This volume was prepared by Simon Wiederhold during his stay at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and at the Duke University in Durham, U.S. It was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the School of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Jena in August 2011. The thesis...

This paper analyzes the factors underlying the weakness of the euro. For this purpose, the framework advocated by Clarida and Gali (1994) is used. Within this model, three structural shocks drive the dynamics of the endogenous variables: aggregate supply shocks, aggregate spending shocks, and...

If the technological revolution which has taken place over the past decades has lowered information costs and if information costs increase in distance, distance should – ceteris paribus – become less important in determining international bank lending. We are using a dataset on assets and...

A shortcoming of most empirical studies on aggregate exports is their exclusive focus on the demand side. Moreover, the effect of globalization is often neglected leading to implausibly high income elasticities. This paper models export demand and supply simultaneously and incorporates a new...

The paper investigates by means of cointegration analysis whether the recently observed low levels of private saving and the current account balance in the United States are worrisome in the sense that they cannot be sufficiently explained by determinants which performed well in the past. Stock...

A contingent claims valuation model which allows to highlight the implications of program trading in spot markets for the pricing of European-style foreign currency options and for the volatility strike structure implicit in these contracts is devoloped. The curvature of the volatility strike...