Liquidity plays an important role in explaining how banks determine their allocation of funds. This paper analyses whether this fact can explain the term structure of interest rates and yield spreads. The paper models banks' demand for liquidity in a manner similar to that used to study...

This paper discusses the role of foreign exchange interventions in the inflation-targeting regime, focusing on the Czech experience since 1998. It concludes that the case for foreign exchange interventions is not clear in an inflation targeting regime both from the theoretical and empirical...

There is some evidence that interdependencies among European banks have increased over the past 15 years and that the potential of systemic risks in banking has shifted from a national level to a European level. / Whereas wholesale financial markets are considered to be highly integrated within...

This paper investigates the credit channel in Germany and the United Kingdom. The financial systems of these two countries show substantial structural differences, which leads one to expect that their real sectors respond differently to changes in monetary policy. To the extent that this is the...

Bis zum Amtsantritt von Gary Gensler ging die US Commodity Futures Trading Commission von einem geringen Einfluss der Spekulanten auf den Rohölpreis aus, während nun eine Neubewertung stattfindet.Dieser Artikel misst die Aktivität der Spekulanten mit Hilfe von Variablen der wöchentlichen...

This article discusses the influence of speculators in the futures market on crude oil prices. The results suggest the dispersion in beliefs influences both crude oil prices and price volatility.

Value at risk (VaR) has become a standard measure of portfolio risk over the last decade. It even became one of the corner stones in the Basel II accord about banks' equity requirements. Nevertheless, the practical application of the VaR concept suffers from two problems: how to estimate VaR and...