We assess whether the voting records of central bank boards are informative about future monetary policy using data on five inflation targeting countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom). We find that in all countries the voting records, namely the difference...

We construct and explore a new quarterly dataset covering crisis episodes in 40 developed countries over 1970–2010. First, we examine stylized facts of banking, debt, and currency crises. Banking turmoil was most frequent in developed economies. Using panel vector autoregression, we confirm...

We search for early warning indicators that could indicate important risks in developed economies. We therefore examine which indicators are most useful in explaining costly macroeconomic developments following the occurrence of economic crises in EU and OECD countries between 1970 and 2010. To...

We identify a set of “rules of thumb” that characterise economic, financial and structural conditions preceding the onset of banking and currency crises in 36 advanced economies over 1970–2010. We use the Classification and Regression Tree methodology (CART) and its Random Forest (RF)...

Computed fundamental real exchange rates in four new EU members point to difficulties in jointly entering the ERM II soon after the EU entry. Three currencies out of the four were overvalued prior to EU entry. Computations suggest that it is unlikely that the Czech, Hungarian and Polish...

What is the optimal rate of disinflation to be targeted during transition? This question has attracted more attention under the inflation-targeting regime than under other monetary strategies, because explicit inflation targets are used to anchor expectations. These targets signal what rate of...

The text is focused on problematic of modelling of Czech household´s demand for financial assets in the period of voucher privatisation which were accompany with important finance innovation - installation a vouchers to the finance portfolio of Czech households. The concentration of text is on...

Are there indications of real exchange rate misalignment in the case of the five pre-accession countries? Will stable real exchange rates, required by two of the Maastricht criteria, be in line with economic fundamentals in the pre-EMU period? In order to address these questions, we employ the...

This paper argues that inflation targeting is a strategy that can be under certain conditions adopted by central banks in countries in transition even though their typical goal is to disinflate instead of stabilising low inflation. On the one hand, according to the Czech experience, inflation...

When currency turbulences hit the CZK in May 1997, the research presented in this paper had been nearly finished. It tried to contribute to the discussion of sustainability of external development of the Czech economy by comparing signals given by a set of indicators to signals implied by the...