Money and International Finance

Overview

Our research and teaching focus on international money and financial markets, central banks and monetary policy decisions, financial market regulation, financial market crises and the analysis of exchange rate regimes and currency areas. In particular, empirical analysis of macroeconomic expectations of households, central bank communication and household finance plays an important role in teaching and research.

Teaching

Topics include, for example, the functioning of international money and financial markets, central banks and monetary policy decisions, financial market regulation, financial market crises and the analysis of exchange rate regimes and currency areas.

The relevance of this orientation is underlined by the fact that the interdependencies of macroeconomic and financial aspects have steadily increased in the course of the global integration of product and financial markets. One consequence of this is a higher susceptibility to financial market crises and contagion effects. These aspects give rise to new economic policy challenges, for example for monetary policy and the regulation of banks and financial markets.

Students learn to analyze these problems at the intersection of monetary macroeconomics between finance and macroeconomics using theoretical and empirical methods. The derivation of economic policy conclusions is a core point of the courses.

Research

• Monetary macroeconomics
• Behavioral macroeconomics
• Survey experiments
• Formation of macroeconomic expectations
• Central bank communication

The research focus of the Institute of Money and International Finance is on empirical analyses of the formation of macroeconomic expectations in households, central bank communication and household finance. These include, for example, the relationship between inflation and interest rate expectations and household consumption or savings decisions, or the effect of central bank communication on household inflation expectations. Furthermore, we examine the role of banking regulation in a monetary union, the investment and savings decisions of households in emerging markets, and the role of communication in unconventional monetary policy instruments. Research results have been published in the journals Review of Economics and Statistics, European Economic Review, Macroeconomic Dynamics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, and European Journal of Political Economy.