We analyse the adjustment of retail and services prices in a period of low inflation, using a set of individual price data from the German Consumer Price Index which covers the years 1998 to 2003. We strong find evidence of time- and state-dependent price adjustment. Most importantly, the...

In several studies, hedonic methods have been used successfully for the ex post assessment of the accuracy of inflation measurement. Most of those studies relate to high-tech products, with respect to which traditional methods of compiling price indices often fail. We apply hedonic methods to...

Price setting in German metal-working industries is analysed using a monthly panel of individual price data for more than 2,000 plants covering the period from 1980 to 2001. Motivated by several models in the literature, a duration model is estimated. Price changes can be explained by a...

This study provides evidence on how German multinational firms have restructured their service activities around the recent crisis. Making use of new micro-level data on service imports of German multinationals from 2002-2008, we assess the determinants of service offshoring along the extensive...

This paper develops a two-tier oligopoly model in which the entry of a multinational firm results in technology transfer to its local suppliers and also impacts the degree of backward linkages in the local industry. The model endogenizes the multinational's choice between anonymous market...

On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum, the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability (IMFS) took the opportunity of the first anniversary of this new institution to organise a joint conference in Berlin on 8-9 November 2011. The purpose of this event was...

This paper introduces a multivariate pure-jump Lévy process which allows for skewness and excess kurtosis of single asset returns and for asymptotic tail dependence in the multivariate setting. It is termed Variance Compound Gamma (VCG). The novelty of my approach is that, by applying a...

We examine contagion from a number of financial systems to the German financial system using the information content of CDS prices in a GARCH model. After controlling for common factors which may cause comovement in security prices, we find evidence for contagion from the US and European...

Social capital theory predicts individuals establish social ties based on homophily, i.e., affinities for similar others. We exploit a unique sample to analyze how similarities and social ties affect career outcomes in banking based on age, education, gender, and employment history to examine if...