A striking development in the euro area financial markets since 1999 was the rapid growth of the corporate debt securities market. This paper offers a first empirical examination of this market since the introduction of the euro using macroeconomic data. It is shown that corporate debt issuance...

This paper presents an error-correction model of the interest rate pass-through process based on a marginal cost pricing framework including switching and asymmetric information costs. Estimation results for the euro area suggest that the proportion of the pass-through of changes in market...

For central banks, the monitoring of financing conditions plays a pivotal role in assessing the actual transmission of monetary policy impulses to borrowers. This paper presents in detail some of the indicators and data used by the ECB to assess financing conditions in the euro area. It also...

This study aims at assessing empirically the determinants of changes in risk-weighted bank capital ratios in the 1990s in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. Both bank-specific characteristics, factors at the banking industry level and the degree of undercapitalization...

This article models industrial new orders across the European Union (EU) countries for various breakdowns. A common modelling framework exploits soft (business opinion surveys) as well as hard data (industrial turnover). The estimates show for about 200 cases that the model determinants...

This paper empirically examines the interest rate pass-through at the euro area level. The focus is on the pass-through of official interest rates, approximated by the overnight interest rate, to longer-term market interest rates, which, in turn, are a proxy for the marginal costs for banks to...

This study focuses on the role of equity and labour markets for holding euro area money. Equity affects money demand positively through wealth effects (financial transaction motive) and negatively via substitution effects from the expected return on equity (speculative motive). A precautionary...

This study aims at assessing empirically the determinants of changes in risk-weighted bank capital ratios in the 1990s in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. Both bank-specific characteristics, factors at the banking industry level and the degree of undercapitalization...

Focusing on the years 1980–1995 and providing empirical evidence for six European countries, namely Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, the author discusses whether cross-country variations in financial structure have a systematic relationship with inter-country...

Empirical results for the United States show that the credit risk premium leads the stock market by up to four weeks. They are robust across different stock market measures, empirical methods and sample periods. The finding of a flight to quality that first occurs in the corporate bond and...