The IREF Working Paper Series publishes original research relevant to ongoing economic policy debates. We are accepting submissions throughout the year. For more information see our open call for papers.
Canonical Austrian business cycle theory holds that a lower rate of interest lengthens the structure of production. Fillieule (2007) derives the opposite conclusion: the average period of production rises with…
Monetary policy changes the stability of German banks differently based on their ownership and business goals. Existing literature shows that monetary policies stabilize markets but can also encourage institutions to…
Central banks influence economic debate through research and citations. This paper studies whether citation patterns reflect past colonial ties or present currency hierarchies. Using a bibliometric dataset of 334,750 economics…
WP 2025-12. Executive Summary This paper examines Gottfried Haberler’s early theoretical work on index numbers as a unique point of convergence between the Austrian School of Economics and the tradition…
WP 2025-10. Executive Summary Many countries’ Founding Fathers and large portions of academia believed that constitutions, common-sense economics, and people’s vigilance would be enough to restrain taxation and public debt.…
WP 2025-05. Executive Summary The temptation to rely on findings from behavioral economics to condition human behavior has given rise to libertarian paternalism, an approach to public policy design that…
WP 2024-11. Executive Summary Our study uses a qualitative comparative analysis method in order to assess the impact of national accreditation schemes and also other relevant features of the higher…
WP 2024-10. Executive Summary When comparing inflation across European countries, we often overlook a simple fact – inflation is the percentage change in the price level. The rate of inflation…
WP 2024-04. Executive Summary Intuitively, crime and entrepreneurship are radically opposed in desirability and empirical effects. Yet, recent research has deliberately chosen to go beyond certain obvious facts, creating —…
WP 2024-03. Executive Summary This paper reviews the neglected contributions to the theory of index numbers in Gottfried Haberler’s (1927) habilitation thesis Der Sinn der Indexzahlen (The Meaning of Index…
