Excessive credit growth is often considered to be an indicator of future problems in the financial sector. This paper 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 buffer”, a...

We evaluate proposals for an independent fiscal authority put forward as a solution to excessive public spending. Our main conclusion is that shifting the responsibility to set broad measures of fiscal policy from the hands of the government to an independent fiscal council is not necessarily...

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...

Excessive credit growth is often considered to be an indicator of future problems in the financial sector. This paper 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 buffer”, a...

This article discusses the role of foreign exchange interventions in the inflation-targeting regime, focusing on the Czech experience since 1998. We find some evidence that the interventions had a statistically significant, but short lived and economically not very important, impact on the...

The paper discusses the inflows of foreign direct investment into the CEE countries and focuses on analysis of productivity spillovers. An overview of the relevance of foreign firms in the CEE economies is presented. Using firm-level data on manufacturing industries for the period...

This article examines procyclicality of the financial system. The introduction describes the natural and regulatory sources of procyclicality, focusing on the potential procyclical effect of the current Basel II regulatory framework for banks. It also mentions the regulatory tools for mitigating...

This article summarises the CNB’s updated banking sector stress-testing methodology and presents the results of a verification of that methodology. The verification, conducted at the end of 2009, is based on a comparison of the actual values of key banking sector variables – in...