International impact of Austrian economists

This paper attempts to document the contributions of Austrian economists to the development of economics. To this purpose we investigated the publications in international economics journals as well as citations of Austrian economists in the period from 1980 to 1989. Our results show only a very limited presence of Austrian economists in the ongoing scientific discussions, with marked differences between university departments.

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Zusammenfassung Die vorliegende Arbeit versucht, den Beitrag österreichischer Universitäts- und Forschungsinstitute zur internationalen Forschung in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften anhand von Publikationen und Zitationen für den Zeitraum 1980 bis 1989 quantitativ zu erfassen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, daß österreichische Ökonomen in internationalen, besonders in anglo-amerikanischen Zeitschriften wenig präsent sind, wobei erhebliche Unterschiede zwischen den einzelnen Universitätsinstituten bestehen.

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We are greatly indebted to R. Niegl (Universitätsbibliothek Wien), D. Spenger (University of Regensburg), and H. Wurm (University of Vienna) for compiling and processing the data.The circulation of earlier drafts as well as the presentation of our study at WIFO and IHS has aroused various responses, comments, and suggestions, most of them very interesting and stimulating, but too numerous to thank each of our colleagues individually. We feel, however, especially indebted to Gunther Tichy and Alexander Van der Bellen for their extensive written comments. Finally, we would like to thank three anonymous referees and the editor for valuable suggestions.     

Ergodic chaos in optimal growth models with low discount rates

Summary We show that for every discount factor(0,1) one can find infinitely many strictly concave discrete-time optimal growth models in reduced form which have optimal policy functions exhibiting ergodic chaos. These reduced form models are interpreted in a two-sector optimal growth setting with utility functions depending on consumption as well as on capital.We thank Luigi Montrucchio for pointing out an error in a previous version of the paper.     

Zum Treuhänder des Sicherungsvermögens unter dem neuen Versicherungsaufsichtsgesetz – Auswirkungen der Solvency II-Umsetzung

This paper is about the consequences of the transposition of the Solvency II Directive into the new German insurance supervisory law (VAG 2016) on the trustee for monitoring of the guarantee assets. The trustee of the guarantee assets is a national security mechanism to protect policyholders in case of insolvency of their insurance undertaking. The previous German Regulation of Investments (AnlV) is not valid any more for insurance undertakings falling under Solvency II since 01.01.2016. Instead of legal investments rules insurance undertakings are now obliged to have a (written) internal investment policy, which is also the basis for monitoring of guarantee assets by the trustee. Challenges arise because of the clash of the accounting view (German local GAAP) and the market valuation view of Solvency II. Our analysis contributes to a better understanding of the interplay between unchanged legal provisions and the new economic, risk based perspective of Solvency II.     

Assessing Ricardian equivalence for the New Member States: Does debt-neutrality matter?

Using a structural model based on dynamic optimizing agents, we empirically test the Ricardian equivalence proposition (REP) for 11 New EU-Member States (NMS). We extend the basic model by including the government budget constraint, thus being able to evaluate whether individuals take the evolution of public debt into account. In the basic setting we cannot reject the validity of the REP for four NMS, in the extended model the relevance of the REP changes for six countries, implying that the development of government debt and long-term sustainability of public finances matters with regard to the validity of the REP.     

Fiscal Multipliers and Their Relevance in a Currency Union – A Survey

The article reviews the debate on government spending multiplier and provides a detailed discussion of the underlying economic mechanisms, focusing on the role of the state of the business cycle and the monetary policy reaction. Special emphasis is on the effects of fiscal policy within a currency union and its implications for the euro crisis.