This study assesses the degree of financial integration for a selected number of new EU member states between themselves and with the euro zone. Within the framework of a factor model for market returns, we measure integration as the amount of variance explained by the common factor relative to...

This paper shows how the problem of mean-downside risk portfolio allocation can be cast in terms of penalized least squares (PLS). The penalty is given by a power function of the returns below a certain threshold. We derive the asymptotic properties of the PLS estimator, allowing for possible...

This paper studies the determinants of interest rate spreads of euro area 10 year government bonds against the benchmark, the German bund, after the introduction of the euro. In particular, it pays attention to the question whether market discipline is advanced or obstructed by financial...

This paper investigates whether comovements between euro area equity returns at national and industry level have changed after the introduction of the euro. By adopting a regression quantile-based methodology, we find that after 1999 the degree of comovements among euro area national equity...

Engle and Manganelli (2004) propose CAViaR, a class of models suitable for estimating conditional quantiles in dynamic settings. Engle and Manganelli apply their approach to the estimation of Value at Risk, but this is only one of many possible applications. Here we extend CAViaR models to...

We study how financial market efficiency affects a measure of diversification of output across industrial sectors borrowed from the portfolio allocation literature. Using data on sector-level value added for a wide cross section of countries and for various levels of disaggregation, we construct...

We exploit the 2007-2009 financial crisis to analyze how risk relates to bank business models. Institutions with higher risk exposure had less capital, larger size, greater reliance on short-term market funding, and aggressive credit growth. Business models related to significantly reduced bank...

Policy impact studies often suffer from endogeneity problems. Consider the case of the ECB Securities Markets Programme: If Eurosystem interventions were triggered by sudden and strong price deteriorations, looking at daily price changes may bias downwards the correlation between yields and the...

This paper examines the degree of fragmentation in the Euro overnight unsecured money market during the period June 2008 – August 2013 using interbank loans constructed from payments data. After controlling for cross-country differences in bank risk, we document several episodes of significant...

This paper proposes methods for estimation and inference in multivariate, multi-quantile models. The theory can simultaneously accommodate models with multiple random variables, multiple confidence levels, and multiple lags of the associated quantiles. The proposed framework can be conveniently...