The Argentine banking industry has experienced increasing consolidation during the last decade. On the one hand, it can be argued that this has resulted from cost economies, perhaps associated with technical change. But on the other, it can also be argued that increased concentration in this...

Currency substitution appears to be an important issue affecting the design of monetary policy, especially in transition economies. Therefore, this paper strives to analyze the particular relevance of a currency substitution phenomenon for the Czech Republic is case. We initially discuss various...

There are few real-world economic transactions that do not involve an element of trust, yet in textbook economics trust is not prominently discussed. In that world, perfectly informed and computationally endowed agents reach optimal, enforceable decisions in continuously harmonising exchanges....

The paper presents a version of the P* model of inflation dynamics for a small open economy and applies it to the Czech economy time series from the period of 1991-1999. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents a brief discussion of the monetary policy indicators issue. Section 3...

This paper reviews and categorises the literature on micro-systemic risks and on optimal policies designed to mitigate these risks. Micro-systemic risks are risks to the financial system that occur when the interaction of a bank with other banks or with financial markets, can propagate an...

Currency boards have often been at the heart of monetary reforms proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) : they have been instrumental either as a short term crisis management strategy that successfully restores financial order for many countries seeking stabilization in the aftermath...

While herding has long been suspected to play a role in financial market booms and busts, theoretical analyses have struggled to identify conclusive causes for the effect. Recent theoretical work shows that informational herding is possible in a market with efficient asset prices if information...

The paper considers the empirical dimension of financial integration among stock markets in four new European Union member states (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in comparison with the euro area. The main objective is to test for the existence and determine the degree of the...

The purpose of this paper is to explain how the choice between distributing cash through dividends or shares repurchases affects the firm?s ability to raise capital in the financial market. I assume investors have quadratic preferences over wealth but different prior beliefs about the likelihood...

Technical analysis involves the prediction of future exchange rate (or other assetprice) movements from an inductive analysis of past movements. A reading of the large literature on this topic allows us to establish a set of stylised facts, including the facts that technical analysis is an...