This essay tries to put Simmel’s Theory of Money into the context of current discussions in economics concerning money. The essay has three parts. Part I looks at the contribution of Georg Simmel in its context, and offers remarks about the changing structure of economics as a discipline...

Studies on central bank reaction functions find that central banks only caring about inflation stability, like the ECB, seem to follow a standard Taylor rule in the sense that the interest rate reacts significantly to variations in the output gap. We explain this result by claiming that the...

This paper investigates exceptional phases of stock market cycles. Defined in Pagan and Sossounov (2003) as unusual, they are detected as outliers in the historical distribution. Moreover, this study completes the growing literature on stock market bulls and bears in several aspects. First,it...

Cochrane (2007) points out that the Taylor rule parameters in New-Keynesian models are not identified, and thus trying to estimate them through single-equation regressions is pointless. This paper shows in contrast that this observation holds only for economies that do not display inflation...

This study aims at unifying the empirical research on the financial part of the monetary transmission process in the Eurozone between 1993 and 2002. After endogenously determining structural breaks, we select an optimal pass-through model for a series of national retail interest rates for each...

This study investigates the transmission of monetary policy onto retail bank interest rates inthe eight Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) that joined the European Union in2004. Focussing on the period from 1993 to 2003, we employ a unifying empirical passthrough model that allows...

This study investigates the current state of euro zone banking market integration by applying convergence and cointegration measures to mortgage and short-term corporate loan markets. These two measures of integration often lead to contradicting conclusions and are therefore comparatively...

Georg Simmel (1858-1918) veröffentlichte 1899 und 1907 seine ''Philosophie des Geldes''. Die Rezeption in der amerikanischen Literatur aber aber auch in den Beitrag von Dietz betohnt den Ökonomisch-Geldtheoretischen Aspekt dieses Beitrages und sucht ihn in der österreichischen Tradition der...

This paper follows up on recent studies of the Eurozone interest rate pass-through. Using a generalized empirical approach that allows for a variety of different specifications of the pass-through, including asymmetric adjustment, the role of interest rate expectations, proxied by EURIBOR...

Shrinkage estimators of the covariance matrix are known to improve the stability over time of the Global Minimum Variance Portfolio (GMVP), as they are less error-prone. However, the improvement over the empirical covariance matrix is not optimal for small values of n, the estimation sample...