This paper tests for the existence of market power in banking, using data on demand deposit rates of households and corresponding market rates in five euro area countries. An implicit measure for market power is based on a partial adjustment model that also allows for an asymmetric response of...

There is a discrepancy between Europe and the United States on whether margin squeeze is a relevant question for competition law and policy. Beyond this question, it is unclear whether law and the Cartel Office can detect margin squeeze, assuming it is necessary to look into the matter. In...

Persistent shifts in equilibria are likely to arise in oligopolistic markets and may be detrimental to the measurement of conduct, related markups and intensity of competition. We develop a cointegrated VAR (vector autoregression) based approach to detect long-run changes in conduct when data...

The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...

Using unit labor cost (ULC) data from Euro area countries as well as US States and German Länder we investigate inflation convergence using different approaches, namely panel unit root tests, cointegration tests and error-correction models. All in all we cannot reject convergence of ULC growth...

The introduction of the Euro has been accompanied by the hope that intra-EMU trade would increase and that prices would converge due to increased elasticities of international substitution. This paper contributes to the literature on the Euro’s effects on international trade by analyzing price...

This paper explores the behavior of profits in the four largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain) and the euro area as a whole, while at the same time considering three main sectors (manufacturing, construction and services) in each economy over the period 1988–2010. The...

In this paper, the monetary policy independence of European nations in the years before European Monetary Union (EMU) is investigated using cointegration techniques. Daily data is used to assess pairwise relationships between individual EMU nations and ‘lead' nation Germany, to assess the...