Chemnitzer Wirtschaftswissenschaftliches Forschungsseminar

The discussions of value in classical political economics, from Smith and Ricardo to Marx's critique, can be the basis for a analytical framework for economic and social challenges, including ecological crisis and international conflict. Building on empirical developments as well as the improved data availability in environmentally enhanced multiregional input output tables (EE-MRIOs) we extend the domain of value theory to its frontiers. We present a theoretical model and empirical evidence that the competitive dynamics of accumulation express international inequalities and create new ones through unequal exchange. Similarly, we argue that in the relationship between accumulation and the natural metabolism, ground rents in landed production express surplus profits and drive the accelerated and ecologically capitalization of land.

We study how to evaluate forecasts when the timing and occurrence of the predicted event is uncertain. We find that a typical approach-evaluating the forecasts after the event occurred-incentivizes dishonest predictions if forecasters discount future outcomes in favor of more immediate benefits. We find strong empirical evidence that forecasters adjust predictions in response to these incentives. We conclude that evaluating such forecasts is inherently challenging due to the potential of misaligned incentives.

We review post-Keynesian contributions to demand and growth regime analysis. First, we distinguish the Kalecki-Steindl approach and the Sraffian supermultiplier approach as relevant theoretical foundations for demand and growth regime research, with investment-driven and distribution-led growth in the focus of the former and autonomous demand-led growth in the latter. Based on this, we review different ways of analysing the co-existence of demand and growth regimes in the current period of neoliberal and finance-dominated capitalism. We distinguish, first, a basic national income and financial accounting decomposition approach, second, a Sraffian supermultiplier inspired growth decomposition approach, and, third, several lenses looking at growth drivers. We argue that these three levels of analysis are, in principle, not mutually exclusive nor even contradictory, but that they rather complement each other. We conclude that, in particular the PK analysis of growth drivers provides several systematic links with comparative and international political economy approaches, when it comes to the introduction of the political economy dimension (social blocs, growth coalitions, changes in institutions favouring certain type of re-distribution and economic policies, etc.), while the national income and financial accounting, as well as the Sraffian supermultiplier growth accounting decomposition approaches provide the consistent macroeconomic foundations for such syntheses.

The prevailing view is that low-frequency movements in the dividend-price ratio reflect time-varying expected returns rather than expected dividend growth. Yet pre-World War II evidence shows the opposite: the ratio predicted expected dividend growth while return predictability from the ratio was weak. I use a dynamic-agency model in which managerial and consumer habits generate regime shifts between dividend-growth- and discount-rate-driven valuation. The framework delivers a cross-equation restriction: when permanent-income innovations dominate surplus-consumption variation, Lintner's partial-adjustment slope equals the negative of the predictive slope for expected dividend growth. Using pre-World War II S&P 500 data, I implement rolling-window tests based on seemingly unrelated regressions and, across windows and specifications, consistently fail to reject this equality at conventional significance levels.

Since the euro's introduction, the Euro area has experienced persistent macroeconomic divergence, challenging the anticipated convergence of its member states. While trade imbalances and competitiveness disparities, driven by divergent labour cost dynamics, have been widely debated, the underlying macroeconomic mechanisms remain largely underexplored. We put under empirical scrutiny one potential driver of divergence, namely cumulative causation: according to this approach, initial competitiveness differences, triggered by misaligned wage and productivity trends, create a feedback loop where improved price competitiveness boosts exports, enhances productivity via increasing returns to scale, and further reinforces competitiveness. Using a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) approach, this paper empirically investigates whether this mechanism shaped macroeconomic outcomes within the Euro area over the period 1995–2022. Our findings confirm the presence of a feedback mechanism that amplifies macroeconomic divergence: initial differences in competitiveness were reinforced by approximately 1.5 times in the medium run through cumulative causation, with lasting effects on export volumes and productivity. These results underscore the need for balanced competitiveness and wage growth paths to prevent divergence enhancing cumulative causation dynamics. Our findings contribute to the debate on the structural roots of Euro area imbalances and offer insights for designing policies to foster greater macroeconomic convergence.

The common European labor market is creating a unified labor force that, according to economic theory, should smooth business cycles across countries and regions. In the literature, doubts remain about this implication, as labor markets are more rigid and internal migration is weaker in Europe compared to the US.

This study presents a novel approach to examining the impact of labor mobility on business cycles in this environment. We incorporate migration decisions and imperfect labor markets into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework and apply it to empirical data from Eurostat and the German Federal Employment Agency covering the period from 2011 to 2023. Our findings reveal that the common labor market helps to smooth out business cycles as productivity shocks direct labor to where it is needed. However, policymakers should reconsider border control measures, as migration-specific disutility shocks have become more influential since the pandemic, thereby weakening this channel.

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Die geschlechtsspezifische berufliche Segregation hat erhebliche Auswirkungen auf den individuellen Arbeitsmarkterfolg, etwa in Bezug auf Löhne und Karrierechancen. Bisherige Studien konzentrierten sich meist auf die national Ebene, während zur regionalen Segregation kaum empirische Daten vorliegen. Lokale Arbeitsmarktbedingungen beeinflussen jedoch die Berufsnachfrage geschlechtsspezifisch, ebenso wie regionale Geschlechterrollen unbewusst die Berufswahl prägen.

Dieser Beitrag erweitert die bislang wenige Forschung zu regionalen Aspekten der beruflichen Segregation. Auf Basis von Daten aller Beschäftigten in Deutschland von 2011 bis 2022 berechnen wir Dissimilaritätsindizes auf Ebene der NUTS-3-Regionen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen deutliche regionale Unterschiede in Bezug auf horizontale und vertikale berufliche Segregation. Erste Fixed-Effects-Regressionen verdeutlichen zudem die Relevanz der lokalen Arbeitsmarktstruktur, von Geschlechter- und Familienverhältnissen sowie der sozio-demografischen Zusammensetzung.