Over the past decade, most OECD countries have begun to reform fundamentally their agricultural policies. Some dispute has emerged over the extent to which policy-making at the international level has triggered these reforms. These disputes raise important theoretical questions about how we...

Globalisierungsprozesse erzeugen Problemlagen, die allein durch nationalstaatliche Intervention nicht mehr zu bewältigen sind. Pessimistische Szenarien schließen daraus auf ein generelles "Steuerungsversagen" des Nationalstaates mit der Folge einer wettbewerblichen Deregulierung von...

This paper analyzes the risk properties of typical asset-backed securities (ABS), like CDOs or MBS, relying on a model with both macroeconomic and idiosyncratic components. The examined properties include expected loss, loss given default, and macro factor dependencies. Using a two-dimensional...

Securitization is a financial innovation that experiences a boom-bust cycle, as many other innovations before. This paper analyzes possible reasons for the breakdown of primary and secondary securitization markets, and argues that misaligned incentives along the value chain are the primary cause...

We provide a simple and intuitive measure of interdependence of asset returns and/or volatilities. In particular, we formulate and examine precise and separate measures of return spillovers and volatility spillovers. Our framework facilitates study of both non-crisis and crisis episodes,...

We document significant and robust empirical relationships in cross-country panel data between government size or social expenditure on the one hand, and trade and financial development indicators on the other. Across countries, deeper economic integration is associated with more intense...

Recent evaluations of the fiscal stimulus packages recently enacted in the United States and Europe such as Cogan, Cwik, Taylor and Wieland (2009) and Cwik and Wieland (2009) suggest that the GDP effects will be modest due to crowding-out of private consumption and investment. Corsetti, Meier...

This paper analyzes liquidity in an order driven market. We only investigate the best limits in the limit order book, but also take into account the book behind these inside prices. When subsequent prices are close to the best ones and depth at them is substantial, larger orders can be executed...

We find and describe four futures markets where the bid-ask spread is bid down to the fixed price tick size practically all the time, and which match counterparties using a pro-rata rule. These four markets' offered depths at the quotes on average exceed mean market order size by two orders of...