National borders are still strong barriers for mergers and acquisitions inEurope. We estimate a gravity equation model based on NUTS 2-regionsand find that the restraining impact of national borders decreased byabout a third between 1990 and 2007. However, there has been nosignificant change...

Implied Base Correlations of Single-tranche CDOs on standardized Credit Indices such asthe iTraxx Europe have been used in the credit derivatives market for price communication.During the financial crisis, implied correlations have been quite volatile indicating thegrowing fraction of systematic...

Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) were established in Europe in 2000 and have grown to a sizeof over 200 bn US$. Some issuers use a full replication strategy while others prefer a swapbased approach. The ETF are dealt parallelly in the primary and in the secondary market, asnew ETFs can be created at...

The paper confronts different aspects of decentralization: fiscal decentralization, postconstitutionalregulatory decentralization, and constitutional decentralization – using a singledataset from Russian Federation of the Yeltsin period as a politically asymmetric country anda variety of...

Credit risk measurement and management become more important in all financial institutions in the light of the current financial crisis and the global recession. This particularly applies to most of the complex structured financing forms whose risk cannot be quantified with com-mon rating...

This paper examines why unsolicited ratings tend to be lower than solicited ratings. Bothself-selection among issuers and strategic conservatism of rating agencies may be reasonableexplanations. Analyses of default incidences of non-U.S. borrowers between January 1996and December 2006 show that...

This working paper surveys theoretical and empirical work about market liquidityand market liquidity risk. It addresses interested practitioners as well asstudents who want to gain a quick overview about the latest progress in researchin market liquidity.

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of developments in the microfinance sector beforeand after the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 by comparing them with developments intraditional banking sectors of emerging market economies and developing countries. Thefindings indicate that microfinance...

While the regional economic integration encompassing the former Soviet Union (FSU) transpiresto be inefficient, there appears to be a stronger interest in regionalism in smaller groupsof more homogenous and geographically connected countries of the region, specifically, CentralAsia. Using a new...

The absence or the presence of the resource curse is often explained by the specifics of politicaland institutional factors. The aim of this paper is to study this effect looking separately ateconomic and political institutions and at their interaction. Unlike most empirical papers inthe...