Stephan Schulmeister

Main field of research: Trading practices and price dynamics in financial markets. The investigations include testing widely used technical trading systems and analyzing the impact of the use of trading systems on price dynamics in the stock markets, the foreign exchange markets as well as in the commodity futures markets. The research is based not only on statistical analysis but also on field research in trading rooms.

Secondary field of research: Medium-term and long-term adjustment of non-financial business to the wide fluctuations of all types of asset prices. This concerns in particular shifts in the dynamics of capital accumulation between real and financial investment (including short-term speculation).

In recent years, I have been combining both research fields in two ways. First, by analyzing the “long cycle” in economic, social and political development as a sequence of “real capitalism” (as over the 1950s and 1960s) and “finance capitalism” (as since the 1980s). Second, by investigating the impact of financial instability on climate change, more specifically, how the fluctuations of the prices of crude oil, coal and natural gas on the one hand, and of CO2 emission permits on the other hand, weaken the efficacy of CO2 taxes and emissions trading, respectively. The crucial problem: Either instrument cannot provide a path of steadily rising prices of CO2 emissions.

After 40 years of professional research at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, I continued as self-employed after my retirement in 2012 (one-man firm).