In this thesis, I undertake an empirical search for the existence of price and exchange rate bubbles during the inter-war European hyperinflations of Germany, Hungary and Poland. Since the choice of an appropriate policy to control inflation depends upon the true nature of the underlying process generating the inflation, the existence or non-existence of inflationary bubbles has important policy implications. If bubbles do exist, positive action will be required to counter the public's self-fulfilling expectation of a price surge. Hyperinflationary episodes have been chosen as my case study because of the dominant role that such expectations play in price determination. In the literature, there are frequently expressed concerns about empirical research into bubbles. The existence of model misspecification and the nonlinear dynamics in the fundamentals under conditions of regime switching may lead to spurious conclusions concerning the existence of bubbles. Furthermore, some stochastic bubbles may display different collapsing properties and consequently appear to be linearly stationary. Thus, the evidence against the existence of bubbles may not be reliable. In my thesis, I attempt to tackle the above empirical problems of testing for the existence of bubbles using advances in testing procedures and methodologies. Since the number of bubble solutions is infinite in the rational expectations framework, I adopt indirect tests, rather than direct tests, for the empirical study. From the findings of my empirical research, the evidence for stationary specification errors and the nonlinearity of the data series cannot be rejected, but the evidence for the existence of price and exchange rate bubbles is rejected for all the countries under study. It leads to the conclusion that the control of the inter-war European hyperinflations was attributable to control of the fundamental processes, since the dynamics of prices and exchange rates for these countries might not be driven by self-fulfilling expectations.

This thesis is a survey of the available material on the submarine issue during 1914-1917 as a factor in German-American relations which contributed to the American declaration of war in April 1917. No other scholarly work is devoted solely to the submarine issue during this period. The purpose of this thesis is to focus on the submarine as an international legal issue. German-American relations were strained during 1914-1917, because of the different interpretations of international law regarding the submarine. And this thesis was written in order to test the existing historical interpretations of the submarine issue as a focal point of German-American relations.

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Scholars assert that the Cold War began at one of several different points. Material recently available at the National Archives yields a view different from those already presented. From these records, and material from the Foreign Relations Series, Parliamentary Debates, and United States Government documents, a new picture emerges. This study focuses on the British occupation of Germany and on the Council of Foreign Ministers' Moscow Conference of 1947. The failure of this conference preceded the adoption of the Marshall Plan and a stronger Western policy toward the Soviet Union. Thus, the Moscow Conference emphasized the disintegrating relations between East and West which resulted in the Cold War.

This study makes use not only of German documents captured during the Second World War but of personal accounts of major figures of the Third Reich and their testimony at the Nuremberg Trials. Organized into five chapters, this study surveys Nazi- Soviet relations from 1939 to 1941, from the German viewpoint, with emphasis on Adolf Hitler's assessment of Russian policies and Germany's wartime situation, both of which factors shaped his decision to invade the USSR. The conclusion is that Hitler saw his attack on the Soviet Union as a preventive war, carried out to destroy a growing threat to the Reich. He interpreted Russian activities during the period 1939-1941 as designed to strengthen the USSR strategically against Germany in preparation for intervention in the ongoing conflict with Britain.

This is a study of the foreign and domestic policies of the USSR as they pertain to its war-readiness, as well as the degree to which these policies presumably opened the door to the European conflagration and, in 1941, to the Nazi-Soviet war. Topics to be discussed include: (1) the crash industrialization of the Soviet Union and industrial war preparations from 1928--41; (2) the development of Soviet military doctrine before and after 12 June 1937; (3) a critical re-examination of the popularly accepted reasons for the devolution of the Soviet armed forces; and (4) Soviet foreign policy from 1937--41. The chronological end of the paper (1941) is followed by a brief epilogue discussing the evident success of the Soviet industrialization program by reference to Soviet industrial performance during the Nazi-Soviet war. Furthermore, the epilogue will challenge the popular depiction of the German invasion as an effortless, seamless advance into the Soviet heartland.

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