Turmoil in euro area once more forces EU authorities to rethink future of further monetary integration. One of the most commonly used criterions for successful monetary in contemporary research is business cycle synchronization (BCS). Though BCS has been vastly described at country level, not as...

This paper analyses the time series behavior of the components of the real exchange rates between the founding member states of the EMU before and after the start of the EMU. Various panel and univariate country-specific tests show that the levels of these components are typically random walks....

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...