Here the author empirically estimates if the different monetary and exchange rate frameworks observed in the Accession Countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics do yield different outcomes in terms of level and variance of a set of nominal and real variables. The author follows and...

This paper examines the ending of moderate rates of inflation in three transition economies, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland at the end of 1998. We argue that the institutions for the conduct of monetary policy in these countries were relatively weak and that monetary policy was...

Many of the EU accession countries have announced that they will not only try to enter the EU as quickly as possible but also to adopt the euro at an early date. This is justified by the effort to avoid the danger of financial instability in the period prior to euro-introduction. However, by...

The papers in the present SUERF Study is a selection of the papers presented at a SUERF Workshop and Special OeNB East Jour Fixe held at Oesterreichische Nationalbank in Vienna on 23 January 2009. In his opening remarks (chapter 2), Ewald Nowotny, Governor of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank...

A model is presented where the question of bank regulation is developed under a principal-agent scenario in a regime where the regulator has limited resources and banks may have an incentive to act ultra virus the regulatory standards.If banks are subject to random audit, then compliance is...

We propose a new strength measure of the global financial cycle by estimating a regimeswitching factor model on cross-border equity flows for 61 countries. We then assess how the strength of the global financial cycle affects monetary policy independence, which is defined as the response of...

The recent EU enlargements into Central and Eastern Europe and increased labor mobility within the Union provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the labor market effects of emigration. Outmigration has contributed to higher wages for stayers, as well as to lower unemployment in the source...

The process of the East-West integration has come to a point that enlargement appears inevitable. But are these countries really ready to join the EU in tfirms of competitive perfirmance? Firstly, we construct a virtual best practice production frontier for firms active in a European Union...

This paper first shows that the forecast error incurred when assuming that future inflation will be equal to the inflation target announced by the central bank is typically at least as small and often smaller than forecast errors of model-based and published inflation forecasts. It then shows...

The paper studies the inflation rate associated with optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a number of standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with nominal price rigidities. While the focus is on Calvo-style nominal price contracts with a range of indexation rules for constrained...