The first part of this paper outlines the concept of democratic accountability of central banks, and compares the legal accountability of the ECB with some other central banks (Bank of Canada, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System). In the second part, we present a theory...

The contribution of this paper is to offer a rationale for the observed seasonal pattern in house prices. We first document seasonality in house prices for the US and the UK using formal statistical tests and illustrate its quantitative importance. In the second part of the paper we employ a...

The capital-asset-pricing model (CAPM) is one of the most popular methods of financial market analysis. But, evidence of the poor empirical performance of the CAPM has accumulated in the literature. For example, based on their empirical results regarding the relation between market Beta and...

Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

Credit risk associated with interbank lending may lead to domino effects, where the failure of one bank results in the failure of other banks not directly affected by the initial shock. Recent work in economic theory shows that this risk of contagion depends on the precise pattern of interbank...

In this paper we propose a generalisation of the noise trader transmission mechanism to examine the impact of central bank intervention on exchange rates. Within a heterogeneous expectations exchange rate model intervention operations are supposed to provide support to either chartist or...