Structural changes play an essential role in the economic development of a country. They represent the evolution of economic dynamics within the macroeconomy. As we know, the economic sectors of a country do not affect the whole economy equally and their level of output generates economic...

Six years after enactment, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) remains the cornerstone of U.S. economic policy toward sub-Saharan Africa. Has AGOA fulfilled its promise to serve as a catalyst for African economic development? The author examines the legislative history that led to...

The appropriate design of monetary policy in integrated financial markets is one of the most challenging areas for central banks. One hot topic is whether the rise in liquidity in recent years has contributed to the formation of price bubbles in asset markets. If strong linkages exist, the...

I examine whether or not returns on stock markets are a leading indicator for real macroeconomic developments in Austria, Japan and the USA. Further I deal with the concept of stock market efficiency, the question whether or not information from real and financial sectors of the economy is...

Empirical evidence on the expectations hypothesis of the term structure is in-conclusive and its validity widely debated. Using a cointegrated VAR model of US treasury yields, this paper extends a common approach to test the theory. If, as we find, spreads between two yields are non-stationary,...

We disentangle different driving factors of sovereign bond market integration by studying yield co-movements of EMU countries, the UK, the US and 16 German Länder in the last 15 years. At a low frequency of weeks, bond market integration has increased gradually in the course of the last 15...

This paper compares four forms of inter-regional financial risk sharing: (i) segmentation, (ii) integration trough the secured interbank market, (iii) integration trough the unsecured interbank market, (iv) integration of retail markets. The secured interbank market is an optimal risk-sharing...

It is well known that information arrival has an impact on prices volatility, and trading volume in financial markets (see e.g., Goodhart and O?Hara 1997). Scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as monthly employment figures, consumer prices, or building permits, stand out from the steady...

This paper delineates the simultaneous impact of non-anticipated information on first and second moments of the intraday price process by including appropriate variables accounting for the news flow into both the mean and the variance function. This allows us to differentiate between the...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive...