This paper develops new time series measures of inflation uncertainty in the United States in the postwar period that account for the prospect of changing inflation regimes. The measures are constructed from estimates of a Markov switching model for inflation. Importantly, we show that rational...

This article uses modern asset pricing theory to examine the behavior of short-term nominal interest rates over the past twenty-five years. The analysis investigates whether variation in the stochastic behavior of consumption growth and inflation can explain movements in the rate of interest....

We assess the extent and speed of exchange rate pass-through in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). We do this in the framework of vector autoregressive regressions, utilising impulse functions and variance decompositions with monthly data that starts in 1999 in order...

We examine the efforts of transition economies to deal with financial fragility and resolve banking cries We characterize the birthing process of banking in transition and the three essential features of banking crises in transition economies: (i) bad loans and the relationship to state owned...

The first decade of transition witnessed rapid and tumultuous financial sector development. Although, few transition economies have reached the point where institutions and markets fulfill all the functions of market based financial intermediation, progress has been much more rapid than had been...

Using data from 1996 to 2000, we investigate the effects of ownership, especially by a strategic foreign owner, on bank efficiency for eleven transition countries in an unbalanced panel consisting of 225 banks and 856 observations. Applying stochastic frontier estimation procedures, we compute...

Modern banking institutions were virtually non-existent in the planned economies of central Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the early transition period, banking sectors began to develop during several years of macroeconomic decline and turbulence accompanied by repeated bank crises....

To investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries, we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Income and balance sheet characteristics are compared across four bank ownership...