Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This study tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. Using a novel dataset that contains all German banks'...

Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect...

The production index is an important indicator for assessing the cyclical state of the economy. Unfortunately, the monthly time series is contaminated by many noisy components like seasonal variations, calendar and vacation effects. Only part of those nuisance components are explicitly...

In this paper, an Unobserved Components Model is employed to decompose German real GDP into the trend, cycle and seasonal components and the working day effect. The most important findings are: 1) The growth rate of potential output declined from 4.2 per cent in the sixties to 1.4 per cent at...

In this paper we investigate the volatility structure of the German stock marketDieses Arbeitspapier analysiert Veränderungen der Volatilität des Deutschen Aktienindex (DAX) und der in ihm enthaltenen Aktienwerte. Ein kürzlich entwickelter Test zeigt einen Bruch im Ausmaß der Schwankungen...

In this paper we estimate a simple New-Keynesian DSGE model withIn diesem Diskussionspapier schätzen wir ein einfaches Neukeynesianisches dynamisches Gleichgewichtsmodel für deutsche Daten und den Zeitraum zwischen dem ersten Quartal 1970 und dem letzten Quartal 1998. Im Unterschied zu einer Reihe