In the light of the inequity of the way losses from bank insolvencies and their avoidance through intervention by the authorities have been distributed over creditors, depositors, owners and the population at large in transition and emerging economies, this paper explores a number of regulatory...

This paper examines the role and determinants of collateral in emerging markets compared to mature ones. Analyzing a data set of 560 credit files of Thai commercial banks, we find that both the incidence and degree of collateralization are higher there than in developed markets. Thai banks use...

Asia has emerged as the balancing wheel of global finance. The countries of Asia now account for 70 per cent of global foreign exchange reserves, compared to only 30 percent in 1990 and 21 per cent in the early 1970s. This paper explores theoretical interpretations for the relatively high demand...

The introduction of a common monetary policy in eleven European countries increased the need for leading indicators for that area. A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference...

Regarding the trade-off between the depth and the duration of recessions, there exists a mounting empirical evidence of the idiosyncratic and non-synchronized behavior of the business cycle over time within and across countries. In this paper, I propose a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium...

In this paper we used a data set constructed for a companion paper (Fritsche/Stephan, 2000) where we explored the leading indicator properties of different time series for the German business cycle. Now we test for the ability of different indicator series to forecast recessions by using a...

The paper analyzes two questions: (i) the effect of a monetary policy shock on the business cycle and (ii) the extent to which a shift in a monetary policy affects the dynamics of business cycle. Unlike previous literature, to answer these questions, we measure cycle movements by calculating an...

We investigate the shape of the Italian personal income distribution using microdata from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth, made publicly available by the Bank of Italy for the years 1977-2002. We find that the upper tail of the distribution is consistent with a Pareto power-law type...

This paper analyses the information content of M1 for euro area real GDP since the beginning of the 1980s. After a literature review on the empirical results in individual euro area countries we review some theoretical arguments why real narrow money growth might be an important determinant of...