We investigate the dynamics of stochastic convergence of the original Euro Area countries for inflation rates, nominal interest rates, and real interest rates. We test for convergence relative to Germany, taken as the benchmark for core EU standards, using monthly data over the period January...

The Great Moderation, the significant decline in the variability of economic activity, provides a most remarkable feature of the macroeconomic landscape in the last twenty years. A number of papers document the beginning of the Great Moderation in the US and the UK. In this paper, we use the...

This paper reports a two-stage analysis of inflation persistence using monthly data from 11 IT countries and, for comparison, the US, a non IT country with a history of credible monetary policy. First, we estimate inflation persistence in a rolling-window fractional integration setting using the...

A widely spread belief among economists is that monetary policy has relatively short-lived effects on real variables such as unemployment. Previous studies indicate that monetary policy affects the output gap only at business cycle frequencies, but the effects on unemployment may well be more...

A widely spread belief among economists is that monetary policy has relatively short-lived effects on real variables such as unemployment. Previous studies indicate that monetary policy affects the output gap only at business cycle frequencies, but the effects on unemployment may well be more...