In this paper we evaluate potential effects of the Basel II accord on preventing the transmission from currency crises to banking crises by analyzing the South Korean crisis of 1997. We show that regulatory capital reserves under Basel II would have been lower than those under Basel I, and that therefore Basel II would have had adverse effects on the development of the crisis. Furthermore we investigate whether the behavior of rating agencies has changed since the East Asian crisis. We find no evidence that rating agencies have started to take micro-mismatches into account. Thus, we have reservations concerning the effectiveness of Basel II.

Im vorliegenden Papier wird die Bedeutung der Besitzverflechtungen zwischen Aktiengesellschaften (bzw. Kapitalgesellschaften im Allgemeinen) für die gegenwärtige Finanzmarktkrise herausgearbeitet. Durch den wechselseitigen Besitz von Firmen untereinander ist eine Situation entstanden, in denen bestellte Manager sich lediglich kontrollieren. Durch entstehende Abhängigkeiten und die innerhalb der verhältnismäßig kleinen Gruppe von Topmanagern mögliche implizite Koordination konnten Vorstände über die Entlohnungs- und damit auch über die Anreizsysteme, denen sie ausgesetzt sind, wesentlich mitentscheiden. Dies hat, wie gezeigt wird, erheblich zur Entstehung von Anreizsystemen beigetragen, die sich im Kern an kurzfristigen Erfolgen orientieren. Da insbesondere in der Finanzintermediation kurz- und langfristige Gewinnoptimierung durch die starke Korrelation von Risiko und Gewinnmöglichkeiten einem starken Trade- off unterliegen, haben diese Anreizsysteme wiederum eine erhebliche Rolle in der verfehlten Risikopolitik der Banken gespielt, die ein wesentliche Ursache der Krise war.

Die Ansteckung durch die globale Finanzkrise war nur ein Auslöser für die schwere Krise in den europäischen Post-Transformations-Ländern. Ursache war die seit 2001 zunehmende finanzielle Instabilität der Länder in Zusammenhang mit der Übernahme ihres Banken- und Finanzsektors durch internationale Finanzinstitutionen. Allgemeine euphorische Renditeerwartungen bildeten den Auftakt für Vermögenspreisblasen und die steigende Verschuldung des privaten Sektors, die durch ausländische Kapitalzuflüsse genährt wurde. Die Studie argumentiert daher, dass simple Konzepte einer Beschränkung inländischer Nachfrage keinen Ausweg aus der Krise weisen. Vielmehr wird eine zweite Transformation notwendig, die ein Wachstumsmodell etabliert, das den Einfluss spekulativer Kapitalzuflüsse reduziert und weiterhin hohe Wachstumsraten ermöglicht.

This paper uses novel news ticker data to evaluate the effect of sovereign risk on economic and financial outcomes. The use of intraday news enables me to derive policy events and respective timestamps that potentially alter investors’ beliefs about a sovereign’s willingness to service its debt and thereby sovereign risk. Following the high frequency identification literature, in the tradition of Kuttner (2001) and Guerkaynak et al. (2005), associated variation in sovereign risk is then obtained by capturing bond price movements within narrowly defined time windows around the event time. I conduct the outlined identification for Italy since its large bond market and its frequent coverage in the news render it a suitable candidate country. Using the identified shocks in an instrumental variable local projection setting yields a strong instrument and robust results in line with theoretical predictions. I document a dampening effect of sovereign risk on output. Also, borrowing costs for the private sector increase and inflation rises in response to higher sovereign risk.

This paper investigates the propagation of technology news shocks within and across industrialised economies. We construct quarterly utilisation-adjusted total factor productivity (TFP) for thirteen OECD countries. Based on country-specific structural vector autoregressions (VARs), we document that (i) the identified technology news shocks induce a quite homogeneous response pattern of key macroeconomic variables in each country; and (ii) the identified technology news shock processes display a significant degree of correlation across several countries. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that the US are only one of many different sources of technological innovations diffusing across advanced economies. Technology news propagate through the endogenous reaction of monetary policy and via trade-related variables. That is, our results imply that financial markets and trade are key channels for the dissemination of technology.

In this paper, we investigate to what extent sovereign stress and banking stress have contributed to the increase in the level and in the heterogeneity of nonfinancial firms’ refinancing costs in the Euro area during the European debt crisis and how they did affect the monetary transmission mechanism. We identify the increasing effect of government bond yield spreads (sovereign stress) and the share of non-performing loans (banking stress) on firms’ financing costs using an instrumental-variable approach. Moreover, we estimate both sources of stress to have significantly impaired the monetary transmission mechanism during the European debt crisis.

The experience of Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) during the global financial crisis and in the resulting European debt crises has been largely different from that of other European countries. This paper looks at the specifics of the CEEC in recent history and focuses in particular on the appropriateness of the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure for this group of countries. In doing so, the macroeconomic situation in the CEEC is highlighted and macroeconomic problems faced by these countries are extracted. The findings are compared to the results of the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure of the European Commission. It is shown that while the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure correctly identifies some of the problems, it understates or overstates other problems. This is due to the specific construction of the broadened surveillance procedure, which largely disregarded the specifics of catching-up economies.

We investigate drivers of Euro area inflation dynamics using a panel of regional Phillips curves and identify long-run inflation expectations by exploiting the crosssectional dimension of the data. Our approach simultaneously allows for the inclusion of country-specific inflation and unemployment-gaps, as well as time-varying parameters. Our preferred panel specification outperforms various aggregate, uni- and multivariate unobserved component models in terms of forecast accuracy. We find that declining long-run trend inflation expectations and rising inflation persistence indicate an altered risk of inflation expectations de-anchoring. Lower trend inflation, and persistently negative unemployment-gaps, a slightly increasing Phillips curve slope and the downward pressure of low oil prices mainly explain the low inflation rate during the recent years.