Germany’s net exports and macroeconomic policy stance are controversial issues in current debates about the Eurozone debt crisis. This paper shows that both are characteristics of what has been described in a variety of political economy literatures as the German socio-economic model. We argue...

It is frequently argued that credit rating agencies (CRAs) have acted procyclically in their rating of sovereign debt in the European Monetary Union (EMU). They are believed to have under-rated sovereign risk in the early years of EMU, when integrated financial markets provided easier access to...

We study the information content of about 3,300 global bank rating changes before and after the Lehman shock in September 2008 from an equity investor's perspective. Based on a multi-model event study approach, we find that while upgrades are not associated with significant abnormal bank stock...

Rating agencies strive to assign reliable, objective and comparable credit ratings as an indicator on one consistent scale. We test empirically how rating agencies meet their promise of providing objective and comparable assessments of credit risk of an issuer and thus creditworthiness. Logistic...

It is a matter of debate in how far credit ratings contribute to allocative efficiency or to excessive volatility of asset prices and cross-border capital flows. Yet it is generally taken for granted that ratings play a significant role in the transnationalization of financial relations. This...

It is a matter of debate in how far credit ratings contribute to allocative efficiency or to excessive volatility of asset prices and cross-border capital flows. Yet it is generally taken for granted that ratings play a significant role in the transnationalization of financial relations. This...

The notion of 'transnational governance' refers to systems in which private actors and other non- state institutions participate in setting and enforcing norms for cross-border transactions in trade, finance and other business. While the term is modern, the co-evolution of world markets and...

Despite the transnational character of the Great Depression of the years 1929-33, there are few works in the inter-war literature that deal in depth with the propagation of business cycles across national borders and systemic risks of depression in the world economy. Two notable exceptions are...

Chinese monetary policy constitutes a marked example of a clash between theory and practice. In theory, a fixed exchange rate regime with capital mobility turns the money supply into an endogenous variable while expansionary pressure can be alleviated by the central bank by foreign currency...

In this paper we study the intra-euro area imbalances based on a dynamic general equilibrium model. We show that European financial integration and the introduction of the euro might have contributed to the development of imbalances. Interest rate convergence following EMU accession led to net...