Is inflation persistence in the new EU Member States (NMS) comparable to that in the euro area countries? We argue that persistence may not be as different between the two country groups as one might expect. We confirm that one should work carefully with the usual estimation methods when...

Original versions of the included papers were written by an extensive team of authors for the meeting of the Bank Board with experts. The aim of this meeting was to assess the ten-year experience with inflation targeting and to contribute to its improvements in the forthcoming years. Following...

This study examines the use of the exchange rate by the Czech National Bank as a monetary policy instrument at the zero lower bound on interest rates. It provides a review of the economic literature on unconventional monetary policy instruments and particularly on the possibility of using the...

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)...

This paper examines the usefulness of Google Trends data for forecasting mortgage lending in the Czech Republic. While the official monthly statistics on mortgage lending come with a publication lag of one month, the data on how often people search for mortgage-related terms on the internet are...