Banknote Demand in the European Union: Different Seasonal Patterns

A model based on evolving splines is proposed to address seasonal patterns in daily cash demand observed in banknotes issued by the national central banks of Spain and Germany. Statistical indexes are applied to measure and compare weekly, monthly and yearly seasonal variations in these two series. Changes in these seasonal patterns are identified. The main finding is that seasonal variations are less relevant in the German series. By contrast, in the Spanish case, the magnitude of seasonal variations is increasing. Therefore, high levels of dissimilarity are observed between both cases for each one of the three seasonal patterns. However, the lower values of complementarity indexes suggest that the shapes of these seasonal patterns are not so different.