International Macroeconomics

The United States, once the Land of Opportunity, has witnessed a tragic decline of income mobility and a rise of cyclical poverty. This article suggests the close connection between geographic mobility and economic mobility as a key root of poverty traps. With this in mind, short and long term policies are outlined in order to…

A bold plan to cancel the European Central Bank’s $3 trillion in public debt, presented as an alternative way to reduce Eurozone debt ratios after a pandemic spending spree, has been dividing economists. It is a law in finance that when government deficits balloon, so do demands for debt forgiveness. And, indeed, this time is…

In January 2021 GameStop, a brick-and-mortar games vendor, saw its stock rise 1,700 percent. Institutional investors like the hedge fund Melvin Capital had approximately shorted 140 percent of GameStop’s public float, which some retail investors on Reddit took note of. Redditors also believed that the stock was undervalued and in January the situation reached its…

With the 13th of the UN Sustainable Development Goals aiming to take urgent action to combat climate change, many countries turned their attention to the reduction of emission to achieve net- zero by 2025. As a result, investments in low-carbon solutions are increasingly gaining importance and it poses the question of the role of the…

Just recently, Bitcoin was able to surpass a market capitalization of 1 Trillion US-Dollars. What is driving this exponential price move, and what are the fundamental economic mechanisms behind it? This piece examines some of the micro- and macroeconomic phenomena surrounding the new asset class of cryptocurrencies.

Free money for everyone. A proposal, which sounds like a utopia has existed for centuries and has even been promoted by the founders of the ne- oliberal thought, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. It’s the talk of an universal basic income, a fixed amount, transferred every month by the state to the citizens, independent of…

Ergodicity Economics is a recent field that allegedly contests traditional economic theory. This piece introduces the claims of ergodicity economics and discusses whether and to which extent they are justified.

After years of unsuccessful inflation target policy, the Fed announced a drastic change to its policy on the 27th August 2020: The average inflation target- ing. In contrast to inflation targeting, this policy measure allows inflation to run higher than the 2% target, having further effects on future expectations and unemployment levels. In the New…