The paper investigates the factors crucial in the locational decisions of multinational German banks in selected emerging markets of central and eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia between 1994 and 2001. Emphasis is placed on testing variables of macroeconomic and financial sector risk along...

The paper discusses the question of whether financial participation of multilateral development banks does prompt private investors to inject more risky equity capital in emerging market banks. Using a theoretical model, it is stipulated that the presence of an official lender in a project gives...

The presence of other firms in a foreign market can have a double-edged effect on the profitability of new entrants. Firstly, a larger presence of other firms implies more competition and thus lowers the earnings prospects of new entrants. Secondly, there might be positive spill-over effects...

By disaggregating price indices, it becomes apparent that the real exchange rate consists of the real exchange rate for a single good and a weighted sum of relative prices between goods. When applying a battery of panel unit root tests to this sum and its components, it is found that both the...

Using aggregate data, the paper analyzes the importance of inventory investment for German business cycles since 1960. In contrast to U.S. experience, the traditional productionsmoothing/ buffer-stock model is not rejected by empirical evidence. Preliminary national accounts data of inventory...

Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo...

This paper investigates the transmission of US macroeconomic shocks to Germany by employing a large-dimensional structural dynamic factor model. This framework allows us to investigate many transmission channels simultaneously, including 'new' channels like stock markets, foreign direct...

When countries, and macroeconomic models, open up to international capital markets, the welfare gains available through completion of financial markets for contingencies potentially are much greater than those available from access to noncontingent international borrowing. Intercasual insurance,...

This paper examines the methods used by the Bank of Japan for the estimation of the output gap. Attention is paid to the real-time estimation problem. After reviewing the evolution of output gap estimation at the Bank, I discuss advantages and disadvantages of the various output gap measures....

We test recent theories of when companies go public which predict that 1) more companies will go public when outside valuations are high or have increased, 2) companies prefer going public when uncertainty about their future profitability is high, and 3) firms whose controlling shareholders...