Prague Economic Papers, 2012 (vol. 21), issue 3
Original contributions, Original article, Research article
An Empirical Investigation of the Purchasing Power Parity Hypothesis in European Transition Countries
Václav Žďárek
Prague Economic Papers 2012, 21(3):257-276 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.423 
The article is aimed at empirical investigation of the relative version of the purchasing power parity (PPP). It attempts to shed some light on the so-called 'PPP puzzle' for selected countries in the CEE region and Turkey. Because of ambiguous results in the literature, various econometrics methods are employed: univariate tests (URTs: ADF, PP, KPSS, DF-GLS), robust URTs including nonlinear URTs (Kapetanios and Sollis' and Bierens' test) and tests allowing for (multiple) structural breaks (Perron, Lee and Strazicich). The euro currency pairs (bilateral) of 10 European transition countries covering the period 1995:1-2011:1 are utilized. Our results...
The Evaluation of an Economic Distance Among Countries: A Novel Approach
Jiří Mazurek
Prague Economic Papers 2012, 21(3):277-290 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.424
The aim of the article is to propose a new measure of a relative economic distance between two countries (RED) or among a group of countries (GRED). Both measures enable to evaluate 'proximity' between national economies through time series of selected variables, and are related to the concept of the sigma (beta) convergence introduced by Barro and Sala-i Martin (1995). In the empirical part of the paper, the RED of Poland, Slovakia, Austria, Germany, the USA and Japan with regard to the Czech Republic are estimated, as well as the time evolution of the GRED of the Czech Republic and its neighbours. The main finding is the strong convergence among...
The Weber-Fechner Law and Public Expenditures Impact to the Win-Margins at Parliamentary Elections
Paulo Jorge Reis Mourao
Prague Economic Papers 2012, 21(3):291-308 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.425
This paper discusses the electoral implications of psychological motivation on voting functions. We tested a claim of the Weber-Fechner law as applied to electoral behaviour - specifically, that an expanded public sector leads politicians to make more significant, opportunistic distortions of public expenditures than the distortions observed when the public sector is diminished. We employed a system of simultaneous equations to test this hypothesis for cases observed in more than sixty democracies since 1960. We gave a special focus to the cases of Central and Eastern European countries. Our results confirm the main implications of the Weber-Fechner...
How Progressive is the Czech Pension Security?
Stanislav Klazar, Barbora Slintáková
Prague Economic Papers 2012, 21(3):309-327 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.426
The aim of the paper is to examine the progressivity of the pension security in the Czech Republic using an intragenerational longitudinal approach. Since there is no available Czech panel data we modelled pseudo-panel data on lifetime earnings of employees on the basis of real crosssectional data. Then the present values of lifetime contributions paid to and lifetime pensions received from the system were derived from the simulated lifetime earnings. The analysis revealed that the Czech pension security redistributes the funds from the higher-income participants to the lower-income ones and from men to women. Furthermore the Gini coefficients confirmed...
Gender Wage Gap in the Czech Republic and Central European Countries
Martina Mysíková
Prague Economic Papers 2012, 21(3):328-346 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.427
This paper aims to quantify the basic structure of gender wage gaps in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, using the EU-SILC 2008 dataset. The structure of the gender wage gap is analyzed based on the Heckman selection model and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The findings are to a great extent similar for the Czech and Slovak Republics. The observed gender wage gap is relatively high in these two countries, compared to Hungary and Poland. A relatively small but positive part of the observed gender wage gap can be explained by gender differences in characteristics in the Czech and Slovak Republics, with a high contribution of job characteristics....
Development of an Early Warning System for Evaluating the Credit Portfolio's Quality. A Case Study on Romania
Iustina Boitan
Prague Economic Papers 2012, 21(3):347-362 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.428
The current financial crisis has boosted the efforts of international financial institutions to strengthen collaboration in the field of banking supervision, with a particular focus on macro prudential supervision. One of the stated objectives is the creation of a warning system, in which economic and financial vulnerabilities at the regional level will be coupled with the potential for spillovers or contagion between markets and countries. The aim of this study is to design an early warning system in order to highlight, at an earlier stage, the likelihood of deterioration of the Romanian banking system credit portfolio's quality. The paper focuses...
On Net External Assets in Developed and Transition Countries
Petr Duczynski
Prague Economic Papers 2012, 21(3):363-376 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.429
The paper focuses on net external assets (NEA) in developed and transition countries in 1995, 2000, and 2005. The net international investment position is used as the main NEA indicator. In addition, alternative NEA estimates for developed countries are based on the cumulated current account, the cumulated financial and capital accounts, and the net factor income from abroad. The NEA estimates are divided by the gross domestic product (GDP) based on the U.S. dollar exchange rate. We identify the most important net creditors and net debtors, for which we study the average behavior of the real product growth, the unemployment rate, and the inflation...
Publication Activity of New Slovak Professors In Economics and its International Reception
Juraj Barta, Michal Považan
Prague Economic Papers 2012, 21(3):377-387 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.430
The paper deals with quality of economic research in Slovakia, which is strongly connected with quality of economic education at Slovak universities. Quality of economic research is described by publication activity of Slovak professors of economics, who are usually the leaders in number of publications and citations and used to be internationally recognised. The paper does not seek for possible roots or explanations of the situation. It only tries to describe the status quo and provide useful data and comparisons.