Three essays on empirical Bayesian econometrics

The dissertation consists of three papers which apply Bayesian econometric techniques to monitoring macroeconomic and macro-financial developments in the economy. Its aim is to illustrate how Bayesian methods can be employed in standard areas of economic research (estimating systemic risk in the banking sectors, nowcasting GDP growth) and also in a more original area (monitoring developments in sovereign bond markets). In the first essay, we address a task which analytical departments in central banks or commercial banks face very often - nowcasting foreign demand of a small open economy. On the example of the Czech economy, we propose an approach to nowcast foreign GDP growth rates for the Czech economy. For presentation purposes, we focus on three major trading partners: Germany, Slovakia and France. We opt for a simple method which is very general and which has proved successful in the literature: the method based on bridge equation models. A battery of models is evaluated based on a pseudo-real- time forecasting exercise. The results for Germany and France suggest that the models are more successful at backcasting, nowcasting and forecasting than the naive random walk benchmark model. At the same time, the various models considered are more or less successful depending on the forecast horizon...