When the goals of internal and external macroeconomic equilibrium are in conflict, sterilized intervention in the foreign exchange market may provide an independent policy instrument through which the central bank can resolve its dilemma in the short run. This paper is concerned with the West...

The purpose of this paper is two fold. First, to estimate, using structural methods, the extent to which capital flows undermined West German monetary policy during the Bretton Woods years 1960 to 1970 and second, to show that earlier reduced form estimates of the capital-account offset...

Since the September 1985 Plaza Hotel announcement by the Group of Five industrial countries, a substantial realignment of exchange rates has been achieved. At the same time, foreign exchange market intervention, much of it concerted and much of it sterilized, has been undertaken on a scale not...

We provide levels of, compositions of, and inequalities in household augmented wealth - defined as the sum of net worth and pension wealth - for two countries: the United States and Germany. Pension wealth makes up a considerable portion of household wealth: about 48% in the United States and...

We document strikingly similar gender differences in financial literacy across countries. When asked to answer questions that measure knowledge of basic financial concepts, women are less likely than men to answer correctly and more likely to indicate that they do not know the answer. In...

About 20% of German workers retire on disability pensions. Disability pensions provide fairly generous benefits for those who are not already age-eligible for an old-age pension and who are deemed unable to work for health reasons. In this paper, we use two sets of individual survey data to...

We examine financial literacy in Germany using data from the SAVE survey. We find that knowledge of basic financial concepts is lacking among women, the less educated, and those living in East Germany. In particular, those with low education and low income in East Germany have little financial...