Investment Behaviour,Population Structure and Long-term Growth in Eastern Europe and Russia

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

Testing the Information Structure of Eastern European Markets: The Warsaw Stock Exchange

This paper investigates the content of the information set used by the agents in the Warsaw Stock Exchange - WSE. Three “candidate variables” are examined — consumers’ prices, the zloty/US$ exchange rate and the refinancing rate of the National Bank of Poland — with respect to three WSE stocks, from different sectors of the economy. The methodology employed supposes that the innovations in the price series are orthogonal to all variables within or outside the information set. Beyond the question of how to specify the agents expectations, the WSE trading rules and the high volatility period present in all monthly price series were additional problems to render it operational. Given the solutions adopted, in only three out of the nine cases tested, it was possible to reject the null that the candidate did not belong to the information set. This is a signal that macroeconomic fundamentals are still absent from the WSE. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Leon Walras' Theory of Money

A bstract . Leon Walras'theory of money , in spite of its serious flaws, provides important insights which should prove of interest to modern monetarists. He was one of the few economists in the classical tradition to detect major deficiencies in the quantity theory of money. He favored a strong public policy to regulate the money supply in order to ensure the preservation of economic equilibrium. Most of his arguments were motivated by his concern for the wage earners because he knew that they were the first to suffer in times of economic crisis.     

Pricing strategies of low-cost airlines: The Ryanair case study

We analyse the pricing policy adopted by Ryanair, the main low-cost carrier in Europe. Based on a year's fare data for all of Ryanair's European flights, using a family of hyperbolic price functions, the optimal pricing curve for each route is estimated. The analysis shows a positive correlation between the average fare for each route and its length, the frequency of flights operating on that route, and the percentage of fully booked flights. As the share of seats offered by the carrier at the departure and destination airports increases, fares tend to decrease. The correlation of dynamic pricing to route length and the frequency of flights is negative. Conversely, as competition increases discounts on advance fares rise.     

Determinants of corporate debt maturity in South America: Do institutional quality and financial development matter?

We test whether a country's level of financial development or institutional quality (or both) has a first‐order effect on corporate debt maturity decisions on a sample of 359 non-financial firms from five South American countries over a 12‐year period. We find that there is a substantial dynamic component in the determination of a firm's debt maturity, and firms face moderate adjustment frictions toward their optimal maturities. More importantly, the level of financial development does not influence debt maturity, whereas the institutional quality of a country has a significant positive effect on the level of long-term debt in a firm's financial structure. Our results support the hypothesis that the quality of national institutions is an important determinant of corporate financing in general and of debt maturity in particular.     

Account portfolio analysis for strategy development

This article proposes a method of composing and complementing industrial marketing strategy. A new approach to industrial marketing strategy is presented. It has the customer as the core of the analysis and considers some of the most important elements of industrial marketing, such as derived demand and buyer/seller relationships. This new approach, called account portfolio analysis, offers some indications to industrial managers and scholars for the analysis of marketing strategies tailored expressly for industrial companies.     

Exchange rate volatility in high inflation economies: An econometric study of Poland and Brazil

This paper analyses exchange rate series for Poland and Brazil. The Polish series, related to the period soon after the first liberalizing measures, presents a high volatility which is not accounted for by some selected fundamentals. The Brazilian series, though also keeping evidence of excessive volatility, is cointegrated with fundamentals similar to those of the Polish case. This raises the issue of a learning process taking place during persistent inflations. Unsuccessful one-shot stabilization plans can reinforce this process, leaving a lasting imprint in the excessive volatility pattern. The message seems clear, though maybe not easy to implement: agents take some time to learn to live in non-stable environments; to avoid this by one-shot measures — if unsuccessful — can have a very high cost and pre-empt future corrections.     

Survey on technical efficiency in higher education: A meta-fractional regression analysis

There has been remarkable growth in the number of studies using data envelopment analysis (DEA) in research on higher education. Heterogeneous DEA models have been applied in assessing the performance of higher education institutions (HEIs), and the multi-faceted production process of higher education has further motivated the extension and improvement of the DEA approach. The present study conducts a meta-regression analysis of 109 published DEA applications in higher education at different levels of analysis to provide a better understanding of the relationship between the efficiency results and the attributes of the studies implemented in different nations.