A method for jointly designing a transmitter pulse-shaping filter and a receiver pulse-shaping filter having respective filter coefficients includes defining one or more performance-related variables based on at least some of the filter coefficients of the transmitter and receiver pulse-shaping filters. One or more constraints applicable to one or more of the filter coefficients and variables are set. A cost function defined over the variables is evaluated. Optimized filter coefficient values of the transmitter and receiver pulse-shaping filters are jointly calculated by applying an optimization process to the cost function while meeting the one or more constraints.