Globalization and Outward Foreign Direct Investment

While recent research into foreign direct investment (FDI) has focused on examining the importance of institutions, corruption, money laundering, and tax havens, the role of globalization on FDI has not yet been explored. This research investigates the impacts of globalization on outward FDI. We find that both overall globalization and its economic and social dimensions significantly positively influence outward FDI flows. We also demonstrate that beyond the level of globalization, corruption, money laundering, and the status of a country as a tax haven, cross-country similarity also plays an important role. Accordingly, policies specifically designed to increase the transparency of outward FDI flows should be required to address money laundering and the existence of tax havens.     

Uhljeb – a post-socialist homo croaticus: a personification of the economy of favours in Croatia?

Party patronage combined with a collectivist culture appears to present a very resistant socialist legacy in Croatia. In-group favouritism and an overly bureaucratised system provide a fertile soil for uhljebs. An uhljeb is a public sector employee whose main ‘competence’ is membership of a political party or a nepotistic relationship. They now already count in the thousands, and often contribute to the further multiplication of uhljebs, and to an increase in clientelist arrangements. The practice of employing uhljebs both undermines and underpins the existing system. That ambivalence is one of the characteristics of the Russian sistema, and that is one of the important links to compare blat users and uhljebs, in addition to the practice of ‘pulling strings’. As key protagonists, uhljebs and blat users illustrate their own and society’s modus operandi: an intense ‘economy of favours’. Recent studies increasingly show that cultural variables influence economic outcomes and this article presents an extension of the ‘economy of favours’ into Croatia’s paradigm. Based on primary sources and international benchmarks, it provides a comparison of the cultural contexts of Eastern and Western European countries, and portrays a rising informal practice that, despite its omnipresence, has been under-researched in the academic literature.     

Application of Neural Networks to Short Time Series Composite Indexes: Evidence from the Nonlinear Autoregressive with Exogenous Inputs (NARX) Model

The aim of this paper is to extend the index of financial safety (IFS) approach with improving its predictive performance and to show the applicability of artificial neural networks to economic and financial short time series. To this end, prediction is performed by means of the nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous inputs (NARX) model that represents the neural networks and can emulate any nonlinear dynamic state space model. Thus, a NARX model, trained by means of Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm, was chosen since it gave the best performance. Results reveal that the NARX models are suitable for performing short time series composite indexes prediction.

     

Extremal Economic (Inter)Dependence Studies: A Case of the Eastern European Countries

This paper considers the application of copula models to study the shifts in extremal economic dependence of the Eastern European countries, i.e., Ukraine and its neighbouring countries, from 1969 to 2014. Extremal economic dependence is analysed in terms of poverty and affluence and with regard to growth rate. This paper contributes to the previous literature by applying the copula approaches to derive the measurements of the economic interdependence in terms of poverty and affluence. The received results depict the pattern of the (inter)dependence and its evolution across the analysed countries. Dependence on other countries in the extreme values can potentially be useful in adjustments of the economic policy of a country to minimize poverty and prevent high inequality.

     

Financial incentives in the Austrian PAYG-pension system: micro-estimation

The scope of this paper is to investigate the impact of financial incentives on the retirement decision of private sector workers in Austria. How do financial incentives embedded in the Austrian pension system impact individual retirement behavior? We are using a unique dataset of individual social insurance spells. Micro-estimating the impact of financial incentives on the probability of retirement shows that the behavioral response to financial incentives in Austria is relatively large in international comparison. Also, there are striking behavioral differences between men and women. Using the estimates to simulate reform scenarios shows huge behavioral changes as incentives alter.     

Doing good deeds in times of need: a strategic perspective on corporate disaster donations

Major corporations often respond charitably in times of disaster. However, disasters can also impose nontrivial costs on firms themselves, and under adverse conditions, firms typically donate less, not more. This paper takes a strategic perspective on corporate magnanimity in times of crisis by looking at the relationship between firm value, reputation, and donations by U.S. Fortune 500 firms in the case of Hurricane Katrina. In general, we find that Katrina's landfall was associated with significant negative abnormal stock returns. In particular, we find that a reputation for social irresponsibility was associated with both the greatest drop in stock prices and the greatest likelihood of making a subsequent charitable donation in response to the disaster. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Correlation of Labor and Civil Contracts Related to the Performance of Work: Preventing the Substitution of Concepts

Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal - Legal relations arising from a civil law contract for the performance of work or the provision of services are not identical to labor relations, and...