In this paper we re-investigate the comovements of interest rates in the G7-countries. We propose a structured modus operandi to analyze the time series characteristics of interest rates and to test for common features. We conduct cointegration, serial correlation common feature and codependence...

We evaluate the proposal for official dollarization in Costa Rica by applying a new approach to measure the business cycle comovements with the United States. While the literature often focuses on the correlation of shocks, we point out that the response of each country to the shocks is also an...

Die EZB hat ein neues Bilanzziel. Um eine Billion Euro möchte sie ihre Bilanz ausweiten – auf den Stand vom März 2012 – um Deflationsgefahren vorzubeugen. Dies wirft jedoch neue Fragen auf: Wie bilanziert eigentlich die EZB? Welchen Zielen dient diese Bilanz? Und wie informativ ist die...

The recent increase of interest rate spreads in Europe and their apparent detachment from underlying fundamental variables has generated a debate on multiple equilibria in the sovereign bond market (see Grauwe and Ji (2012)). We critically evaluate this hypothesis, by pointing towards an...

Central bank credit has expanded dramatically in some of the euro area member countries since the beginning of the financial crisis. This paper makes two contributions to understand this stylized fact. First, we discuss a simple model of monetary policy that includes (i) a credit channel and...

The Structural Vector Auto-regression (SVAR) approach to estimating fiscal multipliers, following the seminal paper by Blanchard and Perotti (2002), has been widely applied in the literature. In our paper we discuss the interpretation of these estimates and suggest that they are more useful for...

In this paper, we investigate whether foreign currency accounts help overcome credit constraints in developing countries. We analyze a novel bank-level data set from Nepal, where a steady inflow of remittances has contributed to foreign currency deposits on commercial bank balance sheets. In...

In this paper, we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the introduction of the IFRS has an impact on the timeliness of loss recognition. We test this hypothesis in a data set of public German firms that report according to German-GAAP and IFRS, respectively. The parallel use of the two accounting...

We present a new empirical decomposition of the effects of financial liberalization on economic growth and on the incidence of crises. Our empirical estimates show that the direct effect of financial liberalization on growth by far outweighs the indirect effect via a higher propensity to crisis....