Since the European debt crisis economists and politicians discuss intensively the sovereign-bank nexus. The high activity in sovereign bond issuance required to mitigate the burden of the Covid19 crisis will rather intensify this debate than calm it down. Surprisingly, however, we still have...

We construct a novel database of monthly foreign exchange interventions for 49 countries over up to 22 years. We build on a text classification approach that extracts information about interventions from news articles and calibrate our procedure to data about actual interventions. Our new...

We study the role of international financial integration in buffering natural disaster shocks, using a large sample of advanced and emerging economies. Conditioning on such exogenous events addresses the endogeneity between financial structures and economic conditions. We document that...

Ecological labels are a market-oriented environmental policy instrument which is applied in a rising number of countries. Products have to meet several criteria in order to qualify for a label. Criteria on production processes of goods can potentially conflict with international trade rules....

We investigate in a horizontal product differentiation model with North-South trade the implications of a home bias in consumers' demand for labelled goods. We compare mutual recognition and international harmonisation of ecological labels with respect to firms' profits and welfare. Northern...

In this paper we present latest facts about the R&D activities of German multinational companies abroad and R&D activities of foreign companies in Germany. These results confirm that Germany is still an attractive location for R&D activites of multinational companies in many technological...

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive multivariate cointegration analysis of three parts of the steam coal value chain - export, transport and import prices. The analysis is based on a rich dataset of international coal prices; in particular, we combine data on steam coal prices with freight...

Using annual data for the period 1992-2012, this paper examines trade flows between China and its main trade partners in Asia, North America and Europe, and whether increasing trade has led to industrial structural adjustment and changes in China’s trade patterns. The analysis is based on both...