In Finland the private sector borrowing started to rise rapidly in conjunction with the liberalization of capital movements and deregulation of the domestic financial sector during the second half of the 1980s. The financial deregulation coincided with and amplified an economic boom marked by...

The Finnish Consumer Barometer was introduced in autumn 1987. Data were first collected twice a year and from August 1991 until September 1995 quarterly. After Finland joined the European Union in 1995, the survey was adopted as one member of the Harmonised Consumer Survey of the European...

This paper deals with Finnish bankruptcies. It shows that bankruptcies are strongly related to the business cycle and that they are perhaps even more strongly related to indebtedness, real interest rates and asset prices. The importance of these financial factors probably increased when the...

Given the emphasis on price stability in monetary policy, the concern caused by recent rapid increases in housing prices are understandable. It is suspected that such rises may provide early indication of mounting inflationary pressure. The purpose of this paper is to formulate and estimate an...

This paper deals with optimal payment systems. The issue boils down to how large are the costs of different payment media, which can be interpreted as a question of the efficiency of the means of payment. However, there are other qualifications related to the choice of payment media. Here, at...

This collection of seven papers deals with three different areas of econometric applications: consumption, asset prices, and forecasting. The papers apply techniques related to the analysis of unit roots and cointegration methods. <p> The first paper deals with consumption theories and formulates...</p>

This paper analyzes the use of cash in the Euro area. It attempts to give at least a partial answer to the question of whether cash is predominantly used in the shadow economy and whether, consequently, the behavior of cash balances is useful in monitoring changes in the shadow economy. The...