Why central banks undershoot their inflation targets

The goal of this article is to explain why central banks undershoot their inflation targets as we can observe also in the case of the Czech Republic. In other words, I am trying to find out if this undershooting is due to unpredictable desinflation shocks or due to asymmetric behaviour of central banks. Specifically, positive deviations from the target (i.e. overshooting) are weighted more in central bank"s loss function than the negative ones. It is shown that the Czech National Bank is asymmetric in its preferences but not so much as in the case of Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom. On the other hand, some part of undershooting attributes to desinflation shocks hitting the Czech economy.

Keywords: credibility, central bank, loss function, model, inflation targets, asymmetric preferences