Over the last few decades Robert Mundell's theory (1963) of Optimum Currency Areas (OCA) has attracted significant attention between researchers and policy makers especially after the formation of the European Monetary Union and the debate over whether the eurozone countries actually consist an...

The issue of whether or not money affects real economic activity (money neutrality) has attracted significant empirical attention over the last five decades. If money is neutral even in the short-run, then monetary policy is ineffective and its role limited. If money matters, it will be able to...

Graph Theory and network analysis have received great attention lately in the process of analyzing complex economic systems. Here we propose the use of the Minimum Dominating Set concept in order to identify a representing set of nodes which can describe the collective behavior of an entire...

In this paper we attempt to provide empirical evidence on the issue of business cycle synchronization within Europe. The issue of business cycle convergence is important and very topical as it is a prerequisite for the implementation of an effective and successful monetary policy within a...

We examine the co-movement patterns of European business cycles during the period 1986-2011, with an obvious focal point the year 1999 that marked the introduction of the common currency, the euro. The empirical analysis is performed within the context of Graph Theory where we apply a rolling...

The magnitude of the recent financial crisis, which started from the U.S. and expanded in Europe, change the perspective on banking supervision. The recent consensus is that to preserve a healthy and stable banking network, the monitoring of all financial institutions should be under a single...

In this paper we investigate the efficiency of a support vector machine (SVM)-based forecasting model for the next-day directional change of electricity prices. We first adjust the best autoregressive SVM model and then we enhance it with various related variables. The system is tested on the...

Comprehensive and thorough supervision of all banking institutions under a Central Bank’s regulatory control has become necessary as recent banking crises show. Promptly identifying bank distress and contagion issues is of great importance to the regulators. This paper proposes a methodology...

In this paper, we investigate the forecasting ability of the yield curve in terms of the U.S. real GDP cycle. More specifically, within a Machine Learning framework, we use data from a variety of short (treasury bills) and long term interest rates (bonds) for the period from 1976:Q3 to 2011:Q4...