It is argued that financial innovation, in so far as it affects the technology for carrying out transactions, is endogenous, discrete and irreversible. This observation is developed to provide microfoundations for a type of `liquidity' trap and its implications of this are explored in an...

This paper presents evidence that the bid-ask spreads in euro rates increased relative to the corresponding bid-ask spreads in the German mark (DM) prior to the currency union. This comes with a decrease in transaction volume in the euro rates relative to the previous DM rates. The starkest...

The standard expectations augmented theory of ex-ante purchasing power parity (PPP), which was first developed by Roll, assumes that agents are risk neutral. A Covered Purchasing Power Condition is developed which holds for the general case of risk aversion. A risk-augmented form of ex-ante PPP...

As Stage Two of European Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe develops, a major issue is the coordination of monetary policies. Member countries of the European Monetary System (EMS) will have to align their domestic source moneys. This paper argues that for this purpose, the Treasury and central bank...

We examine transparency-related characteristics of European and US sovereign bond markets and relate these to differences in primary issuance approaches and the design of the different trading platforms. We highlight the existence of a winner’s curse problem in the interaction between B2C and...

The introduction of the euro on 1 January 1999 created the conditions for an integrated government bond market in the euro area. Using a unique data set from the electronic trading platform Euro-MTS, we consider what is the benchmark' in this market. We develop and apply two definitions of...