Discussions of the economic costs and benefits of EMU usually take as their basis the optimum currency area (OCA) approach. This approach starts from the premise that when an external shock hits the economy, it is easier to adjust the exchange rate than domestic prices or wages. Most economists...

This paper examines the interactions between money, interest rates, goods and commodity prices at a global level. Aggregated data for major OECD countries are therefore analysed in a cointegrated VAR framework. Our empirical results for the period ranging from the 1970s to 2008 support the view...

[eng] Exchange Rate Uncertainty and Unemployment in the Accession Countries : A Case for Euroization by Ansgar Belke and Ralph Setzer . The traditional “ optimum currency area ” approach posits that little is lost in the transition to a very hard peg to a currency union if exchange rate...

The impact of global banking on financial stability and the connected post-crisis challenges have been under-researched before the crisis. We interpret ‘global banking’ as ‘global central banking’, focus on the role of international monetary policies and global liquidity for financial...

The purpose of this contribution is to illustrate the interaction between oil prices and the global savings equilibrium which can invert the usual IS type relationship between growth and interest rates. Higher growth is usually associated with higher interest rates. But higher growth leads to...

This paper examines the importance of the economic sentiments of some macroeconomic key variables in Estonia, Slovenia and Latvia. We analyze the importance of domestic as well as foreign sentiments with respect to these economies against the background of their accession to the European...

We investigate the linkage between business cycle convergence and financial portfolio choice for a panel of 18 EU countries. We construct an index of similarity of financial portfolios which we then put into context with the view that “the financial world” has an impact on business cycles...