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...

The aim of this paper is to study preference heterogeneity in monetary policy committees of inflation-targeting (IT) countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) during the period 2005-2010. It employs (individual) voting records of the Monetary Council of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (the central...

This paper is a comprehensive analysis of Hungary's potential output. Since the concept of potential output is not unique, we present various interpretations of potential GDP, along with a large set of techniques for estimating it. Various estimates are presented and robustness analyses are...

This document gives a detailed account of the current version of the Hungarian Quarterly Projection Model (NEM). It describes the main building blocks, presents the forecast performance of the model and, finally, it illustrates the responses to the most important shocks the Hungarian economy may...

As significant part of national wealth, households' wealth is the central issue in both policy debate and academic literature. Nevertheless, in Hungary little effort has been made so far to conduct thorough evaluation of households' wealth for the last decade. Under the auspices of the plural of...

Decomposing output into trend and cyclical components is an uncertain exercise and depends on the method applied. It is an especially dubious task for countries undergoing large structural changes, such as transition countries. Despite their deficiencies, however, univariate detrending methods...

Cyclically adjusted budget balance (CAB) is a widely cited and widely used concept in the evaluation of fiscal situations. The key idea behind it involves the identification of potential levels of economic variables. There are two recently used methods: the aggregate approach and the...