F62 - Economic Impacts of Globalization: Macroeconomic ImpactsReturn

This paper investigates the impact of behavioural attention on the households' foreign currency savings as a response to the external macroeconomic shocks. The information that the households acquire via different communication channels is expected to influence their decisions regarding their savings' allocation into different currencies. This study has applied the fundamental macroeconomic models by including individuals' attention to the specific risks and search interest in specific keywords on Google in order to assess the impact of acquired information and its communication channel on the households' foreign currency savings. We employed a two-level mixed effects model including macroeconomic fundamentals and individuals' attention to the information determinants. We solved a problem of a long list of potential explanatory variables (keywords) by employing the Bayesian Model Averaging. This study assumes that households are more sensitive to the macroeconomic shocks (factors) if they search simultaneously for infor-mation on Google about these factors or specific related risks. The results emphasize the role behavioural attention during financial turmoil and economic downturn periods, especially in the environment of very low interest rates.

We investigate commonality and heterogeneity of inflationary processes in ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries over the period 2001-2013. The research is important for the analysis of monetary policy as it helps understand the origin of price formation from both sectoral and country perspective. With a multi-level factor model we decompose product-level inflation rates into the CEE region-wide, sector, country, country-sector, and idiosyncratic components. The outcomes indicate that CEE region-wide and country specific components are more persistent than sector and product-level components, which is in line with similar studies for core EU countries. Regional factors explain about 17% of variance in monthly price changes, which is more than any other factors (below 10% each). This result is at odds with the assumptions of many sectoral DSGE models and empirical evidence on the importance of sectoral price shocks in developed economies. The difference may be related to the conclusion that the first regional factor is associated with common disinflationary process that occurred in CEE economies in the 2000s, whereas the second one reveals significant correlations with global factors, especially commodity prices and euro area price developments.