This paper argues that natural resource abundance creates opportunities for rent-seeking behavior and is an important factor in determining a country’s level of corruption. In a simple growth model, we illustrate the interrelationships between natural resources, corruption, and economic...

SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum, the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability (IMFS) took the opportunity of the first anniversary of this new institution to organise a joint conference in Berlin on 8-9 November 2011. The purpose of this event was...

It is commonly found in empirical studies that nominal interest rates contain a unit root, implying that these variables have a permanent memory. One of the characteristics of a nonstationary time series is that it has no tendency to return to its mean values, meaning that the series is trending...

Using information contained in forward interest rates, this paper attempts to assess the probability that European Monetary Union (EMU) occurs and that a particular country participates. It is shown that since the Madrid "summit" the public has become increasingly optimistic about the...

This paper reassesses the long-run relation between nominal interest rates and inflation using German data. It shows that the empirical rejection of the strict Fisher effect in previous studies, i.e., the finding of interest rates not fully adjusting to changes in inflation, can be attributed to...

One prominent characteristic of independent central bank is the legal limitation of the central bank's lending to the government. Although a priori we expect a strong link between the legal restriction on central bank credit to the government and seigniorage, the empirical cross-country evidence...

The EMS crisis of 1992-1993, which resulted in the widening of the exchange rate bands, may have had some impact on the long-run structure of the system consisting of daily 1-month-Eurorates on German Mark, US-Dollar and French Franc. First, we find that both the US Eurorate and the...

This paper attempts to analyze the impact of German unification on the position that Germany holds within the European Monetary System (EMS), i.\ e.\ on the asymmetry in the EMS. Applying kernel estimation and bootstrap methods we can corroborate the result of previous studies that Germany's...