The politically and legally complicated character of the EU Eastern Enlargement heavily influenced the conflict between the legal and economic rationality underlying the construction of the EMR-II. This makes the ERM-II vulnerable to currency crises and creates conditions for a widespread...

This paper looks at the dynamic price relationship between spreads in the corporate bond market and credit default swaps (CDS). It picks up where Blanco et al (2005) leave off but is focused on European credit markets. The study is based on companies listed in the iTraxx CDS index and thus on...

In credit risk modelling, the correlation of unobservable asset returns is a crucial component for the measurement of portfolio risk. In this paper, we estimate asset correlations from monthly time series of Moody's KMV asset values for around 2,000 European firms from 1996 to 2004. We compare...

We analyze collateralized loan obligation (CLO) transactions by European banks (1997 - 2004), trying to identify firm-specific and macroeconomic factors influencing an institution's securitization decision. CLO issuance seems to be an appropriate funding tool for large banks with high risk and...

This paper uses a proportional hazard model to study foreign direct investment by Japanese manufacturers in Europe between 1970 and 1994. We divide each firm?s investment total into a sequence of individual investment decisions and analyze how firm-specific characteristics affect each decision....

Financial markets in Europe become more and more integrated. The persisting fragmentation of financial supervision, however, constitutes a lasting obstacle to integration. The aim of this paper is to assess these costs of supervisory fragmentation. We find clear evidence for the existence of...

We exploit the cross?country and time variation in the demographics and education structure of 11 European countries to study how cohort size has affected real earnings in Europe. When we pool the data of all countries, we find that cohort size has a negative and statistically significant effect...

This paper investigates empirically the interrelationships between the daily stock market returns of the Nikkei 225, DAX and Dow Jones Industrial index. Contrary to former work this paper uses the succession of the markets in time to form different econometric models. In this way it is possible...

Auch dreißig Jahre nach dem Artikel von Modigliani und Miller und zahllosen weiteren Veröffentlichungen ist die Frage zur Finanzierungsstruktur von Unternehmen weitgehend ungelöst. Dabei ist insbesondere in der empirischen Evidenz dieses Forschungsgebietes ein Defizit festzustellen. Unter...

This paper evaluates the appropriateness of the standard methodologies and the quality of the data frequently used to analyse labour market dynamics in Europe. Our results indicate that, due to recall error and heterogeneous survey design, the retrospective approach tends to result in a...