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This article presents comments from economists on a paper by Alberto Giovannini regarding the problem of achieving the objectives of the convergence of inflationary expectations and stability of exchange rates. Richard N. Cooper comments that Giovannini rejects several hypothesis about the differences in interest rates between France and Italy and Germany. He suspects that the Eurofranc market was relatively thin during the period of Giovannini's estimations. To measure exchange risk, one might ask what the typical differentials on short-run notes of U.S. states have been in the absence of exchange risk but in the presence of credit risks and liquidity effects. On the other hand, Robert E. Hall talks about the U.S. as a successful monetary union. According to Hall the paper suggests that Europe today takes for granted that a conventional central bank is the ultimate goal of monetary union. Monetary policy would be executed by open-market operations in member-government securities or by obligations of the European central government. Moreover, Benjamin Friedman pointed out that the distribution of returns from taking a long position in francs had fatter tails than would be expected if the returns were normally distributed.

Based on the Clarence E. Ayres (1891-1972) papers at the University of Texas, this study traces the continuity among thinkers such as Kant, Hegel Veblen, Dewey, and Ayres; the latter was a leading institutional economist following Veblen's death. Publicly acknowledging his intellectual debt to Veblen and Dewey, Ares drew from these men some idealistic assumptions as well as the historicism that is implicit in his technological determinism or instrumental theory of knowledge. Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey owed a great deal to the philosophical tradition of idealism, regardless of the devotion to naturalism in their systems. The origins of Ayres's technological theory of value are found in Veblen and Dewey writings and back of them the legacy of German idealism. The vital link was a mutual acceptance that freedom was expressed in a cultural and historical form, realized in human activity. It was a process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The differing paradigms of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics have been described in various articles and books and are also embedded in different professional associations. However, we cannot take for granted that the paradigm debates described in the literature are actually mirrored in exactly the same way in the perceptions and opinions of researchers looking at sustainability from an economic perspective. This paper presents empirical results from a German case study on how economists and others involved in sustainability research from different schools of thought think about the issues of sustainability and economics, how they group around these issues, how they feel about the current scientific divide, and what they expect to be future topics of sustainability research. We analyze the data using cluster analysis. Based on a literature survey, we generated forty sustainability economics-related statements and asked 196 sustainability researchers about their degree of agreement or disagreement with these statements. In evaluating our survey results, we discuss to what extent the clusters that we identified do—or do not—represent the two schools of thought of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics. We also propose some fields of research that can help to bridge the gaps amongst sustainability economics researchers while clearly marking others that are more suitable for a scientific ‘competition of ideas’. Key results of the study are: We identify two primary scientific clusters, one clearly confirming the existence of the ecological-economics school of thought, and the other largely capturing the neoclassical environmental view. Yet, there are some surprising exceptions: Both schools of thought share a conceptual definition of sustainability that is integrative in considering ecological, societal and economic dimensions (‘three pillar concept’) and is geared at preserving the development potentials of society. We also find a shared critique of ‘pure economic growth’ strategies in our sample. These shared opinions may provide bridging concepts between the schools of thought. Also both clusters agree with respect to a wide range of future fields of sustainability economics research. Yet, the research agenda of the ecological-economics cluster contains a large number of additional topics, primarily related to social, distributional and evolutionary aspects of sustainable development. Strong divides between the clusters that seem to be more suitable for a scientific competition of ideas are primarily related to the question of how to achieve sustainability, including appropriate environmental policies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper sets out to examine the assumption made by radical economists that internal labour markets formed by large scale corporate employers provide a source of labour market dichotomization between `core' and `peripheral' employment. It criticizes the assumption that internal labour markets can be treated as a culturally neutral phenomenon emerging from the demands of technical rationality. Since, by definition, the boundaries of internal labour markets are institutionally defined, their forms and rationales display a cross-national diversity which indicates a difference in employer strategies and employee responses to the historical course of technological innovation. In particular it suggests that the struggle for task control over the mode of production represented in the creation of new occupations has, in the Anglo Saxon culture, been more likely to take place at the point of production, whereas in France it has been expressed in overtly class terms and in modern Germany in the bureaucratic control systems adopted by a corporate pluralistic state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economist Adolph Lowe's theoretical acumen was largely responsible for the practical planning and management of the currency reforms that brought the great German, hyperinflation to an end. He accomplished this from his post as Section Head in the Ministries of Labour and Economics of the Weimar republic. When the awful German hyperinflation had finally ended in 1923 and the currency was in ruins, wholesale German prices averaged 14 trillion times as high as before the war. As a result the currency reform set the new mark equal to 1 trillion old marks and the most severe inflation in history up to that time was finally ended. Unlike Germans, Austrian economists ended their hyperinflation before the final crack-up. Especially because tiny little Austria was all that remained of the once huge Austrian-Hungarian empire, a hyperinflation collapse of the currency would have led to chaos followed by the invasion of Austria by foreign troops and foreign powers would have built a new state. The downward plunge of the Austrian crown was miraculously stopped in 1922 and invasion forestalled for more than a decade Germany's hyperinflation was roaring in free fall when tiny Austria shut down the paper money printing presses.

The analysis of advertising propounded by the German economist Karl Knies in 1857 was a milestone in the development of advertising thought. Knies was the only economic thinker to treat advertising seriously and positively at a time when it first began to take on its modern intensity and pervasiveness; his contemporaries either ignored it or judged it by its excesses, (e.g., tawdry patent medicine ads). Knies perceived the increasingly important information role that advertising was to play in economic life, as expanding markets made person-to-person interaction impractical. Explaining how it played that role, he identified the basic themes of subsequent advertising research: the communication process, analysis of advertising effects and buyer psychology, target audience selection, and media analysis. After being neglected initially, Knies' work eventually had great impact on German advertising thought, but has remained unknown in the United States. The saga of Knies' analysis is a rich illustration of advertising's intellectual history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marxism emerged from the confrontation between the German philosophy, classic English economics and the French socialism. It was a philosophy, a scientific method, a new vision of economics, an economic policy and an economic system alike. The Marxian economic strain of thought was assimilated not only by its advocates, but also by the critics of this radical current: in defence of capitalism, Keynes and Schumpeter both start from Marx's work. Starting from the work of classic economists, Marx assumes the valuable scientific elements from the dominant economic theory, but emphasizes the historical, gnosiological and class limits of the classic doctrine. Although he uses the instruments provided by the classics, the German scientist defines his own personal notional system and comes to excel in terms of abstraction. Operating with his own concepts, Marx builds up an infallible logic, which is impossible to turn over if one does not infirm the starting point of the analysis itself - the labour theory of value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the relationships between Germany's advertising industry, professional self-interest and state control during the Third Reich, the German fascist state under the Nazis from 1933 to 1945. Besides, it focuses on the aims and methods as well as the successes and limits of the regime's regulation of advertising. It also analyzes the advertising industry's suppression, adaptation, and self-assertion. German economists still regarded advertising as an unproductive squandering of resources. It is hardly surprising, then, to discover that German advertisers nursed an inferiority complex and harbored social-climbing ambitions. It was not only in the economic sphere that the advertising industry came up against stiff resistance. Cultural critics on both the Right and the Left attacked it. Younger advertisers had poor prospects for the future in a career that garnered little prestige. Only very slowly, in the 1920s, did the industry become more professional and receive the concomitant social recognition.

The article discusses a theme in recent regulatory changes that creates universal banks as foundation of the financial system in European countries, including Germany, offering a range of financial services under one corporate roof. The interested economists in banking have often used a contrast between the German and other financial systems to realize the nature and significance of the different forms of banking institutions. For economists, financial systems are important for the growth in the economy to renew the interest in banking and financial systems.

This article discusses the emigration of German-speaking economists after 1993. In April 1933, the newly empowered German government led by Adolf Hitler enacted a law "for the restoration of the civil service." The contours and consequences of German-speaking economists' emigration have been detailed in a series of books. Within German universities, the incidence of employment terminations was uneven. Complicating an evaluation of what impact emigration had is the fact that the individuals covered by biographies were only part of a larger exodus of economists from the nations most severely impacted by the events leading to and accompanying World War II. The German-speaking emigres covered by biographies comprised only a subset of those who were displaced by World War II and its totalitarian antecedents. But even that subset made intellectual contributions, measured by election to honorific positions and citations to their published work equivalent to the output of several top ranked U.S. economics departments.

Adolf Damaschke, a Berlin schoolteacher, played a fateful role in developing a large land reform constituency in Wilhelmian Germany. By chance he heard a lecture by Michael Flurscheim, Henry George's follower And by accident he was won to the movement he built the Union of German Land Reformers into an active organization of 100,000 dedicated members from all classes. For tactical reasons what Damaschke pushed was his version of the Single tax Limited,' though he never lost sight of George's philosophy of freedom. There was a `German Fatherland" emphasis in his advocacy. Yet he despaired of building a mass constituency for that philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agents' beliefs in the imminent reform of a particular money supply process can have a powerful effect on their predictions of such variables as the rate of inflation. To find a criterion for monetary reform, we argue that any money supply process which does not provide a finite solution for price in a Cagan-type hyperinflationary money market will be rejected by the public. Such a process does not have the basic property of money which we call "process consistency,'' and we suggest that agents' subjective probabilities that their money is "process consistent" are identical to the probability that they attach to a currency reform. We compute agents' subjective probabilities that a particular money supply process is process consistent for the explosive part of the German hyperinflation, and we find that the probability of process consistency reached its lowest level in the very week in which the reform started. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the impact of the research by economist Hans-Werner Sinn on pension reform in Germany. He states that the research the economist carried out in the late 1990s played a role in encouraging further analysis of public pension reform in the country and other countries. He articulates that the academic work was significant to the reforms of the public pension system that were adopted in the nation in 2001.

The author discusses the characteristics of economist Hans-Werner Sinn as a political economist, an entrepreneur and a friend. Topics include Sinn's argument that Germany has increased the value added component of its exports at the expense of its domestic sectors, his point that academic isolation causes scientific stagnation, and his hospitality to his invited guests.