This paper considers the relationship of the Nordic business cycle to the world business cycle using annual output data spanning 1870–1988. The paper studies the Nordic and a set of non-Nordic countries separately and finds evidence for both a Nordic and a world business cycle. Output...

The creation of EMU and the ECB has triggered a discussion of the future of EMU. Independent observers have pointed to a number of shortcomings or hazard areas' in the construction of EMU, such as the absence of a central lender of last resort function for EMU, the lack of a central authority...

In this study, the recent literature on the integration of fiscal and monetary policy is used to examine the suspensions and resumptions of currency convertibility in Sweden during the period 1668-1931. We demonstrate that urgent demands for financing of war expenditures forced the Swedish...

The causes and consequences of the financial crises in the Nordic countries in the early 1990s are examined and lessons from this episode are extracted. The focus is on the boom–bust episode in Finland, Norway and Sweden as these three economies went into a deep recession. The lessons from the...

In Swedish public debate, economists have been more influential than any other category of social scientists. We examine the views of five great Swedish economists on the role of the university economist in the public arena. What did they say about scholarly objectivity and value judgements,...

Rejoinder to the comments on: “It Can’t Happen, It’s a Bad Idea, It Won’t Last. U.S. Economists on the EMU and the Euro, 1989—2002.” In Jonung and Drea (2010) we surveyed the evolution of the views of U.S. economists on European monetary unification from the publication of the Delors...

On the whole, the euro has, thus far, gone much better than many U.S. economists had predicted. We survey how U.S. economists viewed European monetary unification from the publication of the Delors Report in 1989 to the introduction of euro notes and coins in January 2002. U.S. academic...

This study of approximately 170 publications shows (a) that US academic economists concentrated on the question "Is the EMU a good or bad thing?", usually adopting the paradigm of optimum currency areas as their main analytical vehicle, (b) that they displayed considerable scepticism towards the...