The impact of China's imports on European Union industrial employment

As the EU's biggest supplier of imported goods and a second trading partner, China has become an increasingly important actor on the global economic scene. This paper reports new evidence through analyzing whether the EU labour market is affected by exposure to imports from China. Drawing on a panel dataset of 27 EU countries, over the 2003–2013 period, and using the pooled mean group estimator, the results show that imports from China have a negative effect on industrial employment. This result holds separately for the all analyzed categories: all products, manufactured products as well as for the sub‐groups.     

Sources of productivity differentials in manufacturing in post-transition urban South-East Europe

The paper analyses the effects of urbanization and localisation economies on manufacturing firms’ productivity across urban landscapes in post-transition South-East European (SEE) countries. Fixed-effects panel data estimations on a large sample of firms show that the factors accounting for productivity advantages of manufacturing firms in urban post-transition SEE are related to the firms and to the environment in which these firms operate. Firms located in diversified cities benefit from a productivity premium generated in this type of agglomeration, while no evidence was found that the relative specialization across industries has any effect on firm productivity levels.     

Measuring the effectiveness of cost and price competitiveness in external rebalancing of euro area countries: What do alternative HCIs tell us?

This study examines the marginal effects of traditional determinants of exports and imports with a focus on the role of price competitiveness in restoring external balances in the euro area. It is a first attempt to compare marginal effects of various harmonised competitiveness indicators (HCIs) on both exports and imports of both goods and services across individual euro area countries. We find evidence that HCIs based on broader cost and price measures have a larger marginal effect (with some exceptions) on exports of goods. Exports of services are sensitive to HCIs in big euro area countries and Slovakia, where exports of services are also found more sensitive to competitiveness indicators based on broader price measures. Imports of goods and imports of services are quite insensitive to changes in relative prices. Finally, in some cases measures of fit indicate that a large unexplained residual part is present, implying that other non-price related factors might play an important role in driving foreign trade and policies aimed at enhancing the quality of goods traded are warranted.     

Reputation as Matching Identities and Images: Extending Davies and Chun's (2002) Research on Gaps between the Internal and External Perceptions of the Corporate Brand

Corporate reputation is defined as a construct representing aggregated perceptions of people in and around companies. A corporate personality scale was developed to measure identities as internal perceptions and images as external perceptions with the same instrument. We report here an application of this instrument and the replication of a previous study conducted by Davies and Chun in 2002 (Corporate reputation review 5(2/3): 144–158), by comparing two similar companies operating in the same industry. Perceptions of employees, students, journalists and professional colleagues were measured for each company. The reputations of the two companies were different in synchronization of perceptions of respondent groups for each company (one high and one low) and in their comparative scores from different respondent groups. The study discovered that two companies could be equally successful in performance while their reputations can be significantly different. The second significant theoretical implication of the study was the finding that a composite, aggregate measure of a corporate reputation can obscure as much as reveal perceptions of different valuing groups. The main practical implication of the study is that companies can achieve comparable performances despite having different personalities both in profile and in coherence. This implies that executives need to observe their organizations through various views, which should allow them more freedom of action and experimentation.     

TOWARDS SOUND MONETARY INSTITUTIONS

Most people see money and central banking as shrouded by an impenetrable veil of mystery, as matters that ought to be delegated to expert economists in central banks. Yet the actual performance of central banks has been less than stellar. And there are good reasons to expect unchecked, discretionary monetary policy by central bankers to produce less‐than‐perfect results. Not only do central bankers not have the right incentives and knowledge to make beneficial discretionary decisions, but the economy does not always behave in a predictable fashion, reacting as an automaton to discretionary policy shifts. A market‐based monetary arrangement – such as Friedrich von Hayek's free banking proposal – would be preferable to a national or supranational monopoly on the issue of money. If such an arrangement is not attainable, then it is desirable, at the very least, that the behaviour of central bankers is constrained by rules, such as nominal income growth targets.     

The changing role of education in the distribution of earnings and household income

This article draws on income surveys from the last two decades to report on trends in earnings disparities and household income inequality in the Czech Republic. Education has been the main axis of change in this area, having acquired a much greater role in the entire process of collecting and distributing income. First, an increasing influence of education is evident in the personal earnings of employees, returns to education having doubled. Second, in couples, education has an important impact on both women’s employment and their earnings. Third, the importance of marital partners’ education levels on household income grew even more than its effect on earnings.     

Ein neuer Versuch der Bemessung des Grenznutzens

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Use of social networks in banking: a study in the Czech Republic

Social networks are becoming more and more important nowadays. Apart from regular users of the Internet, companies have started to use them in their business. Their potential is that a great number of people, future clients of big companies, use them on a daily basis. Thus, the aim of this article is to analyse the use of social networks in the banking sector of the Czech Republic, particularly with respect to customer support. The methods of this study include common data analysis and professional analysis. Common data analysis consists of the evaluation of public data from social networks and web pages of the selected bank institutions. The professional analysis is conducted by paid professional analytical tools that provide more detailed statistics. The findings of the study show that social networks are now well-established tools for the Czech banks to attract both their current and potential clients. The Czech banks seem to care about their clients by trying to meet their needs. Customer care and services provided, however, differ with type of bank.     

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.