The Role of the Housing Market in Monetary Transmission

As part of the monetary transmission studies of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank, this paper attempts to analyse the role of the housing market in the monetary transmission mechanism of Hungary. The housing market can influence monetary transmission through three channels, namely, the nature of the interest burden of mortgage loans, asset (house) prices, and the credit channel. The study first summarises the experiences of developed countries, paying special attention to issues arising from the monetary union. It then examines the developments in the Hungarian housing and mortgage markets in the last 15 years, as well as the expected developments and changes attendant to the adoption of the euro. Using panel econometric techniques, the study investigates the link between macroeconomic variables and house prices in Hungary, and the effect of monetary policy on housing investment and consumption through the wealth effect and house equity withdrawal.Housing, Monetary transmission, Mortgage market, Panel econometrics

Varieties whose tolerances are homomorphic images of their congruences

The homomorphic image of a congruence is always a tolerance (relation) but, within a given variety, a tolerance is not necessarily obtained this way. By a Maltsev-like condition, we characterize varieties whose tolerances are homomorphic images of their congruences (TImC). As corollaries, we prove that the variety of semilattices, all varieties of lattices, and all varieties of unary algebras have TImC. We show that a congruence n-permutable variety has TImC if and only if it is congruence permutable, and construct an idempotent variety with a majority term that fails TImC

The Danger of using Artificial Intelligence by Development of Autonomous Vehicles

The world of autonomous vehicles approaches as technology evolves. Researches have been done, development has been made in several countries, car manufacturers have already marketed their semi-self-driven automobiles. Nowadays artificial intelligence is present across nearly all industries due to scientific achievements in the field of artificial neural networks, computer vision, and a multi layer neural network. Utilizing AI for developing autonomous vehicles has been an obvious choice as making decisions based on continuously flowing vast amount of information from different sensors requires fast processing. In case of industrial AI where decision making is based on video image analysing, false decisions can lead to categorizing either flawless products as faulty or wrong products as good. In case of human politics when artificial intelligence is used to determine tender winners, making the wrong call could only mean gender biased results. However in case of self-driven cars making bad decision might equal causing accidents and endangering people’s lives, such as it happened to Uber. Scientists at MIT successfully developed the World’s first psychopath AI, which achievement claimed the responsibility of educating non-natural minds. The aim of this article is to point out those situations and scenarios in which self-driven cars could be hijacked, misguided, captured, or even influenced to turn against other vehicles

How to measure tax burden in an internationally comparable way?

In this paper we address the issue of tax burden and its measurement, beginning with a discussion of use of tax-to-GDP ratio for this purpose. We show that this commonly used indicator has a number of flaws, related to the methodology of calculation of taxes and GDP in national accounts. Firstly, tax revenue calculated in accordance with ESA95 methodology is not perfectly in line with the economic concept of taxes, i.e. levies imposed by the government, which are compulsory and unrequited. Secondly, both tax revenue and GDP include a government component, which distorts the true picture of tax burden. Taxes paid on government expenditure have no impact on the deficit, do not affect incentives, do not constitute a ‘burden‘ on economic activity and may also distort cyclical adjustment of the budget. We propose a number of adjustments to deal with these problems and apply them to data for Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The results indicate that in these countries, the underlying (methodologically and cyclically adjusted) tax burden imposed on economic activity has followed different trends from those implied by the headline tax-to-GDP ratios. The results show that it is also important to look at the headline and adjusted measures of the tax burden in disaggregated terms, namely dividing the tax burden into labour, corporate and indirect tax components.tax burden, cyclical adjustment