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...

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...

Potential output figures are important ingredients of many macroeconomic models and are routinely applied by policy makers and global agencies. Despite its widespread use, estimation of potential output is at best uncertain and depends heavily on the model. The task of estimating potential...

In open economies excess demand in the tradables sector often manfests itself in an external deficit instead of the employment gap that is applied in the usual Phillips-curve model. The inflationary pressure in this case arises from an expected or actual weakening of the exchange rate and its...

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...

over the last decade, the microstructure approach to exchange rates has become very popular. The underlying idea of this approach is that the order flows at different levels of aggregation contain valuable information to explain exchange rate movements. The bulk of empirical literature has...

The paper estimates currency risk premia for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Three different approaches are applied: a constant premium approach based on rational expectations, while time-varying premia are estimated with a method using financial market analysts’ surveys and...

We investigate the relation between the EUR/HUF exchange rate on the one hand and news announcements and order flow on the other hand using intraday data. We extend the existing literature on foreign exchange market microstructure by considering a small open transition economy. We find that the...

This paper investigates the forecasting ability of survey data on exchange rate expectations with multiple forecast horizons. The survey forecasts are on the exchange rates of five Central and Eastern European currencies: Czech Koruna, Hungarian Forint, Polish Zloty, Romanian Leu and Slovakian...

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...