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...

The paper provides an overview of the hedge fund industry, mainly from a financial stability and European angle. It is primarily based on an extensive analysis of information from the TASS database. On the positive side of the financial stability assessment, hedge funds have a role as providers...

The number of participants in the private pension funds, as well as the volume of their contribution, differs significant in each development region. It goes without saying that the territorial distribution of the indicators related to pension funds are influenced, on the one hand, by the offer...

Do asset prices affect real activity? This question has taken on a new importance in recent years, as asset values first surged at the end of 1990s and, thereafter, dramatically retreated. This report reviews the available theoretical and empirical evidence regarding asset price and wealth...

In this paper, we present a set of specific measures to quantify the state and evolution of financial integration in the euro area. Five key markets are considered, namely the money, corporate bond, government bond, credit and equity markets. Building upon the law of one price, we developed two...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different...

This paper documents that ECB announcements increase the stock market volatility in the euro area (EA) on the same day. I consider two volatility measures from January 1998 to May 2019. First, a realized volatility measure uses intraday data for 8 different stock market indices. Second, a range...

We trace the impact of the European Central Bank (ECB) asset purchase programme (APP) on the yield curve. Exploiting granular information on sectoral asset holdings and ECB asset purchases, we construct a novel measure of the "free-float of duration risk" borne by pricesensitive investors. We...

The purpose of this paper is to determine the factors that shape the liquidity levels of euro area sovereign bonds. The values of liquidity measure and explanatory variables were calculated from the limitorder book dataset for almost five hundred bonds from six largest euro area sovereign bond...