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...

We provide a critical review of the literature on early warning indicators of economics crises and propose methods to overcome several pitfalls of the previous contributions. We use a quarterly panel of 40 EU and OECD countries for the period 1970–2010. As the response variable, we construct a...

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...

We assess whether the voting records of central bank boards are informative about future monetary policy. First, we specify a theoretical model of central bank board decision-making and simulate the voting outcomes. Three different versions of model are estimated with simulated data: 1)...