The extensive public support measures for the financial sector have been key for the management of the current financial crisis. This paper gives a detailed description of the measures taken by central banks and governments and attempts a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of such...

Wholesale and retail trade affiliates owned by parent firms in manufacturing account for a considerable fraction of overall affiliate sales. Although quantitatively important, this Export-Supporting FDI (ESFDI) activity has received little attention in the literature. This paper includes ESFDI...

This paper analyses how many euro coins outflow from Germany and which composition of coins is to be expected in the long run. To this end, a simple mathematical model is formulated and calibrated for €1 coins. The introduction of the euro coins in 2002 presented a unique opportunity to...

This paper considers factor forecasting with national versus factor forecasting with international data. We forecast German GDP based on a large set of about 500 time series, consisting of German data as well as data from Euro-area and G7 countries. For factor estimation, we consider standard...

Group-specific estimations can significantly improve the predictive power of accountingbased rating models. This is shown using a binary logistic regression model applied to the Deutsche Bundesbank's USTAN dataset, which contains 300,000 financial statements provided by German companies for the...

We analyse stylised facts for Germany’s business cycle at the firm level. Based on longitudinal firm-level data from the Bundesbank’s balance sheet statistics covering, on average, 55,000 firms per year from 1971 to 1998, we estimate transition probabilities of a firm in a certain real sales...

Following a positive shock, financing constraints will prolong or impede economic expansion that would have been optimal in an unconstrained environment. The study of dynamic adjustment therefore offers a direct way of verifying the presence of financing constraints and assessing their...

We disentangle different driving factors of sovereign bond market integration by studying yield co-movements of EMU countries, the UK, the US and 16 German Länder in the last 15 years. At a low frequency of weeks, bond market integration has increased gradually in the course of the last 15...

The question of whether or not mergers and acquisitions have helped to enhance banks’ efficiency and profitability has not yet been conclusively resolved in the literature. We argue that this is partly due to the severe methodological problems involved. In this study, we analyze the effect of...