Nach dem aus historischer Perspektive außergewöhnlich starken Rückgang des weltweiten Bruttoinlandsprodukts im Jahr 2009 ist eine Diskussion darüber entbrannt, inwieweit die derzeitige Finanzkrise Einfluss auf die mittelfristigen Wachstumsperspektiven einer Volkswirtschaft hat. So war der...

In this paper we assess the information content of seven widely cited early indicators for the euro area with respect to forecasting area-wide industrial production. To this end, we use various tests that are designed to compare competing forecast models. In addition to the standard...

We analyse trade between countries of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance in Eastern Europe between 1950 and 1990. Despite central planning and political motivation of the CMEA, we show that trade could be explained by standard demand factors surprisingly well. Moreover, we document that...

Russian banks have been strongly influenced by the worldwide financial crisis which started in the second half of 2008. This was caused by a combination of domestic, regional and international factors. We estimate an early warning model for the Russian crisis. We identified 47 Russian banks...

We analyze the determinants of the corporate interest rates and the financial accelerator in the Czech Republic. Using a unique panel of 448 Czech firms from 1996 to 2002, we find that selected balance sheet indicators influence significantly the firm-specific interest rates. In particular, debt...

A panel data set for six countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) is used to estimate money demand with panel cointegration methods over the recent disinflation period. The basic money demand model is able to convincingly explain the long-run dynamics of M2 in...

Banks entering an emerging market face a lot of uncertainty about the risks involved in lending. We use a unique unbalanced panel of nearly 700 short-term loans made to SMEs in Slovakia between January 2000 and June 2005. Of the loans granted, on average 6.0 per cent of the firms defaulted....

This paper evaluates the predictions of different price setting theories using a new dataset constructed from a large panel of business surveys of German retail firms over the period 1970-2010. The dataset contains firm-specific information on both price realizations and expectations....