The discussion about country-specific influence on the interest rate decisions of the European Central Bank does not cease. To investigate the possibility of regional influence on the determination of the policy rate, we estimate Taylor-type reaction functions for the period from 1999 to 2005...

In summer 2011, elevated sovereign risk in Eurozone peripheral countries increased the solvency risk of Eurozone banks, precipitating a run on their short-term debt. We assess the effectiveness of different European Central Bank (ECB) interventions that followed – lender of last resort vs....

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person's actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

The main characteristic of the implementation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) is the transition from various national currencies to the Euro, the common European currency. A final fixing of the individual bilateral exchange rates of all European countries involved in the Monetary Union...

This paper investigates why financial market experts misperceive the interest rate policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). Assuming a Taylor-rule-type reaction function of the ECB, we use qualitative survey data on expectations about the future interest rate, inflation, and output to discover...

The communication policy of the European Central Bank attracts a lot of attention from financial markets. This paper analyses the informational content of the monthly introductory statements of the ECB president explaining interest rate decisions with regard to inflation expectations of...

In this analysis, the informational content of central bank rhetoric is assessed based on the experience with the ECB since 1999. Among the ECB’s communication channels we focus on the monthly press conferences. Based on a counting of certain signal words we construct a wording indicator...