We analyze the choice of exchange rate regimes of the 25 transition economies in Europe and the CIS after 1990. The empirical results show that the traditional Optimum Currency Area considerations provide relevant guidance for the exchange rate regime choices in these countries. Moreover, regime...

This paper studies the inflation and interest rate performances since the late 1970s for six former highinflation countries that adopted inflation targeting (IT) in the early 1990’s. Using Germany, Switzerland and the US for comparison, we look at various aspects of central bank performance in...

The ECB’s official inflation objective is an increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices of below 2% in the medium run. Many commentators argue that there is a deflationary bias in this definition because the lower bound of the inflation objective is not clearly specified. It is also...

Identifying banking crises is the first step in the research on determinants of banking crises. The prevailing practice is to employ market events to identify a banking crisis. Researchers justify the usage of this method on the grounds that either direct and reliable indicators of banks’...

Founded by the late Karl Brunner in 1970, the Konstanz Seminar celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1999. Brunner started the Seminar with two objectives, to close the gap in the quality of research and teaching of economics between the United States and Europe, Germany and Switzerland in...

We provide empirical estimates of the risksharing and redistributive properties of fiscal equalization among the states of the German federation. Fiscal equalization serves as a mechanism to insure state budgets against asymmetric revenue shocks, but provides almost no insurance against regional...

We analyze the implications of financial openness to macroeconomic volatility in a small open economy. Major macroeconomic aggregates show non-monotonic volatility patterns with respect to the degree of financial openness in the model without domestic financial frictions. The introduction of...