"The study was commissioned by DG XIII of the European Commission in support of the reporting on Directive 95/47 on the use of standards for the transmission of television signals. Its objective is to provide market data and to monitor the development of digital TV in the 15 countries of the...

This paper compares securities settlement gross and netting architectures. It studies settlement risk arising from exogenous operational delays and compares settlement failures between the two architectures as functions of the length of the settlement interval under different market conditions....

We compute average mark-ups as a measure of market power throughout time and study their interaction with fiscal policy and macroeconomic variables in a VAR framework. From impulse-response functions the results, with annual data for a set of 14 OECD countries covering the period 1970-2007, show...

We investigate the wage-setting behavior of French companies using an ad-hoc survey conducted specifically for this study. Our main results are the following. i) Wages are changed infrequently. The mean duration of wage contracts is one year. Wage changesoccur at regular intervals during the...

We use a novel disaggregate sectoral euro area data set with a regional breakdown to investigate price changes and suggest a new method to extract factors from over-lapping data blocks. This allows us to separately estimate aggregate, sectoral, country-specific and regional components of price...

The paper presents an analysis of the trade-offs of participants of different type between payment delay and liquidity requirement on the basis of synthetically generated data. The generation of the synthetic transaction data set for a simple RTGS system is described and calibrated using real...

We model the impact of bank mergers on loan competition, banks' reserve holdings and aggregate liquidity. Banks compete in a differentiated loan market, hold reserves against liquidity shocks, and refinance in the interbank market. A merger creates an internal money market that induces financial...

This paper addresses a very European issue, the consolidation of securities trading and settlement infrastructures. In a two-country model, we analyze welfare implications of different types of consolidation. We find that horizontal integration of settlement systems is better than vertical...