The paper analyses the factors leading to the fall of long-term interest rates in the Czech Republic – respectively, the long-term interest rate differential in the Czech Republic and the Eurozone – between 1998 and 2003. The selection of factors is determined by the Fisher equation, UIP,...

This paper examines features of the Czech stock market’s development from 1997 to 2003 and attempts to unveil the macroeconomic consequences of stock-price development. The analysis of the stock market’s behavior supports a cautionary stance on the hypothesis of the efficient-market theory,...

This paper discusses recent claims made by Caplan (2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2002, 2007) who argues that democracies produce bad policies as a result of voters' irrational beliefs. We start by outlining the motives which led Caplan to amend classic Public Choice in such a radical fashion. We...

The article characterizes current ideas on this issue and defines a global paradigm of a managerial system on the principle of living organisms. Using Kuhn's theory of science development, the article characterizes controversial attitudes to knowledge economy and defines a global paradigm for a...

Slovak Republic entered the ERM II in the end of 2005 whereby it came nearer to its strategic objective - joining the euro area. In this paper we try to answer two questions. Section 1 examines the features and risks of the EMU. Is EMU an optimum currency area and what is the OCA scorecard of...

In this paper the stability of an inflationary process is examined. A dynamic model of the inflation has been developed based on the quantity theory of money. Some theorists say that any rate of inflation other than zero is inherently instable. They say that as people become aware of the fact of...

The transformation of the world economy over the past two decades has been manifesting itself in various forms. On the one hand, there is an increasing interdependence of the world economy, which is a manifestation of the depth of the globalization process, mainly thanks to the expansion of...

The efficiency of macroeconomic policies depends on adequate business cycle approximation. Given that potential output and the output gap (the difference between actual and potential output) are not directly observable, their values need to be estimated using alternative statistical, structural,...

In this paper, we investigate the adequacy of scaling, a method frequently used in estimation of standard deviation of stock returns. Scaling is based on the assumption that standard deviation is proportional to the square root of the length of the time interval of the sample (for example daily,...

Functional Signal plus Noise (FSN) time series models are introduced for the econometric analysis of the dynamics of a large cross-section of prices in which contemporaneous observations are functionally related. A semiparametric FSN model is developed in which a smooth, cubic spline signal...