Financial Markets play an important role in economic development, channeling saving to investments and facilitating growth. In Eastern Europe financial markets were initially much underdeveloped, and lacked the skills and infrastructure they needed to be efficient, having not acquired them in...

Potential output—in the sense of the GDP level or path an economy can sustain over the medium term—is a crucial benchmark for policymakers. However, it is difficult to estimate when financial “booms and busts” are driving the real economy. This paper uses a simple multivariate filtering...