The present European large-value payment systems are on the verge of notable changes.Since they comprise the backbone or basic infrastructure of the whole economy, it is important that the changes are monitored and carried out in a very prudent manner. This paper attempts to analyse this change...

This book provides a comprehensive review of the prospects for financial markets in the face of rapid technological development and international integration. It offers a revolutionary perspective, exploring the challenges for regulators and demonstrating a network economics approach to explain...

I introduce Expectational Business Cycles where aggregate activity fluctuates due to learning, heterogeneous updating rules and random changes in the social norm predictor. Agents use one of two updating rules to learn the equilibrium values while heterogeneity is dictated via an evolutionary...

This document reports the currently used term structure estimation method at the Bank of Finland and discusses interpretation of the results it generates. We start by introducing two widely used term structure estimation methods: the Cubic Spline Function method and the Nelson-Siegel approach....

This paper deals with the fiscal behaviour of governments in the 1920s and 1930s. The intention is to see whether there were the same features in government behaviour as in the post-World War II era. In par-ticular, attention is paid to asymmetric fiscal policies, ie the question of whether...

Optimal currency area theory suggests that business cycle co-movement is a sufficient condition for monetary union, particularly if there are low levels of labour mobility between potential members of the monetary union. Previous studies of co-movement of business cycle variables found that...