The Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) is likely to give a further boost to trade and capital flows, yet empirical evidence on the possible magnitudes is still scarce. This paper uses four different datasets to estimate the determinants of international asset holdings and trade...

The EU has recently entered accession talks with five transition economies of eastern Europe. Membership in the EU would require inter alia the full liberalization of capital flows. This paper provides empirical evidence on the openness towards foreign capital that the accession states have...

While the impact of exchange rate changes on economic growth has long been an issue of key importance in international macroeconomics, it has received renewed attention in recent years, owing to weaker growth rates and the debate on "currency wars". However, in spite of its prevalence in the...

Germany is world champion in exporting capital ("Exportweltmeister"). No other country invests larger amounts of savings outside its borders. However, Germany plays in the third division when it comes to investment performance, as we show in this paper. We study the returns on German foreign...

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...

In the past decade, Germany has been the world champion in exporting capital (“Exportweltmeister”). No other country invested larger amounts of savings outside its borders. However, we find that Germany plays in the third division when it comes to investment performance. To show this, we...

This paper quantifies the impact of incentives related to potential membership on institutional change as measured by the World Bank Governance Indicators (WBGI). Based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2008 we show that pre-accession incentives provided by EU and...

This paper analyses potential internal and external determinants of institutional change as measured by the World Bank Governance Indicators (WBGI) based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2005. We show that natural resources and capital inflows exert an...

The paper discusses the relevance of past concerns about trade and foreign direct investment diversion to the detriment of Asian suppliers and hosts as a result of EU integration deepening and widening in the nineties. Based on recent empirical evidence, these concerns are rejected. As concerns...

This paper examines the transition process within Eastern Europe and the integration process with the EU and shows that the requirements for the transition towards a market economy overlap with the requirements for EU accession. Furthermore, the economic situation of the candidate countries is...