In this paper, the influence of information costs on the integration of Northern European financial markets between ca. 1350 and 1560 is explored. The approach is based on splitting information costs into their constitutive components and on measuring one of these, i.e. the costs of transmitting...

Information ows across international financial markets typically occur within hours, making volatility spillover appear contemporaneous in daily data. Such simultaneous transmission of variances is featured by the stochastic volatility model developed in this paper, in contrast to usually...

This paper analyses mutual causalities between crude oil price and euro / US dollar exchange rate. Instead of focusing on long-run macroeconomic linkages like the bulk of therelevant literature, the present approach takes a financial markets perspective using daily data. The fast-running...

A large body of literature explains the inferior position of unskilled workersby imposing a structural shift in the labor force skill composition. This papertakes a different approach by emphasizing the connection between cyclicalvariations in skilled and unskilled labor markets. Using a...

Standard models of equilibrium unemployment assume exogenous labour market institutions and flexible wage determination. This paper models wage rigidity and collective bargaining endogenously, when workers differ by observable skill and may adopt either individualised or collective wage...

A small strand of recent literature is occupied with identifying simultaneity in multipleequation systems through autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity. Since thisapproach assumes that the structural innovations are uncorrelated, any contemporaneousconnection of the endogenous variables...

This paper seeks to disentangle the sources of correlations between high-, mid- and lowcap stock indexes from the German prime standard. In principle, such comovement can arise from direct spillover between the variables or due to common factors. By standard means, these different components are...

The subject of this paper tackles questions of macroeconomic integration of the South-East Asian countries South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. Economically, the analysis is based on notions of stochastic long-run convergence and business cycle synchrony in the GDPs. According tests for...

This paper examines the questions of whether and how feudal rulers were able tocredibly commit to preserving monetary stability, and of which consequences theirdecisions had for the efficiency of financial markets. The study reveals that princes were usually only able to commit to issuing a...

Eastern Germanys recovery from the unification shock has beencharacterized by deep structural change with apparent repercussions for the West as well and an integration process involving both capital deepening (extensive and intensive investment) and labor thinning (net out-migration). I propose...