A flurry of recent articles has argued on the basis of constructed European widemonetary aggregates that the demand for EURO's will be more stable than thecurrent demand for national currencies. In policy circles this seeminglymoderating effect of monetary integration figures as an additional...

The paper characterizes first and second order tail behavior ofconvolutions of i.i.d. heavy tailed random variables with supporton the real line. The result is applied to the problem of riskdiversification in portfolio analysis and to the estimation of theparameter in a MA(1) model.