One key focus of the on-going debate on the integration of international financial markets have been measures to lengthen the maturity of foreign debt. Short-term debt is typically considered to be volatile and thus a potential trigger of currency crises. In contrast to the vivid policy debate...

Using dynamic panel estimations, this paper identifies driving forces of venture capital activity for Western European countries. Driving forces might be the liquidity of stock markets, human capital endowment, and labour market rigidities. The paper shows that these factors do not affect...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the trade gains arising from the constitution ofa currency union for a set of economically large, developed nations who create a monetary union as a deliberate economic policy action: namely, for the members of the euro area. With a 1980-2001 sample, no...

This paper estimates the costs of EU restraints on trade in textiles and clothing. After explaining the methods used, we examine the impact of an opening up of EU trade in textiles and clothing, inter alia to those economies where the textile and clothing (T&C) industries command sizeable shares...

Economic policy interventions of a scale as effected in eastern Germany can be expected to have a significant impact on the economy, which may be in accordance with the objectives of the policy measures or manifest itself in distortions of several kinds. This paper analyzes the structural...

The Millennium Round of MTNs, which was stillborn in Seattle, was supposed to have initiated wide-sweeping changes to the world's trading system. This paper deals with the impact on the German economy of some changes that might have been forthcoming from proposed liberalization strategies. It...

The Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) is likely to give a further boost to trade and capital flows, yet empirical evidence on the possible magnitudes is still scarce. This paper uses four different datasets to estimate the determinants of international asset holdings and trade...

Trade in intermediate goods as one possible link between rising trade and foreign direct investment is examined. To explain growing intermediate goods trade, three hypotheses are brought forward: outsourcing, global sourcing and the increasing importance of MNE networks. These hypotheses are...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing controversy on the distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countries. To this end, we set up a small-scale macroeconomic model of a dual economy to capture the transmission mechanisms through which the deregulation of product and...

A review of the measures of the stock of human capital used in empirical growth research reveals that human capital is mostly poorly proxied. The simple use of the most common proxy, average years of schooling of the working-age population, misspecifies the relationship between education and the...