Since housing is the most important component of non-financial personal wealth in most countries and in European post-transition economies in particular, this study estimates the impact of changes in the housing wealth effect on personal consumption in the long-run and the short-run in light of...

The Czech National Bank (CNB) conducts a monthly survey to collect domestic and foreign analysts’ forecasts of several economic and financial variables. Among these are the 2-week repo rate (which is the monetary policy interest rate set by the CNB), the 1-year Prague interbank offer rate and...

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between fiscal decentralization and the size of government. Using a pooled mean group estimator, which has rarely been applied in this context, we analyze a set of 23 OECD countries over the period 1970–2008. In contrast to previous...

In this article we discuss the credit default swap (CDS) as an indicator for measuring sovereign credit risk and the relationship between the sovereign CDS market and government bond market. We analyze the links between the sovereign CDS and sovereign yield spread and try to determine which of...

We examine how written and oral central bank communications affect the level and volatility of interest rates. We use detailed daily data on the Czech central bank’s communication in 2007–2012. We find that financial markets respond to central bank communication. Short-term interest rates...

This paper describes the current stress-testing framework used at the Czech National Bank (CNB) to test the resilience of the banking sector. Macroeconomic scenarios and satellite models linking macroeconomic developments with key risk parameters and assumptions for generating dynamic stock-flow...

We present empirical distributions of the average, marginal and participation tax rates on earnings across the population of Czech taxpayers under the current tax-and-benefit system. We quantify significant differences between the taxation of employees and the self-employed: the average tax...

This paper contributes to the literature on international stock market comovements and contagion. The novelty of our approach lies in the application of wavelet tools to high-frequency financial market data, which allows us to understand the relationship between stock markets in the...

We analyze the long-term memory properties of hourly prices of electricity in the Czech Republic between 2009 and 2012. Various statistical properties of these prices are studied, and as the dynamics of electricity prices is dominated by cycles—in particular intraday and daily—we opt for...

One of the findings of the recent literature is that the 2008 financial crisis caused a reduction in international diversification benefits. To fully understand the potential of diversification, we build an empirical model which combines generalized autoregressive score copula functions with...