This paper gathers the longest available historical monthly return series for the Finnish equity, bond and money markets as well as inflation. The series are analysed to calculate the statistical characteristics of the returns investors would have received in these markets. We also survey...

This paper presents a new monthly value-weighted, all-share total return index for the Finnish stock market. The index covers the period from the establishment of the Helsinki Stock Exchange in October 1912 to the beginning of 1970, after which the WI index by Berglund et al (1983) and later in...

​We examine the effect of finance on long-term economic growth using Bayesian model averaging to address model uncertainty in cross-country growth regressions. The literature largely focuses on financial indicators that assess the financial depth of banks and stock markets. We examine these...

This paper continues the data collection procedure and analysis set forth in Nyberg and Vaihekoski (2009). A number of new time series that are commonly used in finance literature are collected, created, and analyzed for the first time. These series include, among others, monthly dividend yields...

This study analyses cross-country correlations of stock prices (values of firms) using the basic New Open Economy Macroeconomics model. We show that cross-country correlations of stock prices greatly depend on the currency of export pricing in the case of monetary shocks but not notably for...

The developed world exhibits substantial but poorly understood differences in the efficiency and quality of low-value payment services. This paper compares payments arrangements in the UK, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and discusses the impact of network effects on incentives to adopt new...

Although beneficial allocational effects have been a central motivation for the Basel II capital adequacy reform, the interaction of these effects with Basel II's procyclical impact has been less discussed. In this paper, we investigate the effect of Basel II on the efficiency of bank lending....

The emergence of financial conglomerates and multinational financial institutions as well as the development of new financial products have raised concerns as to the ability of separate sectoral supervisors and different national authorities to effectively oversee financial markets....

Recently, banking literature has had a quest for appropriate pricing of bank loans under the new Basel II rules and has been in pursuit of possible outcomes for undertaking such credit risk. In this paper, we propose a simplified formula to price bank's corporate loans, aiming at making bank...

Extending a standard credit-risk model illustrates that a single factor can drive both expected losses and the extent to which they may be exceeded in extreme scenarios, ie “unexpected losses.” This leads us to develop a framework for forecasting these losses jointly. In an application to...