Default Probability of the Medical Imaging Service Providers in Hungary

Medical imaging, providing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) services have a special, oligopolistic market in Hungary. A majority of the MRI machines are operated by private contractors in a Public Private Partnership form in major healthcare centres with defined machine-hours for public healthcare services while they can sell their remaining capacities on the market as well. Current paper analyses the default probability of this firms via Ohlson-O and Altman-Z’ ratios, based on their annual financial report data. Then, default ratios are compared to market segment- and macro-specific variables trough panel regression analysis to identify the key factors of this technology-intense sector. Finally, results are compared to public default-rate databases

The Euro Crisis and Contagion among Central and Eastern European Currencies

This study analyses the Czech, Hungarian, and Polish currencies by examining the statistical characteristics of the Swiss franc as well as the ECB monetary policy in order to indicate shocks in these markets between 2002 and 2013. The abundance of monetary easing decisions can be used as a viable sign of market misbehaviour in addition to the low probability of extreme exchange rate fluctuations. Indeed, the temporal distribution of extreme currency fluctuations provides vital information about the nature of the recent crisis. Contagions can be defined as increased correlations during periods of crisis, while divergence means a significant decrease in this regard. Methodologically, common movements in this study were calculated by using DCC-GARCH modelling. The findings of this study underline the special features of the Swiss franc exchange rate, notably that its extreme fluctuations can be managed by using swap agreements and that it tended towards divergences during the crisis era. These results support the idea of avoiding lending in reserve currencies

The Impact of ECB’s Unconventional Monetary Policy on the German Stock Market Volatility

This study investigated the reaction of German stock market volatility (Dax index) to the European Central Bank (ECB)’s unconventional monetary policy (UMP) announcements. The financial crisis of 2008 proved that the traditional monetary policy’s tool (the short -term interest rate) has lost its effectiveness to meet the new challenges. So, the key central banks, ECB included, had to implement the new, untested and nonstandard monetary policy which so called unconventional monetary policy. In this study, we used the ECB’s shadow policy rate approach to extract unconventional monetary policy. Also, We employed GJR GARCH (p,o,q) model to estimate the volatility in the German stock market. Then we calibrated both OLS (linear regression) and Markov-switching (probability-matrix of regime changes) models to examine the reaction of German stock returns volatility to UMP announcement by ECB for a period from January 2006 to December 2019. The results delivered by both models showed that the ECB’s UMP had a strong and negative effect on the volatility of the German stock market. Also, both models showed that the past German stock volatility has a significant and negative effect on the dependent variable, while the volatility of the German stock returns is a function of the global volatility estimated by the VIX index. Moreover, the results showed that the Markov-switching regression model provides a better illustration of the stock market volatility impact of UMP than the OLS model because it can represent the changes into the two different regimes named ordinary regime and quantitative easing (crisis) regime. Furthermore, under the Markov-switching regression model, we can see how the output gap and the inflation gap influence the volatility of the Dax index, while the results of the OLS regression model showed that there is no significant relationship between the output gap and the inflation gap with the German stock market volatility