The Pass Through From Market Interest Rates to Retail Bank Rates in Germany

In this paper, we address the pass-through from money and capital market interest rates to bank retail rates in Germany for the period January 2003 to December 2006 using a panel of almost 200 banks. In addition, banks' heterogeneous price setting behaviour is analysed by investigating the kind of attributes of a credit institution in terms of its balance sheet characteristics and its institutional arrangements that alter its adjustment process. The main conclusions are the incompleteness of pass-through in both the short and the long run and the existence of considerable heterogeneity across retail products and banks. Both maturity and loan size matter in determining the degree of pass-through as well as whether products are targeted at firms or households. Banks' balance sheet structure has a sizeable impact on the speed and magnitude of their adjustment. Large, illiquid, less diversified credit institutes and those heavily involved in interbank lending change their rates more rapidly and incorporate more of a change in market conditions in their rates in the long run. Even the different banking groups that are peculiar to Germany adjust their rates not in a uniform manner, but savings banks and credit cooperatives adjust their rates more slowly than the remaining banks.

Management of knee osteoarthritis: current status and future trends

Osteoarthritis (OA) affects a large number of the population, and its incidence is showing a growing trend with the increasing life span. OA is the most prevalent joint condition worldwide, and currently, there is no functional cure for it. This review seeks to briefly overview the management of knee OA concerning standardized pharmaceutical and clinical approaches, as well as the new biotechnological horizons of OA treatment. The potential of biomaterials and state of the art of advanced therapeutic approaches, such as cell and gene therapy focused primarily on cartilage regeneration are the main subjects of this review. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2016;9999: 1-23. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.This work was supported from the EU Marie Curie ITN “MultiScaleHuman”: Multi-scale Biological Modalities for Physiological Human Articulation (2011–2015), contract MRTN-CT-2011-289897) and the NORTE-07-0202- FEDER-023189/ARTICULATE—Desenvolvimento de novos produtos e terapias regenerativas para o tratamento de patologias articulares/ADI. J.M. Oliveira also thanks the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for the funds provided to under the program Investigador FCT 2012 (IF/00423/2012).This work was supported from the EU Marie Curie ITN “MultiScaleHuman”: Multi-scale Biological Modalities for Physiological Human Articulation (2011–2015), contract MRTN-CT-2011-289897) and the NORTE-07-0202FEDER-023189/ARTICULATE—Desenvolvimento de novos produtos e terapias regenerativas para o tratamento de patologias articulares/ADI. J.M. Oliveira also thanks the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for the funds provided to under the program Investigador FCT 2012 (IF/00423/2012)