Can developing countries enhance credibility with international markets by adopting a hard currency peg? In this paper we review the hypothesis that adherence to the gold standard facilitated the access of peripheral countries to European capital markets in the first era of financial...

This note looks ata the correlation of short-term business cycles in the euro area and the Eu accession countries. This issue is assessed with the help of vector autoregressive models. There are clear differences in the degree of correlation between acces-sion countries. For Hungary and...

Proper monetary accounting rules are: (1) Central Banks should conform to the practice of the US Federal Reserve to distinguish its Balance Sheet from its Statement of Conditions. (2) Fiat money should not appear as a liability in a Balance Sheet. (3) The Central Bank should not record more...

This paper studies the Gold Standard in Portugal. It was the first country in Europe to join Great Britain in 1854. The principle of free gold convertibility was abandoned in 1891. For the purposes of a macroeconomic study, we also extended the analysis up to 1913. Our study points out the...

The paper deals with the application of Minimum Weighted Residual Methods (MWR) in intertemporal optimizing models of endogenous economic growth. In the 1st part of the paper the basics of the MWR method are described. Attention is mainly concentrated on one special class of MWR methods: the...

Wavelet analysis, although used extensively in disciplines such as signal processing, engineering, medical sciences, physics and astronomy, has not yet fully entered the economics discipline. In this discussion paper, wavelet analysis is introduced in an intuitive manner, and the existing...

In this paper we consider the problem of sequential detecting change points in economic time series. We compare the performances of three well known procedures, Shiryayev-Roberts, CUSUM and EWMA, in the problem of early detection of the US business cycle turning points using leading indicators...

The paper investigates the relationship between relative price movements and changes in the aggregate price level using monthly data on Finland’s Consumer Price Index and its components from the period covering the past eight and a half years. This was a period of very low inflation. The rate...

Lucas (2004) asserts that 'Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion, the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution...The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current...

Monetary models of the business cycle often neglect the importance of investment and the capital stock in the monetary transmission mechanism. Most of the recent literature assumes either investment adjustment costs or ignores capital altogether. This paper re-takes the argument put forward by...