Soft budget constraints (SBCs) are a persistent feature of transition economies and have been blamed for a lack of fiscal consolidation and sluggish growth. EU eastward enlargement has been conditioned on tackling SBCs. This paper analyzes such outside conditionality theoretically and empirically. First, by modeling the SBC problem as a war of attrition between the applicant countries' governments ...
In den modernen Gesellschaften ist die Freizeit eine Dimension des Lebens, die immer mehr an Bedeutung gewinnt und die Erklärung von Unterschieden im Freizeitverhalten soziologisch interessant macht. Die "subjektzentrierte" Lebensstilforschung vertritt die Ansicht, dass sozio-ökonomische Unterschiede auf Grund der langfristigen Verbesserung der materiellen Lebensumstände an Bedeutung verloren haben ...
Using a binary reference series based on the dating procedure of Artis, Kontolemis and Osborn (1997) different procedures for predicting turning points of the German business cycles were tested. Specifically, a probit model as proposed by Estrella and Mishkin (1997) as well as Markov-switching models were taken into consideration. The overall results indicate that the interest rate spread, the real ...
