This paper gives a reassessment of the sustainability of the reformed Hungarian pension system with a special focus on whether the introduction of the fully funded pillar in 1998 has led to any improvement in the sustainability of the pension system. After a brief description of the 1997/1998...

The article analyses the structural changes of the financial intermediary system of Eastern-Central European (ECE) countries, that joined the EU in 2004, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia (ECE5) in the light of global and European trends from 2004 to 2016. Its two...

This paper provides an overview of the antecedents, main drivers and spillover mechanisms of the turbulence emanating from the US sub-prime credit market in the summer of 2007. Its primary goal is to discuss the facts and interrelationships featured in the various analyses and statistics in a...

Credit to the private sector has been growing very rapidly in a number of Central and Eastern European countries in recent years. The main question is whether this dynamics is an equilibrium convergence process or may rather pose stability risks. Using panel econometric techniques, this paper...

In this paper we analyze the degree of competition in the Hungarian household credit and deposit markets. We estimate discrete-choice, multinomial logit deposit service and loan demand functions for each bank and calculate the corresponding price elasticities. Two models of the banking industry...

This paper aims to estimate bank efficiency differences across member states of the European Union and tries to explain their causes. We show on an empirical basis that the level and spread of bank efficiency in the EU and their changes are significantly determined by characteristics of...

In most disability insurance programs beneficiaries lose some or all of their benefits if they earn above an earnings threshold. While intended to screen out applicants with high remaining working capacity, earnings limits can also distort the labor supply of beneficiaries. We develop a simple...

This paper evaluates the effects of the Hungarian disability employment quota, which requires firms over a certain size to employ people with disabilities or pay a noncompliance tax. We employ a regression discontinuity design on firm-level data to estimate the effect on the quota on the...

In most disability insurance programs beneficiaries lose some or all of their benefits if they earn above an earnings threshold. While intended to screen out applicants with high remaining working capacity, earnings limits can also distort the labor supply of beneficiaries. We develop a simple...

The study examines the income redistribution effects of the Hungarian flat-tax and the introduction of the novel family allowance scheme on the basis of administrative data for 2007, 2011 and 2020, which yields more accurate estimates than previous studies based on aggregated or survey data....