The flow of information between futures and spot prices may vary over time, in particular during periods of stress. This article analyses the information content of the Bund Future and German government bonds during 1998 and test whether it is constant over time. The use of high-frequency data...

Risk neutral densities (RND) can be used to forecast the price of the underlying basis for the option, or it may be used to price other derivates based on the same sequence. The method adopted in this paper to calculate the RND is to firts estimate daily the diffusion process of the underlying...

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...

The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (CEEC-3) have undertaken substantial efforts to build a new financial system under the constraints of their legacies from central planning. In this study, first we look at the banking sector. Then we give a description of bond and stock markets. These...

A crucial condition for the existence of a credit channel through bank loans is that monetary policy should be able to change bank loan supply. This paper contributes to the discussion on this issue by presenting empirical evidence from dynamic panel estimations based on a dataset that comprises...

This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

In order to obtain a better understanding of monetary transmission, this paper assesses the importance of the interest rate and credit channels on business fixed investment in the German manufacturing sector. Our panel of financial statements contains 44,345 observations for 6,408 firms. We...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest euro-area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we explore...

Given the marked reduction in the number of banks in Germany during recent years, the study estimates competitive behavior in the German banking system by applying an empirical method developed by Panzar and Rosse (1987). By estimating the banks' reduced form revenue functions, the sums of their...

Conventional wisdom says that commitment eliminates the inflationary bias of monetary policy. However, this paper shows that the inflation bias can persist even when the central bank commits. A simple model is presented in which the central bank precommits by setting the policy instrument, and...