D02 - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and ImpactReturn

The sustainable development of the digital economy has attracted wide attention. To ex-plore how to improve the operational performance of China's digital firms, this paper conducts an influence mechanism model to test the nonlinear effect, heterogeneity effects, and mediation effects using a panel data of China's digital firms from 2008 to 2017. The empirical results indicate that R&D subsidies have an inverted U-shaped effect on operational performance, and these results are still valid after a series of robustness tests. In addition, we find that R&D subsidies have a heterogeneous effect on operational performance in terms of region, company size, governance structure, and executive education background. Moreover, regarding the influence mechanism, R&D subsidies improve operational performance by improving innovation efficiency. This paper proposes some policy implications to improve the operational performance of China's digital firms.

The paper is concerned with pension reform in the Czech Republic and abroad. It argues against two opinions: on the one hand, it is not necessary to do anything, and on the other hand, that a mandatory funded system should be implemented. Both approaches are false because of creating overwhelming explicit debts. The author recommends an evolutionary approach based on decreasing PAYG in combination with voluntary savings.