Inflation-targeting central banks have a respectable track record at explaining their policy actions and corresponding inflation outturns. Using a simple forward-looking policy rule and an assessment of inflation reports, we provide a new methodology for the empirical evaluation of consistency...

The Maastricht inflation criterion, designed in the early 1990s to bring "high-inflation" EU countries in line with "low-inflation" countries prior to the introduction of the euro, poses challenges for both new EU member countries and the European Central Bank. While the criterion has positively...

The paper presents a methodology for measuring the clarity of central bank communication, illustrating it with the case of the European Central Bank (ECB) in 1999-2007. The analysis identifies the ECB's written communication as clear about 95 percent of instances, which is comparable to, or even...

The Czech National Bank has a respectable track record in terms of its policy actions and the corresponding inflation outturns. Using a simple forward-looking policy rule, we find that its main communication tools-inflation targets, inflation forecasts, verbal assessments of the inflation risks...

This paper analyses a hypothesis, whether an asymmetric monetary policy could contribute to the undershooting of the inflation targets of the Czech National Bank in the years 1998-2007. To this goal, a non-linear Taylor Rule has been estimated. The results indicate that – upon the...

This article addresses the role of the inflation target with respect to inflation expectations developments using the vector error correction (VECM) and block restriction vector autoregression (VAR) models, based on the monthly data of 1999-2007. The econometric analysis performed has not...