This paper studies the transaction cost savings of moving from a multi-currency exchange system to a single currency one. The analysis concentrates exclusively on the transaction and precautionary demand for money and abstracts from any other motives to hold currency. A continuous-time,...

Much has been written about why economists failed to predict the latest financial and real crisis. Reading the recent literature, it seems that the crisis was so obvious that economists must have been blind when looking at data not to see it coming. In this paper, we analyze whether such claims...

We extend the Markov-switching dynamic factor model to account for some of the specifi cities of the day-to-day monitoring of economic developments from macroeconomic indicators, such as ragged edges and mixed frequencies. We examine the theoretical benefi ts of this extension and corroborate...