On September 3-4, 2009 SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economicsorganized the Colloquium "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium.

There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutions are fundamental for a country's prosperity. The paper focuses on political events in Italy over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 has helped insulate Italy's financial...

We develop a novel financial market model in which the stock markets of two countries are linked via and with the foreign exchange market. To be precise, there are domestic and foreign speculators in each of the two stock markets which rely either on linear technical or linear fundamental...

Using a vector error correction model I test whether shocks in the funding liquidity conditions in the U.S. and Europe separately explain deviations from the covered interest parity (CIP) between the U.S. Dollar and the Mexican Peso. I find that: (1) Apparent deviations from the CIP seem to be...

Arbitrage ensures that covered interest parity holds. The condition is central to price foreign exchange forwards and interbank lending rates, and reflects the efficient functioning of markets. Normally, deviations from arbitrage, if any, last seconds and reach a few basis points. After the...

Focusing on five major emerging markets (EM), I investigate the interactions between credit default swap (CDS) premiums, foreign exchange (FX) parities, local currency government bond (LCB) spreads, and national stock market indices over the period 4/2/2007 to 8/27/2009. Empirical analysis...

The deepening of the recent crisis was driven by the simultaneous devaluation of stock wealth, housing wealth and commodity wealth. The potential for this devaluation process had been “built up” during the boom of stock prices, house prices and commodity prices between 2003 and 2007. Hence,...

The Asia-Pacific region's currency markets are generally efficient within-country when tested using the Johansen (1991, 1995) cointegration technique whereas market efficiency fails to hold when tested using Fama's (1984) conventional regression. Using the Pilbeam and Olmo (2011) model, we...

Using a sample of monetary policy announcements in Thailand over the period 2003–2011, I show that a monetary policy surprise tends to affect the return and volatility of the Thai baht. In the full sample, a 1% unexpected increase in the policy rate leads to an about 1.8% depreciation of the...

This paper studies the impact of credit rating agency (CRA) announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA downgrade...