Recently, the Bank of Japan outlined a “two perspectives” approach to the conduct of monetary policy that focuses on risks to price stability over different time horizons. Interpreting this as pertaining to different frequency bands, we use band spectrum regression to study the determination...

Announced in the autumn of 1998, the monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank (ECB) quickly became controversial, arguably because the ECB provided neither an explicit representation of the inflation process nor an explanation for why it necessitated the adoption of a two-pillar...

This paper uses a Markov regime-switching model to assess the vulnerability of a series of Central and Eastern European countries (i.e. Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic) and two CIS countries (i.e., Russia and Ukraine) during the period 1993–2004. For the new EU member states in...

While monetary targeting has become increasingly rare, many central banks attach weight to money growth in setting interest rates. This raises the issue of how money can be combined with other variables, in particular the output gap, when analysing inflation. The Swiss National Bank emphasises...

Several authors have recently interpreted the ECB's two-pillar framework as separate approaches to forecast and analyse inflation at different time horizons or frequency bands. The ECB has publicly supported this understanding of the framework. This paper presents further evidence on the...

This paper evaluates the robustness of trade liberalization in Central Europe and the role of the Europe Agreements (EAs) in institutionalizing this process. It finds a) that institutions are still fragile in Central Europe; b) that the EAs are not a great force for liberalism (on either side);...

This paper addresses several questions of concern to economies excluded from the world's two major trading blocs <196> the European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA). First, is there evidence from the past that suggests the direct and indirect effects of regional...</196>