Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a crucial role in innovation, economic growth and job creation. Generally, SMEs face special problems when trying to access funding. Their situation is further complicated by the European economic crisis and a fragmentation of financial markets in...

The current financial crisis is often said to be caused by excessive liquidity and distorted incentives in the US subprime real estate sector. Taking this as a starting point, this paper analyzes the relation between house prices and credit respectively money growth between 1992 and 2006 (West...

This paper deals with potential instabilities in the Eurozone stemming from an insufficient interplay between monetary policy and reform effort on the one hand and the emergence of intra-Euro area divergences on the other. As a first step, we assess the effect of EMU on structural reform and...

This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries. We use quarterly data in the 1980.1–2005.4 period and exclude EMU countries. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant index of central bank independence with...

Monetary policy rules have been considered as fundamental protection against inflation. However, empirical evidence for a correlation between monetary commitment to rules and price stability is relatively weak. We discuss likely causes for this weak link and argue that monetary commitment is not...

Die Finanzkrise 2007/2008 und die derzeitige "Euro-Krise" stellen das bisherige Weltwährungssystem in Frage. Sie legt die Schwächen des aktuellen Systems schonungslos offen und zeigt, welchen herausragenden Stellenwert das internationale Währungssystem nach wie vor für die Stabilität von...

This study applies the Cointegrated Vector-Autoregressive (CVAR) model to analyze the long-run relationships and short-run dynamics between stock markets and monetary policy across five developed and three emerging economies. Our main aim is to check whether monetary policy plays an important...