Abstract It is often argued that the globalisation of the world economy might have contributed to an increased instability of real economic activity, in particular for small open economies. At the same time, there is evidence that the volatility of real economic activity might in fact have been...

Abstract The latest financial crisis has been caused by a mixture of state and market failure, argues Otmar Issing. To avoid future crises, more transparency is needed - not by gathering more information, but by gathering it systematically and thereby creating “intelligent transparency”....

Previous empirical work on the link between domestic and foreign investment provides mixed results which partly depend on the level of aggregation of the data. We argue that the aggregated home country implications of foreign direct investment (FDI) cannot be gauged using firm-level data....

Weak bank supervision could give banks the ability to shift risk from themselves to supervisors. We use cross-border bank mergers as a natural experiment to test changes in risk and the impact of supervision. We examine cross-border bank mergers and find that the supervisory structures of the...

Higher capital features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how does increased bank capital affect business loans? The real costs of increased bank capital in terms of reduced loans are widely believed to be substantial. But the negative real-sector implications need not be...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, new financial market regulation is being implemented, and increasing numbers of countries are establishing new legislation for macroprudential oversight. Against this backdrop, this thought provoking book provides a platform for the leading international...