The archive.

Why should proportional changes in prices leave economic choices unchanged—and what happens when investors learn from new evidence? In this conference contribution, Gerhard Tintner tests the assumptions behind the homogeneity of demand and supply and the separation of real from monetary economies. His distinctive move is to distinguish risk, where probability distributions are known, from uncertainty, where their parameters must be inferred. Portfolio models can preserve familiar invariance results when returns, variances, and covariances scale appropriately; Bayesian learning complicates them because observations need not scale with prior beliefs. Tintner also questions the empirical plausibility of the preference restrictions required for monetary and real economies to yield identical outcomes. The article offers a precise way to distinguish mathematical invariance from its behavioral and informational preconditions.

What information disappears when many economic relations become a single macroeconomic model? In this essay, Gerhard Tintner and A. Sondermann make that loss an explicit statistical problem: a reduced model is judged by how well it reconstructs individual outcomes, under specified weights and probability distributions. Their distinctive emphasis is on optimal approximation when exact aggregation fails—not on assuming that totals preserve the relations beneath them. Generalized inverses and eigenvector methods supply mathematical tools, while consumption examples show why differences among individuals and their association with income can alter aggregate coefficients. Readers can discover both the possibilities and the limits of statistical reduction: preserving dominant variation, minimizing reconstruction error, and reproducing economic structure are different objectives, and need not yield the same aggregate.

Observed employment records how many people work—not how many would work, or how many employers would hire, at the prevailing wage. Bernhard Böhm and Gerhard Tintner make this distinction the basis of their econometric study of Austria’s labour market in 1954–1975. Their model treats employment as constrained by whichever is smaller: labour supply or labour demand. The resulting estimates suggest that registered unemployment can conceal the extent of involuntary unemployment during downturns, even when average rates broadly coincide. Yet the authors also expose the fragility of that inference: different starting values change the estimated market regimes, and a higher statistical likelihood need not produce an economically credible result. This essay offers a concrete encounter with both the interpretive possibilities and the numerical limits of disequilibrium modelling.

Even complete knowledge of a system’s observable behavior may leave its underlying parameters undetermined. In this survey contribution, Manfred Deistler and Gerhard Tintner examine that obstacle before estimation begins, linking measurement-error models with multivariate ARMA systems. Their perspective brings probability theory into contact with the algebra of dynamic models: nonnormal distributions and lagged covariances can supply identifying information, while different polynomial representations can describe exactly the same observable process. Crucially, they distinguish restrictions expressing substantive knowledge from canonical conventions that merely select a unique representation. Readers can discover why more data alone cannot resolve some ambiguities—and why even a uniquely specified model needs a well-behaved parameterization if identification is to support consistent estimation.

Wage restraint may increase employment eventually while deepening unemployment first. Peter Rosner, Gerhard Tintner, Andreas Wörgötter, and Gabriele Wörgötter make this tension central to their analysis of a small open economy. Their modified Dornbusch model treats restraint as slower wage and price growth without shifting income from wages to profits. Under fixed exchange rates, reduced inflation raises real interest rates before improved competitiveness can stimulate demand; under flexible rates, the initial currency movement makes the transition less predictable. Yet the model’s eventual employment gains are the same under either regime. The article offers a precise way to distinguish a policy’s destination from the costs of reaching it—and to understand why demand support and coordinated policy matter when wage adjustment promises recovery but initially worsens recession.

A wage increase cannot be assessed through wages alone: its effects on prices, employment, and production depend on the accompanying policy choices. In this 1977 article, Guillermo L. Gómez M. and Gerhard Tintner build an aggregate model of Colombia that combines Keynesian consumption relationships with neoclassical production and labor demand. Their estimates make the case for coordinating investment, public expenditure, and trade policy rather than treating economic targets separately. Yet the practical ambition encounters unreliable data, restrictive assumptions, and the unresolved choice of a welfare objective. Readers can examine both the numerical trade-offs the authors identify and their refusal to turn modeled wage effects into a mechanical recommendation for wage freezes—a concrete encounter between econometric calculation and political feasibility.