Although price stability has been achieved in the euro area, the first ten years of the euro have not brought the expected long-term output growth benefits. The Czech Republic – an economy that has achieved price stability without the euro – should then reframe the debate about euro area...

This paper uses a specific experiment — „voucher privatization“ in the former Czechoslovakia — to test the permanent income hypothesis of consumer behavior. Voucher privatization (the mass privatization of state-owned assets through publicly offered vouchers) led to an unexpected...

The aim of this paper is to compare inflation persistence between the New Member States (NMS) that joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007 and selected euro area members. If the levels of inflation persistence between the two groups are different, the NMS may encounter problems with...

Candidate countries for accession to the EU often view EU convergence criteria as difficult given that the period of faster growth that real convergence necessitates is usually associated with higher inflation. This paper argues that it is important to focus on the mechanism of real convergence...

The paper is the first part of a broader empirical study that considers the entry timing of accession economies into the eurozone and their exchange-rate regimes between the EU entry and prior to the eurozone entry. The presented empirical analysis is based on model simulations and on the...