The Effects of Monetary Policy on Housing Prices: Evidence from the Czech Republic

This thesis explores the relationship between interest rates, house prices and main macroeconomic variables. In particular, I examine how monetary policy affects house prices in the Czech Republic. The hypotheses assume that an increase in the interest rate that tends to decrease house prices also reduces output and inflation simultaneously. Therefore, the latter would imply that the monetary authority faces a trade-off between macroeconomic and financial stability. The empirical analysis is based on a vector autoregression model and the monetary policy shock is retrieved by the Cholesky decomposition. As for the results, the findings of the thesis conclude that there is a costly trade-off between macroeconomic and financial stability within the Czech economy