Inflation persistence has been put forward as one of the potential reasons of divergence among euro area members. It has also been proposed that the new EU Member States (NMS) may struggle with even higher persistence due to convergence factors. We argue that persistence may not be as different...

We provide a critical review of the literature on early warning indicators of economics crises and propose methods to overcome several pitfalls of the previous contributions. We use a quarterly panel of 40 EU and OECD countries for the period 1970-2010. As the response variable, we construct a...

We examine the determinants of the dissent in central bank boards' voting records about monetary policy rates in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S. In contrast to previous studies, we consider about 25 different macroeconomic, financial, institutional, psychological or...

We assess whether the voting records of central bank boards are informative about future monetary policy. First, we specify a theoretical model of central bank board decision-making and simulate the voting outcomes. Three different versions of model are estimated with simulated data: 1)...

We construct and explore a new quarterly dataset covering crisis episodes in 40 developed countries over 1970-2010. First, we examine stylized facts of banking, debt, and currency crises. Using panel vector autoregression, we confirm that currency and debt crises are typically preceded by...