Suchergebnisse

The internationalization of financial markets is one of the focal points in the discussion about recent globalization trends. These discussions suggest that capital can move freely between countries. However, there is ample evidence that national borders do matter and that there are many implicit and explicit barriers to integration. Understanding the factors that unify and that separate financial markets and thus reconciling these two stylized facts is at the core of this book. While the main focus of the empirical work is on banking industry, results are yet informative also with regard to developments in other financial market segments. Also, the book uses European financial integration as a case study for general integration trends

This paper provides new evidence on the foreign direct investment stocks of German firms. We use firm-level data for the years 1990-2000 to describe the regional and sectoral patterns of German FDI through gravity-type equations. We provide evidence on the patterns of FDI by sector, by size of the foreign affiliate, and by the number of affiliates per host country. While market size and geographic distance have a significant impact on FDI stocks, we also find differences in the determinants of FDI between sectors as well as between the size of foreign affiliates and the number of foreign affiliates.

One key focus of the on-going debate on the integration of international financial markets have been measures to lengthen the maturity of foreign debt, as short-term debt is typically considered to be highly volatile. The transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe are one group of countries for which policy lessons seem particularly urgent. Not only have these countries liberalized their capital accounts to a quite substantial degree already, membership in the European Union also implies that remaining controls to the free flow of capital will have to be abolished. This paper assesses the experience of the transition economies with liberalizing short-term capital flows, and it analyzes factors affecting the share of short-term capital.

Stylized facts suggest that output volatility in OECD countries has declined in recent years. However, the causes and the nature of this decline have so far been analyzed mainly for the United States. In this paper, we analyze whether structural breaks in the dynamics and the volatility of the real output process in Germany can be detected. We report evidence that output volatility has declined in Germany. Yet, this decline in output volatility is not as clear-cut as it is in the case of the United States. In consequence, it is difficult to answer the question whether the decline in output volatility in Germany reflects good economic and monetary policy or merely `good luck'.

The debate on the risks and benefits of the globalisation of international capital markets has focused on the volume and the volatility of the main capital flows ? foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio investment, and foreign bank lending. Financial transfers in the form of worker remittances have received less attention in this context. This paper provides an analysis on the magnitude of remittances, their volatility, and their relationship to other capital flows. Moreover, we provide empirical evidence on the determinants of remittances and private capital flows.

Information costs and regulatory barriers are the main distinguishing features of international financial markets as compared to national financial markets. This paper presents a simple model of the impact of these factors on banks' cross-border activities and provides empirical evidence. Our dataset allows us to capture both the times-series and the cross-section dimension of information costs and changes in regulations, in particular, for intra-EU asset holdings. While EU membership per se seems to have had a negative impact on cross-border banking activities, the adoption of the Single Market clearly had a positive impact. While regulations and information costs are important for all reporting countries, their relative importance differs between countries.