The paper investigates the impact of financial integration on asset return, risk diversification and breadth of financial markets. We analyse a three-country macroeconomic model in which i) the number of financial assets is endogenous; ii) assets are imperfect substitutes; iii) cross-border...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) we specify, estimate and simulate a dynamic structural model of housing demand. Our model generalizes previous applied econometric work by incorporating realistic features of the housing market including non-convex adjustment costs from...

This Paper provides the first empirical examination of the microstructure of the euro money market, using tick data from brokers located in six countries. Special emphasis is put on the institutional environment (monetary policy decisions and their implementation, payment systems and private...

This Paper presents a new approach to the theory of the firm by identifying factor complementarities as central to the determination of the firm’s boundaries. The factor complementarities may take a variety of forms: technological and informational complementarities, as well as economies of...

While transport costs have fallen, the empirical evidence also points at rising total trade costs. In a model of industry location with endogenous transaction costs, we show how and under which conditions a decline in transport costs can lead to an increase in the total cost of trade.

This paper presents evidence that the bid-ask spreads in euro rates increased relative to the corresponding bid-ask spreads in the German mark (DM) prior to the currency union. This comes with a decrease in transaction volume in the euro rates relative to the previous DM rates. The starkest...

Small transaction costs and uncertainty imply that optimal cross-currency interest rate speculation is marked by a first-order hysteresis band. Consequently uncovered interest parity does not hold and market-efficiency tests based on it are mis-specified. Indeed, measured prediction errors are a...

The paper presents a two-country macroeconomic model in which the number of financial assets is endogenous. Imperfect substitutability of assets and international transaction costs give a comparative advantage to large markets, because of demand effects. Agents have more incentives to undertake...

Thin equity markets cannot accommodate temporary bulges of buy or sell orders without large price movements: the resulting volatility can induce risk-averse transactors who face transaction costs to desert these markets altogether. Thus thinness and the consequent price volatility may become...

We propose that analysis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price (LOOP) should explicitly take into account the possibility of ‘commodity points’ – thresholds delineating a region of no central tendency among relative prices, possibly due to lack of perfect arbitrage in...