handed over to public libraries where they form an important part of the relevant Oriental or Southeast Asian manuscript collections.
Therefore the knowledge of the intellectual culture of the Malay Peninsula and the Malay World in general depended very much on these manuscripts and printed books collected often by chance or in a rather unsystematic way. The collections reflect in a strong sense the interests of its administrative or philologist collectors: court histories, genealogies of aristocratic lineages, law collections (adat-istiadat as well as undangundang) or prose belles-lettres build a vast bulk of these collections, while Islamic religious texts and poetry forms popular in the 19th century (especially syair) are fairly underrepresented. Malay manuscripts and books located in religious institutions like mosques or pondok/pesantren schools have not been searched for; until today there are more or less no systematic studies of these collections. As in some statistics religious texts build about 20% of all existing Malay manuscripts, their neglect by Europeans scholars leads to a distorted view of the literary culture in the Malay language.
In der Düsseldorfer Innenstadt und im südlichen Vorort Benrath wurde das Artenspektrum epiphytischer Flechten an freistehenden Bäumen erfasst. Unter den 26 Flechten sind fünf durch den Klimawandel begünstigte Arten (u.a. Punctelia borreri). Bis auf eine meiden diese die Innenstadt. Als Grund dafür wird die gegenüber dem Vorort höhere Immissionsbelastung und höhere relative Trockenheit vermutet (innerstädtische Wärmeinsel).
We reconsider the issue of price discovery in spot and futures markets. We use a threshold error correction model to allow for arbitrage operations to have an impact on the return dynamics. We estimate the model using quote midpoints, and we modify the model to account for time-varying transaction costs. We find that the futures market leads in the process of price discovery. The lead of the futures market is more pronounced in the presence of arbitrage signals. Thus, when the deviation between the spot and the futures market is large, the spot market tends to adjust to the futures market.
In this paper we investigate the comparative properties of empirically-estimated monetary models of the U.S. economy. We make use of a new data base of models designed for such investigations. We focus on three representative models: the Christiano, Eichenbaum, Evans (2005) model, the Smets and Wouters (2007) model, and the Taylor (1993a) model. Although the three models differ in terms of structure, estimation method, sample period, and data vintage, we find surprisingly similar economic impacts of unanticipated changes in the federal funds rate. However, the optimal monetary policy responses to other sources of economic fluctuations are widely different in the different models. We show that simple optimal policy rules that respond to the growth rate of output and smooth the interest rate are not robust. In contrast, policy rules with no interest rate smoothing and no response to the growth rate, as distinct from the level, of output are more robust. Robustness can be improved further by optimizing rules with respect to the average loss across the three models.
In contrast to the US and recently Europe, Japan appears to be unsuccessful in establishing new industries. An oft-cited example is Japan's practical invisibility in the global business software sector. Literature has ascribed Japan's weakness – or conversely, America's strength – to the specific institutional settings and competences of actors within the respective national innovation system. It has additionally been argued that unlike the American innovation system, with its proven ability to give birth to new industries, the inherent path dependency of the Japanese innovation system makes innovation and establishment of new industries quite difficult. However, there are two notable weaknesses underlying current propositions postulating that only certain innovation systems enable the creation of new industries: first, they mistakenly confound context specific with general empirical observations. And second, they grossly underestimate – or altogether fail to examine – the dynamics within innovation systems. This paper will show that it is precisely the dynamics within innovation systems – dynamics founded on the concept of path plasticity – which have enabled Japan to charge forward as a global leader in a highly innovative field: the game software sector as well as the biotechnology industry.
Die Natur unterliegt vielfältigen durch den Menschen hervorgerufenen Umweltbelastungen. Neben Veränderungen der Landnutzung oder Konsummuster stellt der anthropogen verursachte Klimawandel einen entscheidenden Einflussfaktor dar. Nicht nur der Temperaturanstieg an sich ist Auslöser für Ökosystemveränderungen, sondern auch die Folgen des Temperaturanstiegs führen zu massiven Änderungen der Biodiversität. Ökosysteme können so aus dem Gleichgewicht geraten und aufgrund starker Umweltbelastungen schließlich zusammenbrechen. Werden keine Maßnahmen zum Schutz der Biodiversität getroffen, wird es langfristig zu folgenschweren Auswirkungen kommen, die auch die Lebensgrundlage der Menschen stark gefährden. In Deutschland liegt die Verantwortung für den Erhalt der Biodiversität bei verschiedenen Ministerien und Ämtern, die eng miteinander vernetzt sind. Die zentrale Referenz der Bundesregierung stellt dabei die nationale Strategie zur biologischen Vielfalt dar.
Der vorliegende Band analysiert die Biodiversitätsstrategie und ihre Umsetzung als wichtige Diskursarena im Diskursfeld „Klimabedingte Biodiversitätsveränderungen“. Ausgehend von einer Analyse der Akteure auf Bundes- und Länderebene sowie aus Wissenschaft und Zivilgesellschaft werden wichtige gesellschaftliche Handlungsfelder und Forschungslücken ebenso aufgezeigt wie die darin erkennbaren Wissenskonflikte.