National borders reduce trade, but most estimates of the border effect seem puzzlingly large. We show that major methodological innovations of the last decade combine to shrink the border effect to a one-third reduction in international trade flows worldwide. The border effect varies across...

Assuming information asymmetry between private agents and the central bank about the state of the economy, an unexpected change in interest rates signals the central bank's perceived state of the economy and facilitates an update of private expectations in an adverse, perhaps unintended way....

This paper studies the macroeconomic impact of ECB policy on the euro area and six non-EMU countries. The analysis is based on the evolution of a synthetic index of overall euro area monetary conditions (MCI) that can be decomposed into conventional and unconventional policy measures. A standard...

This study investigates the dynamic behavior of the sovereign CDS term premium for a group of European countries. The CDS term premium can be regarded as a forward-looking measure of idiosyncratic sovereign default risk as perceived by financial markets in real time. Using a Markov-switching...

We collect 2,735 estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption from 169 published studies that cover 104 countries during different time periods. The estimates vary substantially from country to country, even after controlling for 30 aspects of study design. Our...

We study the impact of collateral diversification by non-financial firms on systemic risk in a general equilibrium model with standard production functions and mixed debt-equity financing. Systemic risk comes about as soon as firms diversify their collateral by holding claims on a big wholesale...

We survey discretionary measures of Czech fiscal policy in the period 2001-2011 and analyze their episodes and macroeconomic impacts. We use bottom-up and top-down methods to identify fiscal discretion and we compare the results with Kalman filtering. Fiscal discretion is found to be used...

We analyze and quantify the determinants of asymmetric shocks showing up in the form of medium-term real exchange rate (RER) changes. First, we discuss sources of asymmetric shocks causing exchange rate variability and the role of the RER as a shock generator. Second, we use data for 21 advanced...

This paper examines the usefulness of Google Trends data for forecasting mortgage lending in the Czech Republic. While the official monthly statistics on mortgage lending come with a publication lag of one month, the data on how often people search for mortgage-related terms on the internet are...

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the modelling of the cross-sectional dimension of systemic risk. First, the network of financial linkages in the Czech economy is mapped and then a model of inter-sector transmission of financial contagion is presented. The model is used to...