By disaggregating price indices, it becomes apparent that the real exchange rate consists of the real exchange rate for a single good and a weighted sum of relative prices between goods. When applying a battery of panel unit root tests to this sum and its components, it is found that both the...

The Balassa-Samuelson effect is usually seen as the prime explanation of the continuous real appreciation of central and east European (CEE) transition countries' currencies against their western counterparts. The response of a small country's real exchange rate to various shocks is derived in a...

The establishment of European monetary union (EMU) was widely expected to cause price convergence among member states. In an investigation of this claim, the present study avoids problems of comparability and representativeness by using an extremely detailed and comprehensive scanner database on...

Inflation differentials within European Monetary Union (EMU) are increasingly seen as exerting adverse effects on the price competitiveness of member countries' firms and – given the common monetary policy within EMU – as being detrimental to euro-area economies, in particular to those with...

This paper presents a new approach for analysing the recent development of EMU sovereign bond spreads. Based on a GARCH-in-mean model originally used in the exchange rate target zone literature, spreads are decomposed into a risk premium, an expected loss component and a liquidity premium....

Based on a classification of countries and territories according to their regime and anchor currency choice, the study considers the two major currency blocs of the present world. A nested logit regression suggests that long-term structural economic variables determine a given country's currency...

We investigate output sensitivity of inflation in the euro area through a disaggregated analysis using price indices at the COICOP 4-digit level and compare cyclical sensitivity of a newly created index of cyclically sensitive items (ICSP) with that of headline HICP and core price indices. We...

Multiple structural change tests by Bei and Perron (1998) are applied to the regression by Demetrescu, Kuzin and Hassler (2008) in order to detect breaks in the order of fractional integration. With this instrument we tackle time-varying inflation persistence as an important issue for monetary...

Es wird eine Methode zur Messung des Produktionsfaktors Kapital vorgeschlagen, in der Vermögensarten nach ihrem Nutzungswert im Produktionsprozess gewichtet werden. Dazu werden Nutzungskosten für die einzelnen Anlageklassen mit Hilfe von Daten der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungen sowie...

Motivated by the financial crisis of 2007-2009 several papers have provided explanations for why liquidity may dry up during market stress. This paper also looks at this issue but focuses on the question as to why the liquidity crunch was not uniform across maturities. As funding pressures were...