We document significant and robust empirical relationships in cross-country panel data between government size or social expenditure on the one hand, and trade and financial development indicators on the other. Across countries, deeper economic integration is associated with more intense...

The move to monetary union in Europe led to convergence of interest rates among the participating countries. This was associated with notable cross-country differences in the behaviour of key macroeconomic aggregates. Compared to the low interest rate countries, former high interest rate...

This article aims to open a debate on creating a macroprudential policy framework in the Czech Republic. It starts by describing how the CNB defines financial stability and what place macroprudential policy has within it. It then gives the sources of systemic risk and outlines the mechanisms...

This article analyses residential developments using a database of individual projects for the years 2006–2010. Changes in the supply structure towards smaller apartments in recent years were identified in this unique database. These changes were probably a reaction to higher demand for...

Excessive credit growth is often considered to be an indicator of future problems in the financial sector. This article examines the issue of how best to determine whether the observed level of private sector credit is excessive in the context of the “countercyclical capital bufferâ€, a...

This article sets out to contribute to the understanding of the dynamics of retail credit premiums (i.e. the difference between reference interest rates and rates on retail loans with comparable maturities) in the Czech economy. The text documents the history of the credit premium. A model that...

We examine the evolution of monetary policy rules in a group of inflation targeting countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom) applying moment-based estimator at time-varying parameter model with endogenous regressors. Using this novel flexible framework, our main...

This paper is aimed to address when and why do banking crises occur, and whether financial reforms in reaction to crises are generally beneficial. It is argued that banking crises properly defined consist either of panics or of waves of costly bank failures, and they do not necessarily coincide....

Since the beginning of market reforms in 1989, the countries of South-Eastern Europe (SEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have been trading significantly less with the world economy than those Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries which later joined the EU. To explain...