Monetary policy shocks in the new EU members: a VAR approach

The article provides empirical evidence on the effects of monetary policy shocks in the three largest new European Union (EU) economies: Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Vector autoregression (VAR) system estimates show that the co-movement of macroeconomic variables, conditional on a monetary policy shock, is similar across these countries and, despite their lower degree of financial development, not dissimilar to that found for more advanced European economies. While qualitatively similar to the responses observed in the old EU members, the responses of the new members are, on average, weaker.

Fiscal variables and bond spreads - evidence from Eastern European countries and Turkey

We investigate the impact of fiscal variables on bond yield spreads relative to US Treasury bonds in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey from May 1998 to December 2007. To account for the importance of market expectations we use projected values for fiscal and macroeconomic variables generated from Consensus Economics Forecasts. Moreover, we compare results from panel regressions with those from country (seemingly unrelated regression) estimates. We find that, contrary to the evidence suggested by panel estimations, the role of the individual explanatory variables, including the importance of fiscal variables, varies significantly across countries when using the SUR specification.budget deficits, determination of interest rates, fiscal policy, Eastern European countries,