Thema Finanzmärkte

Griechenland würde mit neuen Eigenkapitalregelungen für EU-Staatsanleihen Probleme bekommen: Acht Fragen an Dorothea Schäfer

The Protestant Fiscal Ethic: Religious Confession and Euro Skepticism in Germany

During the European sovereign debt crisis, most countries that ran into fiscal trouble had Catholic majorities, whereas countries with Protestant majorities were able to avoid fiscal problems. Survey data show that, within Germany, views on theeuro differ between Protestants and Non-Protestants, too. Among Protestants, concerns about the euro have, compared to Non-Protestants, increased during the ...

Stricter Capital Requirements for Investing in EU Government Bonds as a Means of Creating a More Stable Financial System

In the wake of the European debt crisis, it has become clear that government bonds may actually be a risky form of investment. The Basel Committee and the Bundesbank have therefore opened an intense debate as to whether banks investing in EU government bonds should be subject to regulatory capital requirements in the future. Currently, banks do not need equity capital when investing in sovereign bonds. ...

New Capital Requirements for EU Government Bonds Would Lead to Problems for Greece: Eight Questions to Dorothea Schäfer

Determinants of Chinese Direct Investments in the European Union

This paper analyses the determinants of Chinese direct investment (DI) in the European Union (EU). Evidence is based on panel Poisson models drawing on two investment monitors for individual projects. We distinguish between the numbers of greenfield investments (GIs) and mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The findings indicate that market size and trade relationships with China are the primary factors ...

How Has the Global Financial Crisis Affected Syndicated Loan Terms in Emerging Markets? Evidence from China

This paper examines the impact of the recent global financial crisis on the cost of debt capital (syndicated loans) in a leading emerging market, namely China, using difference-in-differences and GARCH approaches. Before the crisis China adopted banking reforms allowing entry of foreign banks and more domestic participation in the syndicated loan market. As a result, during the crisis the volume of ...

Euro Area Government Bonds: Integration and Fragmentation during the Sovereign Debt Crisis

The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting the heteroskedasticity of intraday changes in bond yields for identification. The paper finds that euro ...

Solidarpakt und kein Ende? Deutsche Einheit: historische Chance und große Herausforderung

Spillovers between Food and Energy Prices and Structural Breaks

This paper estimates a bivariate VAR-GARCH(1,1) model to examine linkages between food and energy prices. The adopted framework is suitable to analyse both mean and volatility spillovers, and also allows for possible parameter shifts resulting from four recent events, namely: 1) the 2006 food crisis, 2) the Brent oil bubble, 3) the introduction of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) policy, and 4) the ...

The Cyclicality of Automatic and Discretionary Fiscal Policy: What Can Real-Time Data Tell Us?

This paper develops a new methodology for estimating both the automatic and discretionary components of fiscal policy in one reaction function using the differences between real-time and ex post data. Discretionary policy should respond to information available to the policy maker at the time (real-time data), whereas automatic fiscal policy should respond to the true state of the economy at the time ...