With hindsight the debate over whether Europe constitutes an optimal currency area overlooked the elephant in the room. Following Robert Mundell’s considerations, the expert debate in the 1990s focused on the question of whether Europe’s capital and labor markets were sufficiently integrated...

The article presents the main features of one category of innovative financial products – exchange traded commodities (ETCs) and results of the analysis of the European market for ETCs. ETCs are products listed and traded on the stock exchanges and they offer investors returns based on various...

Integrated capital markets facilitate risk sharing across countries. Lower home bias in financial investments is an indicator of risk sharing. We highlight that existing indicators of equity home bias in the literature suffer from incomplete coverage because they consider only listed equities....

This thesis was written by Nadjeschda Katharina Arnold while having been a research assistant at the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the University of Munich. It was completed in December 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in...