This paper investigates the circumstances under which it is beneficial to participate in a currency area. A two-country monetary model of trade with nominal rigidities encompasses the real and monetary arguments suggested by the optimum currency area literature: correlation of real shocks,...

This paper develops a two-country model to investigate the circumstances under which it is beneficial to participate in a currency area. It captures both the real and monetary arguments suggested by the optimum currency area literature in a simple monetary model of trade with nominal rigidities....

What can explain the persistent fluctuations observed in non-fixed exchange rates? We use a version of the Kareken-Wallace two-country overlapping generations model to explain this empirical phenomenon. The agents use an adaptive learning rule to forecast expected prices in both countries...