A monetary economy with counterfeiting

We apply a search-theoretic model of fiat money to study the equilibria in which counterfeit money is accepted. Circulation of counterfeit money presupposes that the agents are impatient and that the punishment for holding it is not too severe. When the stock of genuine money is small counterfeit money may improve the efficiency of the economy. We establish that a monetary economy can be created with private provision of (counterfeit) money as long as the ruler has control over punishments. Totally noncooperative provision will fail as the economy will become flooded with money.     

Low price signals high capacity

We study pricing in a model where buyers are homogeneous and sellers have either capacity one or two. We show that if buyers observe prices but not capacities then an equilibrium exists where sellers of capacity two post lower prices than sellers of capacity one. The equilibrium satisfies the intuitive criterion.     

Demographic changes and economic consequences: Demo-economic multiplier for Austria

"The aim of [this] paper is the development of the demo-economic accounting linkage (demo-economic multiplier) between population development and the production of goods and services in the context of a comparative static analysis." The demo-economic multiplier is derived to indicate the economic conseqences of different household types. The impact of population size and structure on the economy is evaluated. A model is derived based on the demographic pattern of the Austrian population for 1974     

The impact of environmental regulation on productivity in German industries

The objective of this paper is to adjust a traditional total factor productivity (TFP) measure for the direct effect of environmental regulation on material and capital input. For this purpose we consider the fact that part of material input and pollution abatement capital have not been used to increase output but to cover the cost of using the environment as a factor of production. Therefore TFP growth rates are lower if part of the material input is allocated to abatement activities instead of producing output. We propose to treat compliance with environmental regulation as an unproductive input linked to the use of productive material input. Our aim is to answer and discuss two questions: How to measure the effect of environmental regulation on TFP, and does the effect matter. We examine data from 1975–1991 for ten pollution intensive German industries.We would like to thank Cornelia Oßwald for valuable research assistance. We are especially grateful to two anonymous referees for many helpful comments.