This paper uses firm-level financial data for Czech firms and tests for the role of companies’ financial structure in the transmission of monetary policy. Our results indicate that higher short-term interest rates coincide with lower shares of total debt, short-term bank loans, and...

The prominent measure of the current state of the Czech economy, gross domestic product (GDP), is available only with a significant lag of roughly 70 days. In this paper, we employ a Dynamic Factor Model (DFM) to nowcast Czech GDP in real time. Using multiple vintages of historical data and...

A sharp increase in unemployment accompanied by a relatively muted response of inflation during the Great Recession cast further doubts on the validity of the Phillips curve. With the aid of dynamic model averaging (Raftery et al., 2010), this paper aims to highlight that the existence of a...

We develop a methodology for identifying financially distressed households and use it for testing the responses to shocks to the unemployment rate, the interest rate and prices of essential expenditure in the Czech Republic. We extend the approach of Johansson and Persson (2006) for Sweden and...

This paper shows how the reaction of selected emerging CEE currencies to increased uncertainty depends on market sentiment in a core advanced economy or even on the global scale. On the example of the Czech koruna, a highly stylized model of portfolio allocation between EUR- and CZK-denominated...

The abundant literature on the competing motives for holding international reserves stresses different factors, giving rise to a problem called model uncertainty. In this paper we search for the most important determinants of reserve holdings using data for 104 countries in 1999–2010 and...

This paper investigates the extent to which cross-country differences in aggregate participation rates can be explained by divergence in tax-benefit systems. We take the example of two countries, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which – despite a lot of similarities – differ...

We incorporate a housing market with liquidity-constrained households into the Czech National Bank's core forecasting model (g3) to analyze the relationship between housing market and aggregate fluctuations in a small open economy framework. We discuss the historical shock decomposition of house...

In this paper we use a battery of various mixed-frequency data models to forecast Czech GDP. The models employed are mixed-frequency vector autoregressions, mixed-data sampling models, and the dynamic factor model. Using a dataset of historical vintages of unrevised macroeconomic and financial...

This paper investigates empirically to what extent financial variables can explain macroeconomic developments in the Czech Republic and how the results are sensitive to some (usually reasonable or routinely made) modeling choices. To this end, the dynamic model averaging/selection framework is...