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 articulates a logical foundation-drawn from disparate literatures-for understanding why safeguarding financial stability is an important economic policy objective. The paper also explains why private aspects of finance provide broader social economic benefits and have the...

This paper discusses the role of foreign exchange interventions in the inflation-targeting regime, focusing on the Czech experience since 1998. It proposes criteria for assessing whether the interventions are consistent with the inflation targeting. While the CNB's interventions in mid- 1998 and...

To provide a rigorous analysis of monetary policy in the face of financial instability, we extend the standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to include a financial system. Our simulations suggest that if financial instability affects output and inflation with a lag, and if the...

In this paper, we estimate the interest rate pass-through from money market to bank interest rates using various heterogeneous panel cointegration techniques to address bank heterogeneity. Based on our micro-level data from the Czech Republic, the results indicate that the nature of interest...

In this paper we investigate the determinants of the movements in the long-term Standard & Poors and CAMELS bank ratings in the Czech Republic during the period when the three biggest banks, representing approximately 60% of the Czech banking sector's total assets, were privatized (i.e., the...

With this work, we aim to enrich the knowledge about the monetary policy transmission mechanism in the Czech Republic with empirical evidence on the impact of monetary policy on bank lending. Using a panel of quarterly time series for Czech commercial banks for the period 1996-2001, we study the...

Market views on EMU enlargement are measured by a new indicator based on the short-term dynamics of forward spreads. Conceptually, this indicator stems from the notion of uncertainty averse agents and equilibrium indeterminacy. The method was applied on data from central European countries,...

The Maastricht inflation criterion, designed in the early 1990s to bring “high-inflation†EU countries into line with “low-inflation†countries prior to the introduction of the euro, poses challenges for both new EU member countries and the European Central Bank. While 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...