Comparison of Selected Simple Models of Inflation in the Czech Economy

This paper begins with a description of simple select models of inflation and their ability to fit the data. The paper in turn measures the stability of particular parsimonious models. One-step forecast tests are applied, which establish the instability of the money demand model compared with other models, despite its ability to fit the data nearly as well as the P-star model. Further, the forecasting performances of the selected parsimonious models are analyzed, though only the performance of one-step forecasts are fully treated given the insufficient descriptive ability of the AR processes of explanatory variables. As a measure of forecast ability, the author employs U-statistic, RMSE, and MAE tests. The above statistics assign the best-forecast performance to the modified version of the P-star model of inflation for a small, open economy.