The scholarly debate on currency internationalization focuses on country characteristics and policies as the main determinants in currency competition. However, this literature has neglected the fact that, given the intertwined nature of the international monetary system, other countries'...

The Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN) - the institutions and arrangements that provide short-term crisis finance - has turned into a highly complex, uncoordinated system of global, multilateral, and bilateral instruments. The present paper elaborates on a composite index of the GFSN to analyse...

The internet revolution is said to foster integration of the market for financial services, since consumers are able to shop around at all companies worldwide and firms can easily offer their services on the internet at a minimum of distribution cost. However, the European market for online...

Using a simple sign test, we report new empirical evidence, taken from both the US and the German stock markets, showing that trading behavior substantially changed around Black Monday in 1987. It turned out that before Black Monday investors behaved more as in the momentum strategy; and after...

We adapt a theoretical model from the goods trade literature to test whether banks with a comparative cost advantage are more likely to enter foreign markets by means of foreign direct investment. We combine detailed proprietary bank-level data on the international activities of all German banks...

Banking across borders has risen substantially over the past two decades. Yet there is significant heterogeneity in the international and global activities of banks across countries. This paper develops and tests a theoretical model that explains this variation from an international trade theory...

While financial inclusion is typically addressed by improving the financial infrastructure, we show that a higher degree of financial literacy also has a clear beneficial effect. We study this effect at the cross-country level, which allows us to consider institutional variation. Regarding...