This paper deals with the question of what impact membership of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has had on small European states. We will also analyze whether or to what extent a large number of small member states affect the EMU itself when they vastly outnumber the large countries. We...

Do you believe that at Christmas time the gas prices, the economy and the number of suicides peak? Do you think that the value of presents you are giving to your beloved is of importance? We show in this paper that conventional wisdom about Christmas is often doubtful. Furthermore, we give an...

Die ausufernde Verschuldung insbesondere der südeuropäischen Mitgliedstaaten stellt die Europäische Währungsunion (EWU) derzeit vor große Herausforderungen. Während über lange Zeit Einigkeit darüber herrschte, den vollständigen Erhalt der Währungsunion mit einem milliardenschweren...

This paper analyses currency options for six Pacific states - Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu - that issue their own currencies. Empirical estimates indicate that these states already stabilize their currencies against the US dollar because of their large and...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the market efficiency on the foreign exchange market since the introduction of the Euro by applying the cointegration analysis to exchange rates. The introduction of the Euro has changed the structure of the global foreign exchange market to the extent...

The real economic effects of the considerably high appreciation in Central European Economies (CEE) are controversially disputed in the eve of the European Monetary Union (EMU) entry of several CEE economies. The Balassa-Samuelson-effect was made responsible for the expectation of higher...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (e.g., the IMF) and a country has for optimal (conditional) reform design. The main result is that the informational advantage of the country must be strictly greater than the advantage of the multilateral in order...

We investigate RMB pricing differentials for onshore and offshore trading. Testing for long memory, we find strong persistence in the pricing differential. Hence, the Chinese FX market in its bipolar structure still lacks basic conditions for perfectly integrated markets.

This paper uses panel data for 116 countries over the period 1995-2016 to investigate the heterogeneity of the debt-growth nexus across countries and the factors underlying it. In the first step, the grouped fixed effects (GFE) estimator proposed by Bonhomme and Manresa (2015) is used to...

We develop a dynamic two-period generalized beauty contest to study the optimal level of publicity when disclosed information is subject to multipliereffects inherent to social learning. We build upon the static case, where all agents receive a private signal about an unknown fundamental state...