Market analysts and central banks often use the implied volatility of FX options as an indicator of expected exchange rate uncertainty. The aim of our study is to investigate the limits of this statistic. We present some key factors that may deviate the value of implied volatility from the...

This paper investigates the main individual driving forces of Hungarian household credit risk and measures the shockabsorbing capacity of the banking system in relation to adverse macroeconomic events. The analysis relies on survey evidence gathered by the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB) in January...

This paper is an empirical investigation into the role of credit history in determining the spread on sovereign bank loans. It employs an error-in-variables approach used in rational-expectations-macro-econometrics to set up a structural model that links sovereign loan spreads to realized...

Customer order flow - signed transaction volume between market makers and their customers - is a key concept in the microstructure approach to exchange rates. We attempt to explore what the data tells us about the role of customer order flow in the market for Hungarian forint, using the standard...

This paper employs the methodology of Wilson (1997) on Hungarian data to conduct a macro stress test in relation to banks' corporate loan portfolio. First, sector specific models of bankruptcy are estimated, where the bankruptcy frequency is linked to the general health of the economy. Data on...

Many Central and Eastern European countries are adopting flat tax schemes in order to boost their economies and tax revenues. Though there are signs that some countries do manage to improve on both fronts, it is in general hard to distinguish the behavioral response to tax changes from the...

In this paper we investigate corporate investment behavior using a large panel of Hungarian firms between 1993 and 2002. The standard neoclassifical framework is used to derive empirically feasible specifications, however, several other issues beyond the scope of the framework are also...

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...

A standard approach in measuring the effect of monetary policy on output and prices is to estimate a VAR model, characterise somehow the monetary policy shock and then plot impulse responses. In this paper I attempt to do this exercise with Hungarian data. I compare two identification...