The purpose of the paper is to introduce the new “g3†structural model of the Czech National Bank and illustrate how it is used for forecasting and policy analysis. As from January 2007 the model was regularly used for shadowing official forecasts, and in July 2008 it became the core...

The Czech Republic is facing a population ageing phenomenon. In addition, its demographic structure is expected to change dramatically over the next 50 years. We apply a stylised overlapping generation model in order to analyse the potential effects of the expected demographic changes on...

Firms have multiple options at the time of adjusting their wage bills. However, previous literature has mainly focused on base wages. We broaden the analysis beyond downward rigidity in base wages by investigating the use of other margins of labour cost adjustment at the firm level. Using data...

This paper investigates the predictive ability of money for future inflation in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. We construct monetary indicators similar to those the ECB regularly uses for monetary analysis. We find some in-sample evidence that money matters for future...

We assess whether the voting records of central bank boards are informative about future monetary policy. First, we specify a theoretical model of central bank board decision-making and simulate the voting outcomes. Three different versions of model are estimated with simulated data: 1)...

The purpose of his paper is to describe consumer behavior in the Czech Republic by estimating a demand system in which demand depends on income and prices, but also on other factors such as age, size of the household, and position on the labor market. We combine Household Budget Survey data with...

This paper uses information from a rich firm-level survey on wage and price-setting procedures, in around 15,000 firms in 15 European Union countries, to investigate the relative importance of internal versus external factors in the setting of wages of newly hired workers. The evidence suggests...

It has been well established that the wages of individual workers react little, especially downwards, to shocks that hit their employer. This paper presents new evidence from a unique survey of firms across Europe on the prevalence of downward wage rigidity in both real and nominal terms. We...

What do we know about the effects of structural reforms? One main reason the answer may be “little†is inadequate measurement. In this paper we put forward improved measures of economic liberalization across countries over time. We show that structural reforms, carefully measured,...