This brief exposition suggests that the Federal Reserve System temporarily guarantee a lower bound on stock prices in order to escape the current combination of liquidity trap and credit crunch. It shortly discusses reasons for this measure, consequences, and some alternatives. It is meant as a...

This paper explores the link between monetary policies of large industrial countries and international credit cycles. Based on an overinvestment framework, we show that in the prevailing asymmetric world monetary system, monetary policies of large centre countries can fuel credit booms in...

In Germany, the employment response to the post-2007 crisis has been muted compared to other industrialized countries. Despite a large drop in output, employment has hardly changed. In this paper, we analyze the determinants of German firms’ labor demand during the crisis using a firm-level...

This paper reviews economic developments in Iceland following its financial collapse in 2008, focusing on causes and consequences of the crash. The review is presented in the context of the Nordic region, with broad comparisons also with developments elsewhere on the periphery of Europe, in...

During the recent financial crisis, euro area firms, and especially Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, have been reporting acute problems of access to external finance. Using firm-level replies to the SME survey on access to finance, we use two indicators of financing constraints based on...

This paper analyzes the effect of the removal of government guarantees on bank risk taking. We exploit the removal of guarantees for German Landesbanken which results in lower credit ratings, higher funding costs, and a loss in franchise value. This removal was announced in 2001, but...

We analyze the transmission of global financial crisis to business cycles in China and India. The pattern of business cycles in emerging Asian economies generally displays a low degree of synchronization with the OECD countries, which is consistent with the decoupling hypothesis. By contrast,...

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 had major implications for the foreign exchange market. We review events and implications for exchange rates, volatility, returns to currency investing, and transaction costs. This “blow-by-blow” narrative is intended to be a resource for researchers seeking...

We examine evidence for a systematic underperformance of Germany’s state-owned banks in the current financial crisis and study if the bank losses can be traced to the quality of bank governance. For this purpose, we examine the biographical background of 593 supervisory board members in the 29...

We use the Kalman filter to estimate the structure of the secret currency basket of the renminbi based on daily data between 2005 and 2009. The currency weights of selected currencies are modeled as stochastic processes (random walks). The official announcement of the new exchange rate regime in...