Diploma Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - General, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin, language: English, abstract: This paper empirically examines a subsection of the gold market that has evolved within the last 20 years. To date, academic literature has primarily focused on analytical and empirical analyses of the physical gold market and the gold price. This study will contribute to the existing gold market literature from a different perspective: the lending market. Therefore this thesis will initially investigate how the gold lending market functions in general. This will include an analytical overview of the main transaction types, the market participants and their intentions, the gold lease rate, and the impact of central bank lending policy. Secondly, it is unclear as to what the determinants of demand and supply are for the leasing market. Linking theoretical and empirical findings from the gold market and the gold price, this thesis seeks to set up a gold lending market equilibrium. With that, the gold lease rate is derived and empirically tested. The resulting determinants of the gold lease rate are developed with quarterly time-series data from 1990 to 2009.