Prague Economic Papers, 2018 (vol. 27), issue 2

Original contributions, Original article, Research article

What Common Factors are Driving Inflation in CEE Countries?

Aleksandra Halka, Grzegorz Szafranski

Prague Economic Papers 2018, 27(2):131-148 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.640  

We investigate commonality and heterogeneity of inflationary processes in ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries over the period 2001-2013. The research is important for the analysis of monetary policy as it helps understand the origin of price formation from both sectoral and country perspective. With a multi-level factor model we decompose product-level inflation rates into the CEE region-wide, sector, country, country-sector, and idiosyncratic components. The outcomes indicate that CEE region-wide and country specific components are more persistent than sector and product-level components, which is in line with similar studies for core...

Disappearing Borders in the Visegrad Countries

Ádám Márkus

Prague Economic Papers 2018, 27(2):149-168 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.635  

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the trade integration process of the Visegrad countries from a special point of view, namely by estimating border effects in the countries. The regressional analysis run with two different estimators (OLS vs. PPML) on two different model specifications suggests that between 1995 and 2011 the V4 countries were integrating continuously into the Single Market of the European Union. The results also show that the size of border effect is fairly sensitive to the estimator and particularly to the specification chosen by the researcher. According to the country-level estimation, Hungary seems to be the most integrated...

SSD Efficiency at Multiple Data Frequencies: Application on the OECD Countries

Umut Ugurlu, Oktay Tas, Celal Barkan Guran, Aysun Guran

Prague Economic Papers 2018, 27(2):169-195 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.649  

The second order stochastic dominance (SSD) has become exceedingly popular in recent years,due to its ability to determine the dominance of one asset over another for all risk-averse investorswithout a strict requirement in asset distribution. In this study, 33 OECD country indexes and theirenriched set of assets, which consists of some combinations of these indexes, are investigatedand compared between 2007 and 2015 by utilizing pairwise SSD comparisons, with different datafrequencies, such as daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly. This paper contributes to the literaturein three points: Firstly, a serious portion...

Evaluating Competencies of Graduates in Tourism as a Prerequisite for Future Employability

Lukáš Malec, Alžbeta Kiráľová

Prague Economic Papers 2018, 27(2):196-214 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.651  

This study attempted to evaluate the differences between bachelor and master requirements in the field of tourism regarding sixteen communication as well as sixteen managerial competencies explored in a wide range of employers in the Czech Republic. The questionnaire survey data were processed using a multivariate approach of the Fisher linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and its partial least squares algorithm (plsLDA) considering two-set cases and the functional relation of both methods depending on a parameter. It was revealed that although the differences between bachelor and master requirements in communication competencies are more pronounced...

The Determinants of Inward FDI in Selected ServiceS Industries in MalaysiA

Tham Siew Yean, Andrew Jia-Yi Kam, Nirwan bin Noh

Prague Economic Papers 2018, 27(2):215-231 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.652  

In its drive to achieve a high-income country status, Malaysia aspires to attract more private investment into the services sector. However, empirical studies on the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI), especially in the services sector, are sparse, even more so at the industry level. The location theory asserts that FDI inflows into a host country are determined by variables related to resources, infrastructure, market conditions, cost and business environment. This paper investigates the validity of the location theory on Malaysia using a set of panel data for eight services industries from 2003 to 2010. We find that at the industry level,...

Using Economic Value Added in Ex-Ante Profitability Calculation of Bank´s Medium-Sized Clients

Štěpánka Křečková

Prague Economic Papers 2018, 27(2):232-247 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.653  

This article deals with the calculation of bank´s medium-sized enterprises clients´ ex-ante profi- tability and the possibility to use Economic Value Added (EVA) tools in such calculation instead of, currently in bank sector, widely used measure of Risk Adjusted Return on Capital (RAROC). Using a sample of medium-sized enterprises clients to whom a credit exposure was approved in one of the banks operating on the bank´s market within a country belonging to the European Union, the expected profitability of these clients was compared by using firstly RAROC and then compared the results to the profitability calculation using EVA tool on the same...