Soll ich jetzt riestern? Die Beratungspraxis der Verbraucherzentrale NRW zeigt, dass Verbraucher diese Frage oft nicht beantworten können. Ratsuchende empfinden die Regeln der Riester-Rente als zu kompliziert und die Produkte als intransparent und zu teuer. Die Verbraucherzentrale...

On May 11-12, 2011, SUERF, the Belgian Financial Forum, the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) jointly organised the 29th SUERF Colloquium New paradigms in money and finance? The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the...

Starting in June 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped up its monetary accommodation in order to counter a too prolonged period of low inflation in the euro area. This article offers a narrative of the monetary policy measures taken up to December 2016 and a review of the effects of...

Quantitative investment strategies are often selected from a broad class of candidate models estimated and tested on historical data. Standard statistical technique to prevent model overfitting such as out-sample back-testing turns out to be unreliable in the situation when selection is based on...

The OTC derivatives markets all over the world have shown tremendous growth in recent years. In the wake of the present financial crisis, which is believed to have been exacerbated by OTC derivatives, increasing attention is being paid to analysing the regulatory environment of these markets. In...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, it has been widely expected that the implementation of the European Single Market would lead to a rapid convergence of Europe’s financial systems. In the present paper we will show that at least in the period prior to the introduction of the common currency...

Initiated by the seminal work of Diamond/Dybvig (1983) and Diamond (1984), advances in the theory of financial intermediation have sharpened our understanding of the theoretical foundations of banks as special financial institutions. What makes them unique is the combination of accepting...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the alledged transformation of the financial systems in the three major European economies, France, Germany and the UK. Based on a unified data set developed on the basis of national accounts statistics, and employing a new and consistent method of...

In der wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Literatur wird das ökonomische Potenzial von Immobilienverzehrprodukten vielseitig diskutiert. Obwohl diesen Produkten aus wohlfahrts-theoretischen Gesichtspunkten eine hohe Bedeutung beigemessen wird, zeigt die empirische Evidenz, dass die Nachfrage weit...

Using BoC-GEM-Fin, a large-scale DSGE model with real, nominal and financial frictions featuring a banking sector, we explore the macroeconomic implications of various types of countercyclical bank capital regulations. Results suggest that countercyclical capital requirements have a significant...