This paper examines the price discovery processes before and during the 2007-09 subprime and financial crisis, as well as the subsequent European sovereign crisis, for the stock, bond, and U.S. dollar/euro FX markets in the U.S. and Germany in a high-frequency setting. Based on five-second...

In distilling a vast literature spanning the rational — irrational divide, this paper offers reflections on why asset bubbles continue to threaten economic stability despite financial markets becoming more informationally-efficient, more complete, and more heavily influenced by sophisticated...

This paper addresses the following questions. Is there evidence of financial contagion in the Eurozone? To what extent a country's vulnerability to contagion depends on "fundamentals" as opposed the government's "credibility"? We look at the empirical evidence on European sovereigns CDS spreads...

Heavy tails and volatility clusters are both stylized facts of financial returns that destabilize markets. The former are extreme events by definition and the latter can accelerate adverse market developments. This work disentangles the two sources and examines which one does the greater damage...

The goal of this paper is to recognize the dynamics of financial integration across the European stock markets over the last two decades. We investigate two groups of markets: (1) three developed European markets in the U.K., France, and Germany; and (2) three emerging Central and Eastern...

There is a general acceptance of the fact that a significant direct relationship between financial markets and macroeconomic variables exists, especially by considering the assertion that developed financial markets correspond to high GDP levels. This paper provides an investigation of the...

Europe’s financial landscape has substantial institutional variety. This reflects different societal responses to (or preferences with regard to) trade-offs. For monetary policy, it implies a challenging environment, particularly in times of financial crises. Using a non-linear VAR-model we...

The prospective normalisation of monetary policies in the main OECD areas will be challenging given that current policy rates are likely to be significantly below neutral levels and that central bank balance sheets will be above the pre-crisis levels by a wide margin. Monetary policy...

This paper introduces a new methodology to date systemic financial stress events in a transparent, objective and reproducible way. The financial cycle is captured by a monthly country-specific financial stress index. Based on a Markov-switching model, high financial stress regimes are...