This paper is aimed to address when and why do banking crises occur, and whether financial reforms in reaction to crises are generally beneficial. It is argued that banking crises properly defined consist either of panics or of waves of costly bank failures, and they do not necessarily coincide....

This paper discusses comovement between inflation and output in the euro area. The strength of the comovement may not be apparent at first sight, but is clear at business cycle frequencies. We propose a new estimation approach to trimmed mean inflation, determining jointly the upper and lower...

This paper examines the impact of monetary conditions on the risk-taking behaviour of banks in the Czech Republic by analysing the comprehensive credit register of the Czech National Bank. Our duration analysis indicates that expansionary monetary conditions promote risk-taking among banks. At...

At the dawn of the 21st century, property and equity ownership are spread more broadly across the population than they once were. One consequence of this is that asset price booms and crashes now have a direct impact on general welfare. The fact that bubbles distort nearly all economic decisions...

The use of estimated policy rules has been on the rise over the past few decades as central banks have increasingly relied on them as policy benchmarks. While simple, conventionally estimated rules have proven insightful, their value is generally seen to depend, among other things, on the...

We examine whether and how selected central banks responded to episodes of financial stress over the last three decades. We employ a new monetary-policy rule estimation methodology which allows for time-varying response coefficients and corrects for endogeneity. This flexible framework applied...

This paper contributes to a better understanding of how inflation targets are set. First, we gather evidence on how inflation targets are set from official central bank and government publications and from a questionnaire of our own design. Second, we estimate the determinants of the level of...

This paper reviews price-level targeting in the light of current theoretical knowledge and past practical experience. We discuss progress in the economic debate on this issue, starting with the traditional arguments discussed in the early 1990s, moving to Svensson’s seminal paper in the...

Consensus Economics forecasts for euro-area GDP growth, consumer and producer price inflation and the USD/EUR exchange rate are used by the Czech National Bank to make assumptions about future external economic developments. This paper compares the accuracy of the aforementioned Consensus...

Do private analysts coordinate their forecasts via central bank forecasts? In this paper, we examine private and central bank forecasts for the Czech Republic. The evolution of the standard deviation of private forecasts as well as the distance from the central bank’s forecasts are used...