This paper investigates bond issuance of non-financial corporations in advanced economies during the period 1999-2003, attempting to understand motives for issuing in foreign currency, and determinants for the choice of currency. We consider the following influences on the currency choice when...

The experience with the two pillar strategy of the European Central Bank (ECB) suggests that at some point in the future the ECB may have to commit to one of the more traditional policy strategies - a direct inflation target or an intermediate monetary target. This study offers some information...

Workers’ remittances have become the second largest source of net financial flows to developing countries. However, the main motives for sending remittances remain controversial. This paper examines the importance of altruistic versus investment motives using a new panel data set of bilateral...

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) plans to introduce a single currency by 2010 in its six member states, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This paper focuses on selected macroeconomic and institutional issues and key policy choices which are likely to arise during the...

A recurring theme in recent years in the debate on the international role of currencies has been the possiblity of pricing oil in euro. This paper contributes to these debates by providing a detailed review of the empirical evidence regarding the market for crude oil and current oil invoicing...

Crude oil is a homogeneous good traded on specialised exchanges and quoted and invoiced predominantly in US dollars. Despite the strong case for the use of the US dollar as a vehicle currency in the oil trade, we provide an alternative view. We develop a simple network effects model to identify...

We analyse empirically the effect of uncertainty on the investment decisions of a sample of quoted German firms. The uncertainty measures are constructed by employing two procedures: the conventional formula of standard deviation, and the GARCH methodology. In the econometric estimates the...

This paper discusses techniques for estimating structural vector autoregressions. Especially when monetary policy shocks are estimated, VAR residuals turn out to be leptokurtic. It is argued that this is no coincidence but follows directly from the properties of monetary policy decisions. The...

This paper investigates monetary policy transmission at the microeconometric level. The credit rationing literature suggests that monetary policy has a larger effects on firms which are credit constrained. I use a large panel of German industrial firms to investigate whether this is empirically...

Policy actions by the ECB have potentially asymmetric effects across countries in Euroland. However, it is unclear whether these differences remain or whether convergence has taken place. This paper considers monetary policy transmission into real activity in a SVAR model. Extending earlier work...