This document was commissioned by the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON). It is a quick critique, conducted over a four week period, of those sections of the European Commission’s Impact Assessment (hereafter “the IA”) on the revisions to the Capital...

The financial crisis that began in 2007 as a liquidity crisis for banks has transformed itself into a sovereign debt crisis that threatens the viability of the eurozone and the foundations of the European Union. In this study, we analyse some of the recent regulatory initiatives in response to...

This paper examine differences between risk-neutral and objective probability densities of future interest rates. The identification and quantification of these differences are important when risk-neutral densities (RNDs), such as option-implied RNDs, are used as indicators of actual beliefs of...

Two seemingly unconnected empirical results suggest an intriguing mechanism. First, economic integration helps harmonize prices internationally, with trade being the primary channel (Rogoff 1996, Goldberg and Knetter 1997). Second, monetary union may greatly increase the amount of trade among...

Strukturen der allgemeinen und beruflichen Bildung und der Erwachsenenbildung in Europa Wer die allgemeine Organisation der Bildungssysteme in Europa kennen lernen möchte, findet die entsprechende Basisinformation in den ca. 40-Seiten umfassenden Länderberichten. Diese Monografien werden...

This paper uses data on German government bond futures options to examine the behaviour of market expectations around monetary policy actions of the European Central Bank (ECB). In particular, this paper focuses on the asymmetries in bond market expectations, as measured by the skewness of...