Export Sophistication: A Dynamic Panel Data Approach

In this article, we analyze export sophistication based on a large panel dataset (2001–2015; 101 countries) and using various estimation algorithms. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we evaluate the bias properties of estimators and show that GMM-type estimators outperform instrumental-variable and fixed-effects estimators. Based on our analysis we document that GDP per capita and the size of the economy exhibit significant and positive effects on export sophistication; weak institutional quality exhibits negative effect. We also show that export sophistication is path-dependent and stable even during a major economic crisis, which is especially important for emerging and developing economies.     

Divestitures,privatization and corporate performance in emerging markets

We use new firm‐level data to examine the effects of firm divestitures and privatization on corporate performance in a rapidly emerging market economy. Unlike the existing literature, we control for accompanying ownership changes and the fact that divestitures and ownership are potentially endogenous variables. We find that divestitures increase the firm's profitability but do not alter its scale of operations, while the effect of privatization depends on the resulting ownership structure – sometimes improving performance and sometimes bringing about decline. The effects of privatization are thus more nuanced than suggested in earlier studies. Methodologically, our study provides evidence that it is important to control for changes in ownership when analyzing divestitures and to control for endogeneity, selection and data attrition when analyzing the effects of divestitures and privatization.     

Foreign News and Spillovers in Emerging European Stock Markets

We analyze foreign news and spillovers in the emerging EU stock markets (the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland). We employ high‐frequency five‐minute intraday data on stock market index returns and four classes of EU and US macroeconomic announcements during 2004–07. We account for the difference of each announcement from its market expectation and we jointly model the volatility of the returns accounting for intraday movements and day‐of‐the‐week effects. Our findings show that intraday interactions on the new EU markets are strongly determined by mature stock markets as well as the macroeconomic news originating thereby. We show that strong contemporaneous links across markets are present even after controlling for macroeconomic announcements. Finally, in terms of specific announcements, we are able to show the exact sources of macro news spillovers from the developed foreign markets to the three new EU markets under research.     

Direct and indirect effects of FDI in emerging European markets: A survey and meta-analysis

We review a large body of literature dealing with the effects of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on economies during their transformation from a command economic system toward a market system. We report the results of a meta-analysis based on the literature on externalities from FDI. The studies on emerging European markets covered in our survey report direct and indirect FDI effects weakening over time, similarly as in other FDI destination countries. This is imputable to a publication bias that is detected and to the fact that more sophisticated methods and more controls can be used once a sufficient time span is available. Panel studies are likely to find relatively lower spillover effects. The choice of the research design (definition of firm performance and foreign firm presence) matters. More specific to the sampled studies is the role played by forward and backward spillovers which dominate other channels in driving FDI externalities.     

Macroeconomic sources of foreign exchange risk in new EU members

We address the issue of foreign exchange risk and its macroeconomic determinants in several new EU members. We derive the observable macroeconomic factors—consumption and inflation—using the stochastic discount factor (SDF) approach. The joint distribution of excess returns in the foreign exchange market and the factors are modeled using a multivariate GARCH-in-mean specification. Our findings show that both real and nominal factors play important roles in explaining the variability of the foreign exchange risk premium. Both types of factors should be included in monetary general equilibrium models employed to study excess returns. To contribute to the further stability of domestic currencies, the new EU members should strive to implement stabilization policies aimed at achieving nominal as well as real convergence with the core EU members.     

Firm efficiency: Domestic owners,coalitions, and FDI

In this paper we analyze the evolution of firm efficiency in the Czech Republic. Using a large panel of more than 190,000 Czech firm/years we study whether firms fully utilize their resources, how firm efficiency evolves over time, and how firm efficiency is determined by ownership structure. We employ a panel version of a stochastic production frontier model for the period 1996–2007 with time-varying efficiency. We differentiate among various degrees of ownership concentration and domestic or foreign origin. In a two-stage set-up we first estimate the degree of firm inefficiency and then the effect of ownership structure on the distance from the efficiency frontier. Our results support the hypothesis that concentrated ownership is positively related to efficiency. FDI has beneficial effects at the microeconomic level. However, we show that a simple majority is not necessarily the best structure to improve efficiency. We further analyze the effects of ownership coalitions and shed light on many other subtleties of how ownership and the specific industry affect firm efficiency.     

The reaction of asset prices to macroeconomic announcements in new EU markets: Evidence from intraday data

We estimate the impact of macroeconomic news on composite stock returns in three emerging European Union financial markets (the Budapest BUX, Prague PX-50, and Warsaw WIG-20), using intraday data and macroeconomic announcements. Our contribution is twofold. We employ a larger set of macroeconomic data releases than used in previous studies and also use intraday data, an excess impact approach, and foreign news to provide more reliable inferences. Composite stock returns are computed based on 5-min intervals (ticks) and macroeconomic news are measured based on the deviations of the actual announcement values from their expectations. Overall, we find that all three new EU stock markets are subject to significant spillovers directly via the composite index returns from the EU, the U.S. and neighboring markets; Budapest exhibits the strongest spillover effect, followed by Warsaw and Prague. The Czech and Hungarian markets are also subject to spillovers indirectly through the transmission of macroeconomic news. The impact of EU-wide announcements is evidenced more in the case of Hungary, while the Czech market is more impacted by U.S. news. The Polish market is marginally affected by EU news. In addition, after decomposing pooled announcements, we show that the impact of multiple announcements is stronger than that of single news. Our results suggest that the impact of foreign macroeconomic announcements goes beyond the impact of the foreign stock markets on Central and Eastern European indices. We also discuss the implications of the findings for financial stability in the three emerging European markets.     

Volatility transmission in emerging European foreign exchange markets

This paper studies the dynamics of volatility transmission between Central European (CE) currencies and the EUR/USD foreign exchange using model-free estimates of daily exchange rate volatility based on intraday data. We formulate a flexible yet parsimonious parametric model in which the daily realized volatility of a given exchange rate depends both on its own lags as well as on the lagged realized volatilities of the other exchange rates. We find evidence of statistically significant intra-regional volatility spillovers among the CE foreign exchange markets. With the exception of the Czech and, prior to the recent turbulent economic events, Polish currencies, we find no significant spillovers running from the EUR/USD to the CE foreign exchange markets. To measure the overall magnitude and evolution of volatility transmission over time, we construct a dynamic version of the Diebold–Yilmaz volatility spillover index and show that volatility spillovers tend to increase in periods characterized by market uncertainty.     

Learning by investing

We test for learning among heterogeneous individuals who are engaged in bidding and who possess limited information about the auctioned assets. We use an extensive dataset taken from an auction through which state‐owned enterprises were privatized in the Czech Republic in 1993–94. To test for learning, we develop new measures of individual performance to accommodate the varying prices of assets available in six successive stages of bidding. We present evidence that learning took place among heterogeneous agents during a large‐scale multi‐stage auction that is unique in terms of its size, incentives and variation. The auction’s design, with multiple market periods, allowed agents to learn based on accumulated experience. As individuals had to pay a fee to participate, and as the potential gain was in the magnitude of several months’ salary, we conclude that large incentives were driving our results.