This paper contributes to a better understanding of how inflation targets are set. First, we gather evidence on how inflation targets are set from official central bank and government publications and from a questionnaire of our own design. Second, we estimate the determinants of the level of...

The global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 renewed interest for the role of international reserves in preventing and mitigating currency crises. The findings usually support the view that higher (or excess) reserves provided insurance against currency instability, which is considered as a good...

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding on how inflation targets are set. For this reason, we first gather evidence from official central bank and government publications and from a questionnaire sent to central banks on how inflation targets are set; we then estimate the...

This paper discusses the role of foreign exchange interventions in the inflation-targeting regime, focusing on the Czech experience since 1998. It proposes criteria for assessing whether the interventions are consistent with the inflation targeting. While the CNB's interventions in mid- 1998 and...

Since the introduction of inflation targeting in the Czech Republic in 1998, supply-side factors have had a strong direct influence on CPI inflation on several occasions. This paper uses a small-scale dynamic rational expectations model based on an open-economy version of Fuhrer- Moore-type...

This paper asks to what extent the market prices in the future monetary policy decisions of the Czech National Bank (CNB), how this policy predictability has evolved over time, and whether the change in the central bank's forecasting methodology in mid-2002 had any impact. Using a sample up to...

This paper analyses the performance of the inflation forecast-based (IFB) monetary policy rules in the quarterly projection model of the Czech National Bank. The paper begins by reviewing the model and its parametrization, including the variance-covariance matrix of disturbances employed in...

The paper provides an empirical analysis of inflation persistence in the Czech Republic using 412 detailed product-level consumer price indexes underlying the consumer basket over the period from 1994:M1 to 2005:M12. Subject to various sensitivity tests, our results suggest that raw goods and...

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...

This paper shows how fan charts generated from Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) models can be useful for assessing 1) the forecasting accuracy of central banks’ prediction models and 2) the credibility of stress tests carried out to evaluate financial stability. Using unique data...