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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 paper is devoted to gender wage differences; it especially focuses on the impact of the gender characteristics of the manager on gender wage disparity. Under the social identity theory, women in managerial positions, that can affect the wage of their subordinates, are likely to evaluate female employees better than male employees. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the gender characteristics of middle managers on the wages of directly subordinated rank-and-file employees using a variation within the firm. We have used two methods to consider the effect of the manager gender characteristics on subordinates: the estimation of the wage function and the average treatment effect on the treated, both supplemented by a matching procedure. We concluded that women in middle management in comparison to their male counterparts have a lower tendency to apply wage discrimination against women. The presence of a female head of department led to a decrease in the gender pay gap by almost 7 percentage points.

Wide range of academic studies and economic practice are showing strong correlation between GDP growth and FDI flows. Moreover, there is a number of cases when FDI inflows were positively impacting economic development. That provides grounds and needs for profound research in the area of investment determinants. The main objective of this paper is to classify FDI determinants in the EU countries. All assuming that there are differences between the two groups - old and new member states. The econometrical approach of gravity modelling was chosen as the most appropriate methodology to analyse panel data set. Panel is depicting FDI flows coming from the external nonEU investors and does not include intra EU investment flows among the member countries (firstly due to the relative insignificance of the intra-EU flows compared to the outer inflow values and secondly due to the need to answer what exactly leads non-European investor to opt for the EU country A and not B). The random effect model has proved diversity in FDI flows determinants. Study outcomes support the need for policymakers' attention in the EU investment policy harmonization, towards market equalization that would improve competiveness of the whole EU region.

The study is a contribution to the theoretical/empirical analysis of the problem of outsourcing of policy advice in the public administration. It provides the typologies of expenses for policy advice in the public administration and examines the relationship between internal and external expenses on an example of the ministries of the Czech Republic for the period from 2001 to 2011. It shows that extreme changes in the form of increases in expenses for outsourcing arise when an amendment to the Act on Public Contracts is prepared. We explain the problem on the basis of changes in the behaviour of the clients as a result of expected changes to the contracting conditions. The study shows that several factors influence the amount of expenses for the outsourcing of policy advice. The ""large"" ministries have relatively fewer expenses for the outsourcing of policy advice than ""small"" ministries. Ministries that have their own workplaces available in their structures (i.e. in the form of their own scientific research workplaces) have lower than average expenses for the outsourcing of policy advice. Ministries with higher average wages are ministries with a relatively large number of managers in relation to the number of analysts, and thus they implement a higher degree of external services (measured as a share of the wage expenses).

Current paper has focused on the capital structure management theories. The theoretical part of the study firstly highlights the differences between trade-off theories and pecking order theories. In the empirical part there are then proved some significant relationships between financial indicators (debt/equity ratio and return on equity) of homogenous data sample from the Czech branch of building area. The aim of the study is to prove the differences between the capital structure development that are based on the type of the Czech companies' ownership in the selected NACE industrial branch and to point out some other particularities. The contribution of the paper is a comparison of the theory as well as practice of this issue in the Czech Republic. For pooled sample there are used selected financial indicators of 57 building companies, all with turnover of more than CZK 1.5 billion. The choice of this criterion was a result of a change in efficiency in Czech economy observed in the selected period. We can assume that this factor will have low influence on the selection of financial resources of large corporations. We may even say that for large companies the availability of financial resources remain unchanged. We have obtained annual data from 2004 to 2011. Due to such short estimation period, but the width of pooled sample on the other hand, it is used generalized method of moments (GMM) panel regression. There are also arguments of motivation to analyse business branch of building specifically. Moreover, an analysis is split according to ownership of companies into two categories, for the Czech and foreign owners. Based on the recent literature there has been made and tested three hypotheses. Results of the article have clearly proved the separation of managers from owner's positions. On the top of that, domestic companies are not pushed to distribute the realized profit so much as foreign owners that prefer the return of their means invested into business. There is also a suggestion of future interests in research focused on other Czech business branches, too.

This paper provides an up-to-date analysis of the redistributive effects of the Czech tax and benefit system at the household level. We provide several measures of the extent in which the tax and benefit system redistributes from the rich to the poor and from the childless households to the households with children. We find a rather weak combined power of the tax and benefit systems in alleviating income inequalities. The system redistributes primarily towards households with children. While households with children earn 55 per cent of total earnings, they pay 39 per cent of total taxes and receive 68 per cent of total benefits. Even the richest households with children contribute a lower share of total net taxes (8 per cent) than their share in total earnings (10 per cent). About a quarter of households with children in the upper income deciles collect some benefits while only half of the poorest households without children do.

This study offers a scientific and methodical approach to identifying systemically important domestic banks based on the indicator-based measurement approach recommended by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. By improving both a set of criteria and indicators of a bank's systemic importance it is offered to distinguish its five levels - low, moderate, medium, significant and high. The approach was tested on 26 Ukrainian banks representing different groups (depending on the size of assets) according to the classification of the National Bank of Ukraine. We have discovered the absence of banks with high systemic importance in the period 2007-2011 - the majo-rity of banks are characterized by their moderate or low level. In our opinion, the best solution for systemic risk regulation would be the introduction of a differentiated regime of supervision over banks depending on their level of systemic importance and risk profile.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the current crisis of the eurozone. The irst part explains why the eurozone is not an optimum currency area. The second part points out that euro is an intensiier of the business cycle. The third part examines the Greek crisis. The fourth part explains the inner tensions in the eurozone. The ifth part asks whether euro is suitable for the countries of Central and East Europe. The sixth part examines the debt crisis within the eurozone.

This paper develops a theoretical framework for the analysis of transformation of the service sector during privatization process. A simple model which includes a supplier of services and retail firms is presented and applied to study the effects of various sequences of privatization. Our findings indicate that privatizing the supplier first is always at least as good as privatizing the retailers first because (unlike the strategy of privatizing the retail firms first) it increases both the number of retail firms and profit of the supplier.

Voluntary contribution mechanism to public goods is one of the traditional types of economic experiments. The article summarizes the results of series of experiments that have been conducted with several groups of Czech university students. Using the threshold mechanism the impact of several factors (experience, communication and the form of experiment) on voluntary contribution to public goods is tested. The results confirm, to a great extent, findings published by foreign studies. The results show that Czech students also do not behave consistently with the traditional economic public goods model, i.e. they cooperate voluntarily in situations that favour free riding. Threshold is a traditional part of (mostly American) charitable collections and can be regarded as one of the most successful modifications of the voluntary contribution mechanism to public good. Experiments involving Czech students indicate that such technique can be successful even in Czech non-profit sector.

In transition countries, especially in the period of central planning or semi-command regulation, prices of goods and services in the non-tradable sector were regulated, which was one of the main obstacles to normal functioning of the supply-demand market mechanism after the breakdown of the socialist economic system. In the period of economic transition reestablishment of market institutions arises, with price deregulation as one of the fundamental constitutional parts of this process. But in the case of transition economies there exists a recognized doubt in an immediately well functioning market system after deregulation because of inadequate development of the economic system in the past that produced a gap in the development of institutions typical for market economies. The aim of this article is to present the results of the empirical analysis on the market outcomes of price deregulation for chimney sweep services in the Slovenian economy. For this purpose we developed an original model for analysing market outcomes after price deregulation occurs. For the selected case study we recognize large cumulative price growth, that was a consequence of significant supply-side imperfection, since the selection among suppliers is based on the concession system at the municipality level.

Because of growing awareness of financial needs for public pensions, attention has been focused on privatisation of the pension systems. While the privatisation of pension funds can encourage development of capital markets in New Member States, equity investment in transition economies is even more volatile than in the ""old"" capitalist countries. Privatised pension system coincides with investment risks, higher administrative costs, and inability of private markets to provide retirees with affordable, indexed and certain annuities. Namely, private sector may not provide enough investment projects to efficiently absorb mandated pension savings and the expected pension income is subject to a number of risks: poor and volatile investment returns, longevity, and inflation eroding the purchasing power of pensions. Indeed, the PAYG system appears to be the only viable system to perform well in terms of risk and volatility of returns.

In this paper, we assess the effects of the investigations carried by the Turkish Competition Board in 1997, 2002 and 2003 on the degree competition in the Turkish cement market. For this aim, we used proverbial Bresnahan-Lau framework with alternative definitions for the supply relation. Our first finding is that cement producers had a considerable amount of market power at the period prior to the first investigation in 1997. In addition, this study shows that, parallel to our initial expectation, competition in the cement market increased thanks to the investigations. The positive effect of the first investigation is found to be especially significant. Hence, this study witnesses that the enforcement of the competition law by the Turkish Competition Board has produced the desired effects in the most problematic sector with respect to competition law.

New principles, tasks and expectations for the nearest future, as well as upcoming development trends of private equity investments in global economy are mentioned in this paper. Ecological investments of private equity, as for example: alternative power engineering, biotechnologies or any other technologies, regardful to the living environment, appear to replace gradually foregoing investments focusing on information engineering and communication technologies. Attention of private equity funds seems to be paid especially on emerging markets during oncoming decade. Sources, aims and conditions of usage of private equity in Europe are not similar comparing with North America or Asia-Pacific region. While in the North America major-part of equity consists of private sources, Cohesion Funds of the European Community are frequently used for financing of funds in Europe. Consequently private equity is usually used for growth or expansion of a company or for ""buy in - buy out"" operations, scarcely any investments are focused on start-up and early stage projects in Europe. Recommendations of European Commission and EVCA regarding elimination of obstacles to private equity investments in Europe include: - harmonization of tax and legal rules for private equity investments in the Member States of European Community, - improvement of European tax and legal environments, - move towards greater transparency of tax reporting.

At present the majority of advanced countries are dealing with the problem of the ageing of the population. The Czech Republic is no exception. Demographic ageing is caused by the fact that mortality is dropping, especially infant mortality, and this expectation of life at birth. At the same time the birth rate is declining and subsequently total fertility rate drops below the preservation level of simple reproduction, which means that there are less children and more persons in particular in the older and oldest age-groups. It is very important to realise that the changes in the level of mortality bring with them positive impacts in lengthening of life expectancy on the one hand, but on the other hand, there is significant demographic ageing of the population. In this contribution we would like to show how the life expectancy has developed in the Czech Republic in a historical context and how it might develop in the coming years. For professionals the application of the Lee-Carter method will certainly be interesting - this is a method commonly used in the world by demographers and actuaries for modelling the future development of mortality and it is also the basic method used for stochastic demographic projections.

The paper estimates cost efficiency of 99 general hospitals in the Czech Republic during 2001-2008 using the Stochastic Frontier Analysis. We control for determinants of the inefficiency and found that bigger, not-for-profit and teaching hospitals tend to be less efficient, as well as hospitals in municipalities with a larger share of the elderly. Small hospitals, hospitals in bigger municipalities and hospitals in regions where hospital competition is tense tend to be more efficient.

Nonprofit organizations in transition countries experience low trust and consequently low income from donations. The study introduces one particular solution to the problem, certification, and examines its impact on the quality of the nonprofit organizations in the market. The situation is illustrated in a game theoretical model, with a manager, donor, certifier, and the charity providing a charitable good: for simplicity, charity is either good or bad: A good charity spends all the resources on the charitable good, and a bad one diverts all resources to the private consumption of its manager (for-profit in disguise). We show that for a wide parameter range and for two different disclosure rules, the presence of a certifier in the market increases the incentives for managers to choose good charities, leading to an improvement in the market as the share of good charities increases.

This paper incorporates hierarchical structure into the neoclassical theory of the firm. Firms are hierarchical in two respects: the organization of workers in production and the wage structure. The firm's hierarchy is represented as a sector of a circle, where the radius represents the hierarchy's height, the width of the sector represents the breadth of the hierarchy at a given height, and the angle of the sector represents the span of control. A perfectly competitive firm chooses height and width, as well as capital, in order to maximize profit. We analyse the short-run and long-run impact of changes in scale economies, input substitutability, and input and output prices on the firm's hierarchical structure. We find that the firm grows as the specialization of its workers increases or as its output price increases relative to input prices. The effect of changes in scale economies is contingent on the price of output. The model also brings forth an analysis of wage inequality within the firm, which is found to be independent of the firm's hierarchical organization of workers, and only depends on the firm's wage schedule.

This paper assesses whether the legal independence granted to the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) by the latest legislation promulgated in 2005 is factual. The author followed Fry's methodology, which assumes that the level of independence of the central bank is determined by fiscal attributes. In an attempt to develop Fry's method, there was used a simple criterion to assess the central bank's independence, namely, that the central bank is actually independent if it can fulfill its money supply target without squeezing the private sector. Applying this criterion to the case of the CBE, we find that the legal independence granted to the CBE by the latest legislation is not factual.

The present article reexamines some of the issues regarding the benchmarking of patents using the NBER data base on U.S. patents by generalizing a parametric citation model and by estimating it using Generalized Additive Models (GAM) methodology. The main conclusion is that the estimated effects differ considerably from sector to sector, and the differences can be estimated nonparametrically but not by the parametric dummy variable approach.

We investigate the influence which the financial condition of a multinational bank group may have on the lending rates of its affiliates, using data from the ten biggest banks in the Czech Republic under foreign control. The analysis is based on a theory of bank lending in which the implicit opportunity costs of lending by a foreign bank affiliate are influenced by the scarcity of funds within the multinational conglomerate. The theory predicts that parent banks' influence should be stronger in loan segments with more pronounced information asymmetry. Our empirical model, which explains the interest rate charged by the affiliate by means of affiliate-level controls and a parent influence variable, is tested for three categories of commercial non-financial borrowers (domestically owned firms, foreign-owned firms and the self-employed). Evidence of parent influence is found in a limited number of cases of banks and borrower classes for which the constraint on fund flow within the parent bank group is likely to be tight, particularly when the borrower class is of strategic importance for the affiliate's overall performance.

During different GDP growth regimes, the dynamics of global financial markets impacts the Slovenian stock exchange with varying intensity. We propose a smooth transition regression model to explain Slovene stock exchange index returns employing financial and macroeconomic variables. According to our model, the reaction of the stock market to several of the explanatory variables depends on the magnitude of GDP growth. The weaker relationship between Slovene stock exchange index returns and S&P 500 returns in the period of lower or negative GDP growth could be explained by less developed financial market in Slovenia and therefore not closely linked interchange of securities.

Real convergence is the key economic challenge for the new EU Member Countries. The main growth area today is the "new" entrepreneurial economy of creativity and innovation. But such an economy needs a financial structure capable of coping with the higher risk inherent in the "new" economy. To provide such a financial structure, the financial markets must be broad, deep and liquid, i.e. financial markets must be large enough to provide this financial structure. Hence, the financial integration became an imperative for the new Member Countries. But this integration process possesses both economic and political challenges and dilemmas. Answers to those challenges and dilemmas will then determine the degree of real convergence - and hence the degree of economic success - for each new Member State.

The paper provides the methodological background for the Czech Republic business cycle dating process using an alternative approach. This approach is based on the mathematical principle of identification of extremes using estimates of derivations of time trend of the analysed time series, for which the nonparametric Gasser-Müller estimate is used. The presented methodological approach is applied on the real gross domestic product data sets, the total industry (excluding construction), the gross capital formation and the final consumption expenditure. The selected variables are taken from the national accounts system. The obtained results are compared to the widely used naive technique of business cycle dating written by Canova (1998, 1999) or Bonenkamp (2001). The presented new method specifies the identification of turning points in the business cycle dating process.

This paper is based on the new institutional economic approach, which focuses on analysis between services features (asset specificity, outcome measurability) and their eligibility to contract out. This issue, which de facto constitutes one of the subsets of the ""make or buy decision"" issue, is also analysed by the so-called Brown-Potoski model. It analyses the relations between selected features of a demanded service and its suitability or unsuitability for outsourcing, whilst making use of information about transaction costs economy. Using data from 100 Czech municipalities and 100 Slovak municipalities, the viability of the Brown-Potoski model is tested. The results of the research show that a connection was identified between the measurability of the required service and its suitability for external provision, but the relationship between the specificity of investments and the suitability for external provision was not. The reason is probably the previous financial demands of the initial investment, which is, above all in the case of small municipalities, beyond their budgetary means.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between non-performing loans and bank efficiency in Malaysia and Singapore. To achieve the objective, cost efficiency was estimated using the stochastic cost frontier approach assuming normal-gamma efficiency distribution model proposed by Greene (1990). The cost efficiency scores were then used in the second stage Tobit simultaneous equation regression to determine the effect of non-performing loans on bank efficiency. The results indicate that there is no significant difference in cost efficiency between banks in Singapore and Malaysia although banks in Singapore exhibit a higher average cost efficiency score. The Tobit simultaneous equation regression results clearly indicate that higher non-performing loan reduces cost efficiency. Likewise, lower cost efficiency increases non-performing loans. The result also support the hypothesis of bad management proposed by Berger and DeYoung (1992) that poor management in the banking institutions results in bad quality loans, and therefore, escalates the level of non-performing loans.

The article analyses the process of nominal convergence of the new EU member states (NMS) with particular attention paid to some applied and theoretical aspects, which may have impact on the process of the euro adoption. Chapter two addresses selected theoretical and methodological issues connected with the International Comparison Project (ICP). It discusses determinants and influences affecting price level convergence and some issues that have set off new trends, such as the globalization or process of the on-going European integration. This chapter also presents a brief summary of the main trends of price convergence observed by focusing on changes of comparative price levels (CPL) for various disaggregated items of GDP. It also deals with potential issues and problems arising in this context. Chapter three is aimed at an empirical verification of price convergence and at a search for main driving factors using data for the NMS and the old EU member states over 11 years (1995-2006). There are some differences in results depending on the applied econometric method. The most important determinants of price level are GDP and population, the openness and public finance's indicators are not significant. The last section summarises the main findings.

The paper attempts to assess the development path of the Czech food processing and to identify the presence of idiosyncratic developments in industries. We elaborate it by using a fitted production function for the construction of TFP and by decomposing TFP into a scale effect, a technical change effect and an efficiency effect for total food processing and its selected branches. The results suggest that despite more than one decade of transition, serious adjustment problems exist, including problems on the capital market. Furthermore, contrary to the large differences among firms in the whole sample, the various sectors are rather homogeneous. TFP shows that although individual sectors have a few frontrunners, the majority of companies perform quite poorly. The scale effect is relatively small in food processing. Technical change has contributed positively to TFP in recent years, and the efficiency effect varies rather strongly. Whereas scale effect and technical change have a similar pattern across industries, the efficiency effect differs significantly. There is also some indication that the efficiency effect is affected by different sources. Finally, in addition to systemic effects, industry developments are characterized by idiosyncratic factors, especially in the Dairy industry.

This article presents a meta-regression analysis of 32 studies on frontier efficiency measurement in banking, focusing on the sensitivity of the reported estimates to the methodological design. Our findings suggest that study design is crucial for the resulting scores. The differences between the scores estimated using parametric and non-parametric approaches arise when the Fourierflexible functional form is used since this functional form yields lower scores. Generally, the higher the number of observations, the higher is the average estimated efficiency. The removal of scale effects using equity capital increases the profit efficiency but it is insignificant for other scores. The efficiency analysis should distinguish the commercial banking from other bank types because the former tends to deliver lower efficiency scores.