The minimum wage has been a controversial issue since 1912, when Massachusetts (USA) passed the first state minimum wage act. The Czech Republic has had a statutory national minimum wage since 1990 (Act no. 65/1965 Coll., or the Labour Code; the specific minimum wage levels and the conditions for...

Hedging strategies represent basic instrument used toward eliminating financial risk. Increasing volatility of financial markets and their globalization also lead to higher financial risks. These aspects are especially important for transitional and small open economies. The basic goal of the...

The paper considers modern frameworks of public debt management from a credibility perspective. It focuses on the institutional and operational arrangements of effective debt management. In particular, the author seeks to shed light upon the contemporary problems of Czech debt manager compared...

Over the past few years, the Value at Risk indicator (VaR) has evolved, without doubt, into the most frequently used comprehensive tool for assessment of potential losses caused by adverse changes in market rates. However, the common models used for VaR assessment are based only on mid prices...

The author of this paper criticizes the broad, cash-flow based concepts of seignorage that were introduced and emphasized by the economic literature of the 1990s (i.e., fiscal seignorage, total seignorage, etc.), which the author argues are ill justified and confusing. On the other hand, the two...

Autoøi se ve svém èlánku pokoušejí odpovìdìt na otázku, zda proces eliminace neperspektivních firem napomohl oživení èeské ekonomiky na konci 90. let. Pro rok 1999 prokázali vysokou míru podobnosti provozních výsledkù (produktivita práce, pøidaná hodnota na zamìstnance,...

The purpose of this paper is to study a three-equation dynamic model. The first equation describes the commodity market. The second one demonstrates the dynamics of the money market and the third equation is the interest rate parity. The aim is to investigate the conditions of more complex...

This paper surveys recent literature on real business cycles in open economies. It focuses on the empirical regularities of international macroeconomic fluctuations and provides a short discussion of the differences between the stylized facts of business cycles in advanced and in developing...

The authors contend that the theory of optimum currency areas (OCA) provides a useful framework for discussions of monetary integration. The authors summarize the historical development of monetary integration and discuss possible future development. Theoretical issues, such as those raised in...

There are three possible price movements in a market economy: stability, inflation, and deflation. Inflation and deflation are defined in this article as changes in the purchasing power of money caused by the money creation. Inflation and deflation have many asymmetric, and even some symmetric,...