In the course of the EU enlargement process, the participation of accession countries in the European Monetary Union might lead to a significant redistribution of seigniorage wealth if current regulations prevail. In general, accession countries will be winners from this redistribution, for...

The paper analyses the empirical relationship between bank risk and sovereign credit risk in the euro area. Using structural VAR with daily financial markets data for 2003-13, the analysis confirms two-way causality between shocks to sovereign risk and bank risk, with the former being overall...

Real Wage Rigidities, Fiscal Policy, and the Stability of EMU in the Transition Phase. - EMU will start with eleven member countries as scheduled on January 1, 1999. The paper shows that the primacy of politics over economics in this decision could have serious consequences concerning the...

The study analyses the characteristics of professional exchange rate forecasts for the € /US-$ rate. The results indicate that the quality of forecasts produced by professional economists is rather poor and incompatible with the rational expectations hypothesis. This dismal result is according...

Die Berücksichtigung der zukünftigen Entwicklung des Wechselkurses ist sowohl für internationale Unternehmen als auch für international tätige Investoren unabdingbar. Allerdings ist die Erstellung von Wechsel- kursprognosen schwierig, da bis zum heutigen Zeitpunkt kein allgemein anerkanntes...

The paper derives a normative model for partial fiscal equalisation based on a number of axioms and makes special allowance for the existence of a specific fiscal need in the jurisdictions. A simple version of this idealised equalisation scheme relates net contributions to the equalisation funds...

The paper studies the link between the integration of European financial markets and corporate governance in Europe. The focus of the paper is on how integration affects the interplay of ownership structures, capital structures, and monitoring, all of which can be used to govern agency problems...

This paper attempts to answer the question whether the threat of systemic risk in banking exists only on a national or on a European level. Following De Nicolo and Kwast (2001), mean rolling-window correlations between bank stock returns are used as a measure for interdependencies among European...

This paper brings together the literature on determination of home bias in equity holdings and the portfolio balance model of exchange rates to consider whether the dollar might be affected by a change in transactions costs that alters international portfolio allocations. The empirical findings...

We analyze the effectiveness of the foreign exchange market interventions conducted by the European Central Bank (ECB) in the fall of 2000 to support the external stability of the euro. To this end, in a first step different channels through which interventions may influence exchange rate...