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...

In this paper we analyze the convergence of interest rates in the European MonetarySystem (EMS) in a framework of changing persistence. This allows us to estimate the exact date of full convergence from the data. A change in persistence means that a time series switches from stationarity to...

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....