We measure consumers’ use of cash by harmonizing payment diary surveys from seven countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States (conducted 2009 through 2012). Our paper finds important cross-country differences, for example, the level of cash...

The instability of standard money demand functions has undermined the role of monetary aggregates for monetary policy analysis in the euro area. This paper uses country-specific monetary aggregates to shed more light on the economics behind the instability of euro area money demand. Our results...

This paper empirically investigates whether individuals withhold a certain amount of cash for precautionary reasons at the point-of-sale (POS) in order to be able to cover future transactions that might have to be paid for in cash. Such behaviour is costly for consumers because it imposes...

As part of the Eurosystem’s annual banknote production planning, the national central banks draw up forecasts estimating the volumes of national-issued banknotes in circulation for the three years ahead. As at the end of 2021, more than 80 per cent of euro banknotes in circulation (cumulated...

The VAR/SVAR (Vector Autoregressive and Structural Vector Autoregressive) models are the cornerstone of the contemporaneous empirical macroeconomic research, in particular for being able to measure the impact of fiscal policy shocks. They may be employed as atheoretical models, as well as a mean...

The European Central Bank (ECB) has adopted a mixture of conventional and unconventional tools in order to achieve its mandate of price stability in the current low-inflation, low-interest-rate scenario. This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a taxonomy of the ECB’s...

This paper investigates how the ordering of variables affects properties of the time-varying covariance matrix in the Cholesky multivariate stochastic volatility model.It establishes that systematically different dynamic restrictions are imposed whenthe ratio of volatilities is time-varying....

We provide a simulation smoother to a exible state-space model with lagged states and lagged dependent variables. Qian (2014) has introduced this state-space model and proposes a fast Kalman filter with time-varying state dimension in the presence of missing observations in the data. In this...

The severity function approach (abbreviated SFA) is a method of selecting adverse scenarios from a multivariate density. It requires the scenario user (e.g. an agency that runs banking sector stress tests) to specify a "severity function", which maps candidate scenarios into a scalar severity...

We analyze Granger causality testing in a mixed-frequency VAR, where the difference in sampling frequencies of the variables is large. Given a realistic sample size, the number of high-frequency observations per low-frequency period leads to parameter proliferation problems in case we attempt to...