This paper examines the determinants of private equity activity across Europe. We analyze a total of 43 explanatory variables, categorized into six groups: Economy; Finance and capital markets; Quality of institutions; Life quality; Economic freedom and Globalization. We assess their impact on...

Using newly collected discount rate data for six Swiss cities, we find no evidence of increasing integration during a 30-year period of lightly regulated free banking. We attribute this to two structural issues: banks had incentives to protect their local monopolies, and the inherent instability...

This paper investigates the capital market relations between Euroland and the USA from 1990 until 2006. Formally based on the uncovered interest rate parity (UIP), backward recursive estimations establish a long-run equilibrium between European and US government bond yields. Since the mid-1990s...

In this paper, the influence of information costs on the integration of Northern European financial markets between ca. 1350 and 1560 is explored. The approach is based on splitting information costs into their constitutive components and on measuring one of these, i.e. the costs of transmitting...

A good description of the dynamics of interest rates is crucial to price derivatives and to hedge corresponding risk. Interest rate modelling in an unstable macroeconomic context motivates one factor models with time varying parameters. In this paper, the local parameter approach is introduced...

Bayesian learning provides a core concept of information processing in financial markets. Typically it is assumed that market participants perfectly know the quality of released news. However, in practice, news' precision is rarely disclosed. Therefore, we extend standard Bayesian learning...