The Balassa-Samuelson effect is usually seen as the prime explanation of the continuous real appreciation of central and east European (CEE) transition countries' currencies against their western counterparts. The response of a small country's real exchange rate to various shocks is derived in a...

In this paper we present a critical overview of differnt methods of constructing an equilibrium exchange rate. The recent literature on purchasing power parity (PPP) indicates that on its own PPP is not a good vehicle for defining an equilibrium exchange rate. Rather, we argue that the latter...

The establishment of European monetary union (EMU) was widely expected to cause price convergence among member states. In an investigation of this claim, the present study avoids problems of comparability and representativeness by using an extremely detailed and comprehensive scanner database on...

This paper provides new evidence on the foreign direct investment stocks of German firms. We use firm-level data for the years 1990-2000 to describe the regional and sectoral patterns of German FDI through gravity-type equations. We provide evidence on the patterns of FDI by sector, by size of...

The well-known problem of too many instruments in dynamic panel data GMM is dealt with in detail in Roodman (2009, Oxford Bull. Econ. Statist.). The present paper goes one step further by providing a solution to this problem: factorisation of the standard instrument set is shown to be a valid...

In this paper we stress-test credit portfolios of 28 German banks based on a Mertontype multi-factor credit risk model. The ad-hoc stress scenario is an economic downturn in the automobile industry that constitutes an exceptional but plausible event suggested by historical data. Rather than on a...

We put forward a Merton-type multi-factor portfolio model for assessing banks’ contributions to systemic risk. This model accounts for the major drivers of banks’ systemic relevance: size, default risk and correlation of banks’ assets as a proxy for interconnectedness. We measure systemic...

Conditional heteroskedasticity is an important feature of many macroeconomic and financial time series. Standard residual-based bootstrap procedures for dynamic regression models treat the regression error as i.i.d. These procedures are invalid in the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity....

In this paper we propose exact likelihood-based mean-variance efficiency tests of the market portfolio in the context of Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), allowing for a wide class of error distributions which include normality as a special case. These tests are developed in the framework of...

In our analysis we discuss several dynamic panel data estimators proposed in the literature and assess their performance in Monte Carlo simulations. It is a well known fact that the natural choice, the least squares dummy variable estimator is biased in the context of dynamic estimation. The...