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Motivated by the persistent fall in oil prices due to incessant uncertainty-inducing events in recent years, this study empirically examined if economic growth in Africa's top five oil exporters (Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Libya, and Nigeria) is responding asymmetrically to changes in global economic uncertainty as well as uncertainties from U.S., Europe and China using nonlinear ARDL framework from 1997Q1 to 2021Q4. We find that rising global uncertainty hampers economic growth in these economies, while declining global uncertainty significantly enhances growth in Nigeria, Angola and Libya in the short run, but becomes growth-retarding in the long run. Thus, economic growth responds asymmetrically to global uncertainty, especially in the short run. The findings are robust to U.S., Europe, and China uncertainties, except that economic growth in Libya and Algeria remained unresponsive to U.S. and China uncertainties respectively. We concluded that Africa's oil exporters should embrace policies that can strengthen their resilience to global economic uncertainty as well as uncertainties from U.S., Europe, and China.

This study aims to estimate a dynamic fiscal reaction function in a state-space setting to obtain time-varying reaction parameters for appraising the evolution of public debt sustainability in Turkey. The data set used for estimation is the longest for Turkey in the literature. Succinctly speaking, this function quantifies the corrective fiscal efforts exerted to preserve the stability of public debt. The time-varying estimation findings in this study suggest that the recent fiscal history of Turkey can be divided into two subperiods in terms of fiscal stability. Before the mid-1990s, no systematic fiscal response existed to restore the stability of public debt, whereas after the mid-1990s, a remarkable effort was evidenced by the positive fiscal reaction parameters. Notwithstanding some 20 years of strong positive reactions, the former performance appears to be far-off in recent years, and the strength of fiscal reaction has waned gradually, which is perturbing for the future course of fiscal sustainability.

This study evaluates the effects of opening new segments of mass rapid transit (MRT) lines on housing prices near the MRT stations in Tucheng District and Xinzhuang District, New Taipei City, Taiwan. The effect of proximity to each MRT station is estimated separately with difference-in-differences regressions integrated with spatial econometrics with heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors. The opening of the new segment of the Blue Line, also known as Bannan Line of the Taipei Metro, does not significantly influence housing prices within 600-metre road network distance of the MRT stations, compared to prices outside the distance range. In contrast, and also unlike the findings of prior studies, although the segment and the stations are underground structures, the opening of the new segment of the Orange Line, also known as the Zhonghe-Xinlu Line of the Taipei Metro, significantly decreases housing prices within 600-metre road network distance of the MRT stations, compared to prices outside the distance range, perhaps because the opening of the stations is delayed about one and a half years to be used as a temporary storage area for MRT trains. The findings have implications for homebuyers, investors, mortgage lending institutions and tax assessment authorities.

Uncertainty about monetary policy associated with uncertainty in interest rate is an important determinant of economic decisions. Due to the dominant position of the US economy on global financial markets, in addition to countries' own uncertainties, uncertainty related to the monetary policy of the USA may have an impact on other economies. In this study, we investigated the impact of interest rate uncertainties for different maturities on industrial production, inflation, unemployment and exchange rate. We used the impulse response functions based on the vector error correction model (VECM). We also conducted the Granger causality test to analyse the causality. We examined the impact of US monetary policy uncertainty on the mentioned variables of Turkey. Our findings suggest that uncertainty in long-term interest rates increases unemployment and inflation rates. Although we find that uncertainty in interest rate reduces growth of industrial production, we do not find a causal relationship between these variables. Finally, we show that a shock related to US monetary policy uncertainty tends to increase unemployment significantly, while reducing the growth of production.

This study aims to evaluate the effects of selected key factors on health outcomes. Unfortunately, statistical reporting in this field is not harmonized, and in some countries it is completely absent. For this reason, valuable information for health determinant analysis may be lacking or overlooked. Using two different databases, we obtained data from 61 countries for the period 2000-2015. To analyse panel data with over 660 observations, a linear mixed model was applied. This paper contributes to the health economics debate by statistically testing the relationship between health outcomes and variables such as healthcare personnel, healthcare expenditure and infrastructure. The results confirm the importance of healthcare expenditure and healthcare infrastructure. However, the size and direction of the effect vary among countries with different income levels. In regard to human resources, the number of doctors proved to have a significant effect only in lower-income countries.

Government debt has increased not only in times of economic stress, but it has become a com- mon manifestation of government expenditure funding. The aim of the paper is to inspect the effect of government debt on economic freedom in ten CEE countries between 1995 and 2020 using a panel model approach. Selected quantitative and qualitative variables were examined to validate the hypothesis, including public governance indicators, besides the economic ones. Based on a robust panel setting, we conclude that government debt has a negative impact on economic freedom. A causality from government debt to economic freedom is detected to- gether with a long-term equilibrium relationship between them, with both a long-run and a short-run negative impact of debt on economic freedom. For the considered countries, the gross debt impacts economic freedom and not vice-versa.

This article investigates the relationship between environmentally related taxes introduced in OECD countries and air pollution, represented by carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emission levels in the atmosphere. The article makes a statistical analysis of data on environmental taxes, specifically energy and transport taxes, and other variables that might affect air quality in the OECD member countries. The ARDL model used on the panel data of all OECD member countries shows statistical significance in only one out of five models. A subsequent comparative analysis of the reduced sample of OECD countries that are members of the EU exhibits a statistically significant effect of environmentally related tax revenues on the air emission levels, indicating that this relationship is present in the reduced sample.

This paper uses the projection pursuit method (PP method) to construct a comprehensive output indicator and uses the heterogeneous stochastic frontier model (HSFM model) to calculate China's green economy efficiency and analyse effects of environmental factors on the inefficiency fluctuation of green economy. Conclusions are drawn as follows: (1) The average value of China's green economy efficiency is generally low, and a regional heterogeneity of green economy efficiency is obvious. (2) For the overall inefficiency fluctuation of China's green economy, openness has a significant inhibitory effect; the industrialization level and technological level have a certain inhibitory effect, but their importance is weaker than that of openness; fiscal decentralization has an insignificant effect. Since 2001, changes in unit openness and the unit industrialization level have had a strengthened restraining effect on the inefficiency fluctuations of China's green economy, and the change in the unit technology level has had a small and stable inhibitory effect on China's green economy's inefficiency fluctuation. (3) Openness and the industrialization level have had a significant inhibitory effect on the inefficiency fluctuation of China's regional green economy in the Eastern region more than in the Central and Western regions; the technological level has had a certain inhibitory effect in the Central and Western regions, but its influence is lower than that of openness. The inhibitory effect of unit change in openness and the industrialization level on the inefficiency fluctuation of green economy in the Central region is greater than that in the Eastern region. The inhibitory effect of unit change in the technological level on the inefficiency fluctuation of green economy in the Western region is obviously greater than that in the Central and Eastern regions. These conclusions can provide a mathematical basis for a reform of China's green economy efficiency.

This paper tests how important the time value of money (TVM) principle is in decision making in real-life conditions, when different selection criteria can be considered. A three-stage survey was administered to students from a Romanian university of economics. They were asked to choose between two cars. These cars have equal total cash outflows but different present values. The benefits from using them were not specified, thus inducing a model ambiguity: respondents may consider only cash flows, but they can consider other benefits, too. It was tested whether the answers remain stable when supplementary information is provided. The respondents explained their motivations. Probit regressions were used to explain the preferences for applying or not applying TVM, for switching from one answer to another, and for converging to a response compatible with a preference for TVM. TVM was not the main selection criterion. Financial education had no impact on the opinion.

Green development prioritizes ecology and sustainability and strengthens scientific and technological innovation to drive high-quality economic development. This paper con- structs a coupled coordination model of a system evaluation index to explore the spatial and temporal pattern of green technology innovation and high-quality economic development. it also employs a Tobit regression model to analyse the influencing factors of coordinated development further. For this purpose, panel data on 30 Chinese provincial administrative regions were selected, ranging from 2010 to 2019. The results indicate that the level of coupling and coordination of green technology innovation with high-quality economic quality shows a steady upward trend and the evolution trend of "basic, moderate, and high coordination". At the same time, differences in coordinated development between regions are obvious, showing a development trend of "high in the east and low in the west". It is affected positively by the industrial structure, urbanization level, economic development level, R&D investment, foreign investment and education investment. In contrast, energy consumption has inhibited the coordinated development of green technology innovation and a high-quality economy coupling.

This paper deals with Czech household mortgage debt and its determinants in the period 1Q2005-2Q2021. Our analysis focuses on the variables determining the level of mortgage debt from both short- and long-term perspectives. Our contribution is two-fold. Firstly, we examine the relationship between the selected variables within a cross-correlation analysis. The results confirm the positive dependency of household mortgage debt and real GDP, real gross average income and the level of house prices. By contrast, a negative relationship was identified for real interest rates, the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. Secondly, we explore the ARDL and EC models and identify one cointegration relationship. Our results confirm that house prices and real wages are determinants of household mortgage debt in the long-term perspective. However, a wider range of variables plays a role in the short run, including house prices, real gross average income, inflation and long-term interest rates. Moreover, our model indicates the insignificance of unemployment in both the short and long run.

The objective of this paper is to examine one of the essential behavioural concepts - the 'status quo bias' - on the available macroeconomic data. The recent global economic crisis has provided a valuable opportunity for analysing the concept and ensured that relevant and sufficient inputs for such academic research are available. Specifically, to study the 'status quo bias', this paper studies the relation between consumption and income before and after the 2008 economic crisis in a selected country. As such, this study attempts to provide answers to such questions as: How strongly is consumption dependent on income prior to and after the crisis? What are the forces behind consumption during the assessed period - income or existing quality of living? What conclusions can be drawn for public finance from the analysis? The findings indicate that the 'status quo bias' behavioural concept could be confirmed based on the tested macroeconomic data, and possible implications for public finance are presented as well.

Equity release contracts allow property owners to receive a financial benefit in exchange for surrendering their real estate to a company. The benefits depend on the life expectancy of owners, the real value of properties, and the rate of interest. These parameters are not the same throughout the years. The aim of the paper is to analyse varying payments of equity release contracts which have already been offered to customers for several years in Poland. A recalculation procedure year by year is proposed applying the actuarial and financial methods. This paper estimates the potential advantages of reverse annuity and reverse mortgage contracts in a changing economic environment. The calculations were made based on actual Polish market data, including the Svensson model of spot interest rate. It is shown that there is considerable scope for increasing retirement income; however, the exact amounts may be unknown. The advantages for customers resulting from changes in parameters and valorization are shown, as well as the risk associated with equity release.

We analyse the extent and determinants of somewhat gloomy employment prospects of older unemployed populations in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. For this purpose, we explore the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions over the period 2004-2014. Survival estimates suggest that older unemployed workers face lower job-finding probabilities compared to prime-age unemployed workers, while this age-based gap increases with longer unemployment spells. The results of estimating the hazard models reveal that the job-finding probability of older unemployed workers is about 20-25% lower than that of the prime-age group, even after controlling for explanatory covariates and unobserved heterogeneity. Unemployment duration appears to be the major determinant of job-finding probability within both age groups. In contrast, the impact of explanatory covariates (gender, education, household characteristics, etc.) is relatively less robust and/or uniform.

We model the probabilistic structure and cash flows arising from marriage reverse annuity contracts in the case of the joint-life status and the last surviving status. In contrast to the classical approach, we take into consideration that future lifetimes between spouses are dependent. The structure of dependence of the length of spouses' lives is modelled using copulas. The term structure of interest rate is modelled using a time-dependent function. The numerical results are based on actual Polish data covering both the structure of the probabilistic model and the interest rate.

An ageing European population and, therefore, a rising dependency ratio of retirees to the working population, strongly suggests that a pension funding gap will be a key social issue in future. Yet many older people have significant real estate assets that they could access using equity release products. They could sell their assets in exchange for lifelong or temporary monthly payments. Equity release products are relatively new to Poland, but are not yet offered by commercial banks in Czechia and Slovakia. This paper estimates the potential benefits of marriage reverse annuity, and reverse mortgage contracts, using the Svensson model function, and empirical property data from selected Czech, Slovak and Polish cities. The results are also compared to the average pension of inhabitants in the selected cities. It is shown that there is substantial scope for boosting retirement income in all the cases considered, though the precise size of the increase depends on factors such as contract buyers' age and life expectancy, the value of their assets, the payment consequences of a spouse's death, and contract suppliers' pricing policies.

The aim of this paper is to find out determinants which affect the commercial banks' decision to lend on the interbank market in the Visegrad countries. The data cover the period from 2000 to 2011. The net interbank position of individual banking sectors significantly differs. Results of the probit model showed that banks' decision to lend in interbank market is determined both by bank-specific and macroeconomic factors. Bank liquidity, capital adequacy and quality of the loan portfolio are important bank-specific factors. Growth rate of the gross domestic products, unemployment rate, financial crisis and level of interest rates matter among macroeconomic factors. Although the Visegrad countries have a lot in common, different factors determined the banks' decision in individual countries. Moreover, the direction of influence of some factors may also differ.

There is still a significant gender wage gap on labour markets in the majority of developed countries. The different earnings are determined mainly by the different sectors, professions and positions that men and women choose. The behavioural approach to interpretation of the labour market agents' decisions can help to explain the choice of different working career paths. The approach focuses on subjective individual preferences and their intrinsic rewards and motivations that cannot be explained by objective rational rules. The paper confirms the different relation of men and women to risk and competition and different preferences to intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and rewards. The author's existing research on Czech data is used. Women indeed preferred a lower risk, although the difference was not large (-0.7 points on a scale of 0-10), while gender does not matter for people with university education. The level of accepted risk was increased by education, career preferences, pride and partnership. On the contrary, having children and their number did not affect the level of accepted risk. As far as extrinsic and intrinsic rewards and motivations were concerned, the preference for intrinsic rewards was higher among women (44%) than men (31%). Women preferred intrinsic rewards compared to higher wages more likely than men. Women with university education preferred intrinsic rewards with the same probability as men with the same degree of education. The preference of non-monetary rewards and motivation increased with higher education.

This paper examines the role of structural change in the asymmetric adjustment of retail energy prices following changes in crude oil costs. The paper also examines the pattern of adjustment in retail energy prices when exchange rate is accounted for as part of the marginal cost of importing crude oil in European countries with high oil import dependency ratio. The paper shows that the results of Greenwood-Nimmo and Shin (2013) no longer hold when the structural change in the relationship between retail energy prices and crude oil costs is taken into the consideration. The paper also cautions that studies like Kristoufek and Lunackova (2014) that failed to account for exchange rate as part of the marginal cost of importing oil for countries with high oil import dependency ratio may be misleading. In fact, the results of this paper further indicate that once the exchange rate effect is taken into consideration, the possibility of rent-seeking behaviour in the gasoline markets of Italy and Spain disappears; while the rockets and feathers effect observed in most of the ex-tax gasoline, diesel, domestic heating oil and industrial fuel oil markets vanishes.

This paper evaluates the relative importance of country and firm-specific determinants of capital structure using a multilevel modelling approach. Annual data for 18,201 public and non-financial firms from 66 countries are analysed for the period 2000-2016. Variance decomposition analysis is employed in order to assess the relative importance of country and firm levels. Additionally, random intercept and random coefficient models are used to analyse direct and indirect effects of capital structure determinants. Our results showed that country and firm levels explain approximately 10% and 60% of the total variability in capital structures, respectively. This shows that managers assign a higher importance to the firm-level factors when making capital structure decisions. Also country-level variables affect leverage choices to a lower extent.

This study questions the importance of accounting for sectoral heterogeneity in a DSGE model for the Czech Republic. The benchmark DSGE model originally developed by the Czech Ministry of Finance benefits from features such as wage and price stickiness, habit formation in the utility function and capital adjustment costs. The Input-Output DSGE model extended hereby proves to provide more precise estimates for the evolution of aggregate variables and to supply a more detailed structure of the economy. The set of variables the dynamics of which significantly improve consists of inflation rate and nominal interest rate. The disaggregated model also fits data well in terms of sectoral production functions. Finally, the absence of industrial heterogeneity in the model is shown to lead to an underestimation of the impact of the technology shock on the Czech gross domestic product.

I take a Bayesian approach to estimate and forecast the effects of fiscal stimulus in various versions of the model by Smets and Wouters (2007) for the US economy. Specifically, I proxy various simpler DSGE sub-models by imposing a tight prior on a single parameter or a combination of tight priors on multiple parameters in the Smets-Wouters model. I find that the present-value government spending multipliers obtained are all in a reasonable range. Moreover, I forecast the effect of fiscal stimulus in a scenario similar to the 2008/2009 recession in the US, where the public expects a large and temporary increase in government spending to stimulate a fragile economy. The forecasts, generated individually by a group of representative models, are weighted averaging by means of the posterior model probabilities that are computed on the basis of their corresponding marginal data densities. According to the Diebold-Mariano test, I find that the forecast error of the combination forecast, computed via Bayesian model averaging (BMA), is statistically larger than the individual forecast, obtained only from the one that has the best fit among those DSGE models.

This paper investigates the impact of behavioural attention on the households' foreign currency savings as a response to the external macroeconomic shocks. The information that the households acquire via different communication channels is expected to influence their decisions regarding their savings' allocation into different currencies. This study has applied the fundamental macroeconomic models by including individuals' attention to the specific risks and search interest in specific keywords on Google in order to assess the impact of acquired information and its communication channel on the households' foreign currency savings. We employed a two-level mixed effects model including macroeconomic fundamentals and individuals' attention to the information determinants. We solved a problem of a long list of potential explanatory variables (keywords) by employing the Bayesian Model Averaging. This study assumes that households are more sensitive to the macroeconomic shocks (factors) if they search simultaneously for infor-mation on Google about these factors or specific related risks. The results emphasize the role behavioural attention during financial turmoil and economic downturn periods, especially in the environment of very low interest rates.

Knowledge of employers' requirements on competencies of job applicants is highly important in the process of human capital accumulation. This paper focuses on the general competencies since they can be applied in a wide range of jobs or tasks and increase an individual's employability. First, employers' requirements on general competencies are identified and described on the basis of 3,822 job advertisements published online. Second, the econometric analysis is used in order to test hypothesis whether examined demand for general competencies is really general or if it differs significantly with respect to required education and firm characteristics. The results of our probit regressions proved that the requirements on examined general skills significantly differ according to the education required and some categories of NACE and ownership of the firms.

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 EU countries. Regional factors explain about 17% of variance in monthly price changes, which is more than any other factors (below 10% each). This result is at odds with the assumptions of many sectoral DSGE models and empirical evidence on the importance of sectoral price shocks in developed economies. The difference may be related to the conclusion that the first regional factor is associated with common disinflationary process that occurred in CEE economies in the 2000s, whereas the second one reveals significant correlations with global factors, especially commodity prices and euro area price developments.

The article shows properties of risk-based portfolios in the German stock market. Those systematic strategies use different approaches to weight stocks in portfolios. We present theoretical and empirical characteristics of five risk-based equity investments: the equal-weighted, minimum variance, maximum diversification and risk parity (equal risk budgeting and equal risk contribution) portfolios. Risk-based portfolios outperformed the market-cap weighted CDAX index with a lower level of risk in the period 2002–2015. Their excess returns relative to the CDAX index can be explained with Scherer’s five-factor model; with Fama-French and low-risk anomaly factors. R2s of different strategies range from 77% to 92%.

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 country getting the lowest home bias parameters followed by the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, respectively.