Bulgaria started the transition in the early 90’s with a sovereign default and debt restructuring. Later on, under a strict fiscal discipline, the country succeeded to reduce significantly its debt burden and is currently among the top EU performers in that respect. The current debt...

Exchange rate stability was defined as one of the prerequisites for monetary integration in Europe. In this paper, we analyze recent developments in the volatility of exchange rates of the Central European countries (the Visegrad Group) and a selected group of European Union countries (the...

The characteristics of the interest rate pass-through in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are studied making use of autoregressive distributed lags (ARDL) models. Significant differences are found across market interest rates and countries concerning long-run elasticities of market...

This paper uses data from a large survey of firms across 26 transition countries to examine the determinants of trust in the transition process. We first introduce a new measure of trust between firms: the level of prepayment demanded by suppliers from their customers in advance of delivery....

We demonstrate that bond yield compression is under way in the countries converging to the euro and that German yields are significant drivers of local currency yields. Based on the evidence from Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, we conclude that these new Member States of the European...

In this study, we seek to better understand the interest rate pass-through in five Central and Eastern European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, the CEE-5. Our pass-through estimates for several retail rates are generally lower than those reported in the...

This paper examines (real-time) equilibrium interest rates in the Czech Republic in 2001:1- 2005:12 estimating various specifications of simple Taylor-type monetary policy rules. First, we estimate it using GMM. Second, we apply structural time-varying coefficient model with endogenous...

When the first phase of the crisis focused primarily on the interbank market volatility, the second phase spread on the instability of public finance. Although the overall stance of public finances of the new members is better than the old member countries, the differences within the new group...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

This paper investigates the impact of international shocks – interest rate, commodity price and industrial production shocks – on key macroeconomic variables in ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries by using near-VAR models and monthly data from the early 1990s to 2009. In...