The enlargement of the European monetary union to include the accession countries (ACs) will not lead to higher average inflation in the enlarged euro area, but only to inflation redistribution across countries if continuity of the monetary policy framework is preserved. In the short term,...

Recent empirical studies challenge the traditional theory of optimum currency areas by arguing that a monetary union enhances trade and business cycle co-movements among its member countries sufficiently as to obviate the need for national monetary policy. This paper examines the empirical...

What is the optimal institutional structure for an independent central bank? The paper shows when it will be optimal for a country to have a central bank to be organized according to federal, purely national or a combination of both aspects. The analysis is then extended to a supranational...

This paper examines the welfare implications of a country joining a currency union as opposed to operating in a flexible exchange rate regime. At the country level, the suboptimal response to domestic and foreign shocks and the inability of setting inflation at the desired level may be offset by...

What is the optimal institutional structure for an independent central bank? The paper shows when it will be optimal for a country to have a central bank to be organized according to federal, purely national or a combination of both aspects. The analysis is then extended to a supranational...

Credit default swaps ("CDSs") were widely blamed as a primary cause of the recent financial crisis; CDSs fomented panic as the price of credit protection spiked and contributed to the Federal Reserve's decision to bail out American International Group. To reduce the likelihood that credit...

Economists in the public are accused of propagating highly professional, but unrealistic theories that mislead market agents and policy makers to place too much confidence in rational behaviour and market equilibrium. The paper analyses to what extent the US banking crisis and the euro crisis...

The quantum money (q-money) as a possible convenient, socially innovative, technologically attractive and user/issuer friendly value storing/not storing unit, mean of payment and exchange medium in the advanced financial systems of the developed states is a subject of our scientific interest in...

Central banks with an exchange rate objective set the interest rate in response to what they call "pressure." Instead, existing interest rate rules rely on the exchange rate minus its target. To stay closer to actual policy, we introduce a rule that uses exchange market pressure (EMP), the...

If there is exchange market pressure (EMP), monetary authorities can use the interest rate and official interventions to offset this depreciation tendency, or they can let the exchange rate change. We introduce a new approach to derive how these three variables should be combined to measure EMP....