At the beginning of 1999 the euro was launched as a common currency in 11 European countries. This paper addresses empirically the medium to long-term forces driving the real euro-dollar exchange rate. Constructing a synthetic euro-dollar exchange rate over a period from 1975 to 1998 and...

Rating downgrades are known to make subsequent downgrades more likely. We analyze the impact of this 'downward momentum' on credit portfolio risk. Using S&P ratings from 1996 to 2005, we estimate a transition matrix that is insensitive to and a second matrix that is sensitive to previous...

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...

We analyze contributions of different markets to price discovery on traded inflation expectations and how it changed during the financial crisis. The quicker information is processed on one market and the less one market is disrupted by the financial crisis the more valuable is its information...

The first part of this paper outlines the concept of democratic accountability of central banks, and compares the legal accountability of the ECB with some other central banks (Bank of Canada, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System). In the second part, we present a theory...

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...

From time to time, economies undergo far-reaching structural changes. In this paper we investigate the consequences of structural breaks in the factor loadings for the specification and estimation of factor models based on principal components and suggest test procedures for structural breaks....

This paper compares four forms of inter-regional financial risk sharing: (i) segmentation, (ii) integration trough the secured interbank market, (iii) integration trough the unsecured interbank market, (iv) integration of retail markets. The secured interbank market is an optimal risk-sharing...

This paper examines the relation between money and housing variables in the euro area and in the US. Our empirical model is based on a standard money demand relation which is augmented by housing market variables. In doing so, co-integrated money demand relationships can be established for both...

Although stable money demand functions are crucial for the monetary model of the exchange rate, empirical research on exchange rates and money demand is more or less disconnected. This paper tries to fill the gap for the Euro/Dollar exchange rate. We investigate whether monetary disequilibria...