Educational upgrading,structural change and the task composition of jobs in Europe

We analyze the changes in the task content of jobs in 24 European countries between 1998 and 2015. We link the O*NET occupational data with the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU‐LFS), and use the methodology of Acemoglu and Autor ( 2011 ). We find that the intensity of non‐routine cognitive tasks grew in all countries, while the intensity of manual tasks declined. Workforce upskilling was the major factor contributing to these developments. The intensity of routine cognitive tasks grew in most Central and Eastern European countries, but it declined in Western European countries. This difference is attributed to the contrasting patterns of structural changes in these groups of countries.     

File sharing as conditional cooperation: evidence from a framed field experiment

In this project, we investigate downloading and sharing behaviour in a novel ‘piracy game’ modelled after standard public good games. We find that willingness to share correlates positively with the sharing by others. By contrast, actual behaviour in the ‘piracy game’ is not correlated with self-reported behaviour.     

Demand for cigarettes in Turkey: an application of count data models

Household cigarette demand in Turkey is examined using the zero-inflated negative binomial model to account for a large portion of households not reporting cigarette smoking or purchase and estimated using the data from the national household survey implemented in 2003. Data were divided into two main groups: families with and without teenagers. Results identify relevant household head and household characteristics needed to develop effective public policy to prevent the decision to begin to smoke and to reduce cigarette purchase to lower the future growth of government healthcare expenditures. Specifically, healthcare expenditure share, income, and cigarette-price elasticities are relevant in lowering cigarette purchases. The calculated price elasticities for cigarette demand falls within the range determined by studies conducted for developed countries including the member states of the European Union. An estimate of the effect of an increase in the excise tax lowering demand is provided.     

Does the use of professional legal assistance bring measurable benefits?

In this paper, the first attempt to quantify measurable effects of using legal advisory services is made with the use of a random sample and advanced econometric methods (robust MM-estimator). The estimates of parameters of an extended Mincer equation indicate that the appearance of legal problems results in lower earnings per person in a household and the choice of an active reaction to this legal problem results in a substantial reduction of losses.     

Pricing to Market Behavior by Canadian and U.S. Agri-food Exporters: Evidence from Wheat, Pulse and Apples

A fixed-effects model to control for time variation in marginal costs is employed to pinpoint evidence of price discriminatory behavior of Canadian and U.S. exporters of agri-food products. We test for evidence of pricing to market behavior and whether price discrimination or commodity/country characteristics may provide a plausible explanation. A distinguishing feature of our approach is to examine the time-series properties of the data by the conventional augmented Dickey-Fuller and recently developed panel unit root test. The panel data set employed in this paper consists of annual exchange rates and export prices for three agri-food products (wheat, pulse and apples) exported by Canada and the U.S. in foreign markets during 1980–98. Our fixed-effects model suggests that U.S. exporters are sensitive to exchange rate changes, while Canadian exporters in most cases raised price markups in response to a depreciated currency in overseas markets. The results highlight the differences in pricing policy that both countries employ to merchandise agri-food products in export markets.     

An Exchange Rate Model with Market Pressures and a Contagion Effect

The model we propose includes variables accounting for the behavioral aspects of decision-making in the currency markets, namely the contagion effect between countries in the same region. It combines the classical purchasing power parity (PPP) and uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) hypotheses with the effects of risk aversion in financial markets and of currency market pressures.

The results based on the Polish data confirm that the currency market instabilities arise not only from fundamental factors such as economic activity and the country’s balance of payments, but also from the contagion effect brought about by investors’ tendency to view Poland and its neighbors, the Czech Republic and Hungary, as one group.     

ÜberfühServiceorientierte Strukturen zur Unterstützung des integrierten Konzernrechnungswesens

Ohne Zusammenfassung Ihr Forschungsschwerpunkt liegt im Bereich des Preiscontrollings, ihr Dissertationsvorhaben besch?ftigt sich mit dem empirischen Nachweis von Rationalit?tsdefiziten im Preismanagement.     

Central Bank Independence in Transition Economies

The paper discusses recent changes in central bank laws and the relationship between inflation and central bank independence in transition economies. Two indices of legal independence are constructed, covering political and economic aspects of independence. Most of the countries experienced high-inflation episodes in the recent past and changes introduced to the laws after, or simultaneously, with stabilization programmes strengthened the position of the central banks. In further analysis, an inverse relationship emerges between inflation and indices of central bank independence. However, the robust relationship is present only at a high level of economic liberalization. This conclusion is supported by results from regressions on time-aggregated and panel data, even after controlling for the government fiscal position and the absence/presence of an IMF stabilization package.     

How to rescue the environment： The uncommon idea

Successful solution to any environmental problem implies working with Knightian uncertainty that explicitly deals with decision making under conditions of unstructured randomness. Nature did not endow us with clear set of laws. A ＂wild＂ type of randomness that we will never discern due to its unstable properties makes the assignment of corresponding probabilities impossible. For that reason, the consideration of general economical factors within cost/benefit analysis must fail. So, instead of governmental imervention and cup and trade scheme, we propose direct financial market out of certificates on environmental improvements. They could be applied unaided by a model specification. The approach is based on Principal-Agent method. We propose to fill a huge gap in what is called Free Market Environmentalism （FME）, and make the proposal of financial market property rights for situations when ＂property＂ rights can not be set.