Prague Economic Papers, 2011 (vol. 20), issue 3
Original contributions, Original article, Research article
Models of Factors Driving the Czech Export
David Havrlant, Roman Hušek
Prague Economic Papers 2011, 20(3):195-215 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.396 
This paper aims to analyze the cost factors that influence the export of the Czech Republic, and to estimate models suitable for quantitative analysis of export and its prediction. According to the macroeconomic theory, the fundamental export factors include foreign demand, domestic and foreign price level and exchange rate. Foreign demand reflects the business cycle of foreign economy, price levels and exchange rate characterize the competitiveness of the exported goods, and the exchange rate determines, among others, the production costs through the prices of imported crucial inputs. Several models are applied to set of these variables, and their...
Who Bears the Burden of Voluntary Export Restraints?
Fuhmei Wang
Prague Economic Papers 2011, 20(3):216-231 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.397
Conventional wisdom believes that voluntary export restraints (VERs) are beneficial for the exporting country but detrimental to the importing country. Based on the benchmark model of Obstfeld and Rogoff, this paper aims to examine this belief and evaluate the welfare effects of VERs on the world economy. Analytical results find that VERs exert expansion effects on the exporting economy temporarily. The conventional view of VERs effects holds only when there is perfect competition on the goods market or when the exporting country is bigger than the importing country. On the whole, VERs deteriorate the overall welfare of the world economy.
Exchange Rate Predictions in International Financial Management by Enhanced GMDH Algorithm
Josef Taušer, Petr Buryan
Prague Economic Papers 2011, 20(3):232-249 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.398
Exchange rate forecasting is an important financial problem that is receiving increasing attention nowadays especially because of its difficulty and host of practical applications in globalising world of today. The paper presents an enhanced MIA-GMDH-type network, discusses its design methodology and carries out some numerical experiments in the field of exchange rate forecasting. The method presented in this paper is an enhancement of self-organizing polynomial Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) with several specific improved features - coefficient rounding and thresholding schemes and semi-randomized selection approach to pruning. The experiments...
Threshold Effectiveness in Contributing to the Public Goods: Experiments Involving Czech Students
Jiří Špalek, Zuzana Berná
Prague Economic Papers 2011, 20(3):250-267 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.399
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...
Impact of the Car Scrapping Scheme on Consumer Behaviour and Aggregate Consumption
Lukáš Mohelský
Prague Economic Papers 2011, 20(3):268-287 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.400
The American financial crisis, which started in 2007, triggered subsequently a global economic decline. To boost the decreasing national economies, many countries introduced various stipulating measures. The automotive industry has been among the numerous fields, which were affected by the decline. The proclaimed importance of this industry led to the introduction of a new economic tool to support the short-term consumption, usually referred to as the car scrapping scheme. This scheme stands for a special incentive to purchase a new car. Usually, the incentive is introduced in the form of a direct financial support or an ex-post tax relief, and is...