The globalization of markets and companies has increased the demand for internationally comparable high quality accounting information resulting from a common set of accounting rules. Despite remarkable efforts of international harmonization for more than 25 years, accounting regulation is still...

The single most important policy-induced innovation in the international financial system since the collapse of the Bretton-Woods regime is the institution of the European Monetary Union. This paper provides an account of how the process of financial integration has promoted financial...

Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions. We argue that tax policy is the driving force. Using long time-series from eight countries, we show that the fraction of household ownership decreases with...

Die Vorstellung selbst-stabilisierender, zum Gleichgewicht tendierender Finanzmärkte, lange Zeit als Selbstverständlichkeit angesehen, ist durch die aktuelle Banken- und Kreditkrise in Frage gestellt. Trotz ausgefeilten Risikomanagements der Banken und einer an Basel II orientierten Aufsicht...

We examine the impact of stock exchange trading rules and surveillance on the frequency and severity of suspected insider trading cases in 22 stock exchanges around the world over the period January 2003 through June 2011. Using new indices for market manipulation, insider trading, and...

Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...

We analyze the role of different kinds of primary and secondary market interventions for the government's goal to maximize its revenues from public bond issuances. Some of these interventions can be thought of as characteristics of a primary dealer system. After all, we see that a primary dealer...

In this paper we develop empirical measures for the strength of spillover effects. Modifying and extending the framework by Diebold and Yilmaz (2011), we quantify spillovers between sovereign credit markets and banks in the euro area. Spillovers are estimated recursively from a vector...

This paper presents a model to analyze the consequences of competition in order-flow between a profit maximizing stock exchange and an alternative trading platform on the decisions concerning trading fees and listing requirements. Listing requirements, set by the exchange, provide public...