infonet-economy

How a sustainable fiscal policy can be performed in a federal system is not only a Swiss problem but is also discussed in other federal countries like Germany and Austria, and in the European Union. Contrary to most other countries, the Swiss Fiscal system is characterised by an extensive fiscal federalism with high fiscal autonomy at all govermental levels, by direct popular rights...

The purpose of this contribution is to give an overview of the role of System Dynamics in the context of the evolution of the systems movement. "Systems movement"--often referred to briefly as "systemics"--is a broad term, which takes account of the fact that
there is no one systems approach, but a range of different ones. Indeed, the development of the...

Recent research shows that when commonly estimated dynamic Taylor rules, which are augmented with a lagged interest, are embedded in a variety of macroeconomic models, they imply a greater amount of predictable information about future movements in interest rates than is actually evident in the yield curve. We extend the analysis to consider more generally the predictability of the...

Using Allensbach survey data about how people look forward to the coming year, we construct true ex-post forecasts and compare them with the forecasts produced by the German Council of Economic Experts and by the Economic Research Institutes. Then we perform rationality tests for these forecast series. The Allensbach forecasts outperform the professional forecasts in many respects....

Many people contribute to public goods but stop doing so once they experience free riding.We test the hypothesis that groups whose members know that they are composed only of "likeminded" cooperators are able to maintain a higher cooperation level than the most cooperative, randomly composed groups. Our experiments confirm this hypothesis. We also predict that groups of...

On 1 January 1995, the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU) entered into force. During its first ten years, the DSU has since been applied to 324 complaints - more cases than dispute settlement under the GATT
1947 had dealt with in nearly five decades. The system is perceived, both by practitioners and in academic literature, to work...

System Dynamics is a discipline for the modeling, simulation and control of complex dynamic systems. In this contribution, the methodology of System Dynamics-based modeling is argued to be a powerful and rigorous approach to theory-building. The strength od the pertinent process of theory development lies in its high standards for model validation, and in a combination of abductive...