We analyze current account imbalances through the lens of the two largest surplus countries; China and Germany. We observe two striking patterns visible since the 2007/8 Global Financial Crisis. First, while China has been gradually reducing its current account surplus, Germany's surplus has...

We use two measures to study two capital flight channels for Germany. One measure is based on the concept of trade misinvoicing and one on net claims and liabilities in the Eurosystem of central banks. For both measures, we propose refinements to enhance the assessment of capital flight. We find...

We study the evolution of offshore renminbi trading between 2016 and 2019. The diffusion behaviour of offshore renminbi trading during this period is different from the one between 2013 and 2016. The geographical diffusion process displayed in the 2016-2019 period, in addition to the previously...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...

While illicit capital flight is a major concern of policy makers in developing countries, there is only little research on the possible link between capital flight and development aid. In this paper, we address the issue for Nepal, a stereotypical financially-closed developing economy that is...

In this paper we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the development of the financial sector was an essential factor behind economic growth in 19th century Germany. We apply a structural VAR framework to a new annual data set from 1870 to 1912 that was initially recorded by Walther Hoffmann (1965)....

In this paper, we investigate whether foreign currency accounts help overcome credit constraints in developing countries. We analyze a novel bank-level data set from Nepal, where a steady inflow of remittances has contributed to foreign currency deposits on commercial bank balance sheets. In...

Die EZB hat ein neues Bilanzziel. Um eine Billion Euro möchte sie ihre Bilanz ausweiten - auf den Stand vom März 2012 - um Deflationsgefahren vorzubeugen. Dies wirft jedoch neue Fragen auf: Wie bilanziert eigentlich die EZB? Welchen Zielen dient diese Bilanz? Und wie informativ ist die...

We study China's illicit capital flow and document a change in its pattern. Specifically, we observe that China's capital flight, especially the one measured by trade misinvoicing, exhibits a weakened response in the post-2007 period to the covered interest disparity, which is a theoretical...

During Europe's sovereign-debt crisis, interest rate spreads have been highly correlated with the share of multilateral loans that were considered senior to private markets. As both variables are potentially endogenous, we follow two different approaches to analyze the direction of causality....