Since the introduction of the euro in January 1999, exchange rate stability at the periphery of the euro area is growing. The paper investigates the impact of exchange rate stability on growth for a sample of 41 mostly small open economies at the EMU periphery. It identifies international trade,...

While up to the late 1990s Japanese foreign exchange intervention was fully sterilized, Japanese monetary authorities left foreign exchange intervention unsterilized when Japan entered the liquidity trap in 1999. According to previous research on foreign exchange intervention, unsterilized...

The paper discusses global imbalances under the aspect of an asymmetric world monetary system. It identifies the US and Germany as center countries with rising / high current account deficits (US) and surpluses (Germany). These are matched by current account surpluses of countries stabilizing...

The ECB Working Paper Series seeks to disseminate economic research on issues that are relevant to the various tasks and functions of the ECB. The Series invites submissions of research work by ECB staff and visitors. Papers by researchers not affiliated with the ECB may also be considered for...

The ECB has an obligation to provide statistical information of the highest quality to the public and this third edition of the publication u0093Bond markets and long-term interest rates in non-euro area Member States of the European Union and in accession countriesu0094 serves to contribute to...

[...]This paper aims to ascertain the quality (that is, thepredictive power and prediction errors) of two marketindicators: the distance to default and the subordinated debtspread. Previous work has established that banks’ marketprices reflect contemporaneous information about bank riskin the...

This paper investigates the financing conditions of non-financial corporations in theeuro area. We develop a new firm classification based on micro data by distinguishingbetween three groups of firms: unconstrained, relatively and absolutely constrainedfirms. We also provide further evidence on...

We test whether firms with a single bank are better shielded from loss of credit and investment cutsin periods of adverse cash flow shocks than firms with multiple bank relationships. Our estimatesof the cash flow sensitivity of investment show that both types of firms are equally subject...

Volatilities implied from interest rate swaptions are used to assess the size and thesign of the compensation for volatility risk, for dollar, euro and pound rates at a dailyfrequency, between October 1998 and August 2006. The measurement of the volatilityrisk premium rests on a simple model...