Unbundling of insurance contracts according to IFRSs – applicability and limitations

Insurance contracts are difficult to report on in financial statements because they often – or even regularly – contain both an insurance component and a so-called deposit component. Both IFRS 4 “Insurance Contracts” and the IASB's recent Discussion Paper entitled “Preliminary Views on Insurance Contracts” require an insurer to unbundle those components under certain conditions. In this regard, unbundling refers to accounting for the deposit component separately from the insurance component as if they were independent contracts. However, the Discussion Paper contains no guidelines on how the process of unbundling shall be carried out. It is the authors' aim to develop a solution for the separation problem which is innovative, theoretically correct and practically applicable. The principal innovation is the way of distinction between different types of deposit components. Dividing them into “implicit” and “explicit” deposit components delivers the theoretically correct results for unbundling of insurance contracts for accounting purposes. While unbundling can be carried out without major difficulties in the case of insurance contracts containing an explicit deposit component, it is only implementable in exceptional cases for insurance contracts containing an implicit deposit component.     

Optimal choice of order statistics under confidence region estimation in case of large samples

The problem of optimal estimation of location and scale parameters of distributions, by means of two-dimensional confidence regions based on L-statistics, is considered. The case, when the sample size tends to infinity, is analyzed.     

ICT modernization in Central and Eastern Europe: a Schumpeterian catching up perspective

The paper characterizes main trends in ICT implementation and diffusion in the CEE countries in terms of market volume, economic development and ICT trade integration within the EU market. The analysis reveals a gradual closing up of the technology gap in ICT sector between the CEE and the ‘old’ EU countries. The focus is on the relationship between ICT expenditure, NRI index, vs GDP per capita, competitiveness and productivity. The evolution of ICT development trajectory is traced analysing the changing pattern of ICT trade between the CEE countries and the EU. The impact of the current crisis on the structural adjustment of the CEE ICT sector is assessed from the perspective of Schumpeterian technology gap and catching up.     

Is Inflation Always and Everywhere a Monetary Phenomenon?*

Using a sample of about 160 countries over the last 30 years, we test for the quantity theory relationship between money and inflation. When analysing the full sample of countries, we find a strong positive relation between long‐run inflation and the money growth rate. The relation is not proportional, however. The strong link between inflation and money growth is almost wholly due to the presence of high‐(or hyper‐) inflation countries in the sample. The relationship between inflation and money growth for low‐inflation countries (on average less than 10% per annum over the last 30 years) is weak.     

The effects of monetary policy in the Czech Republic: an empirical study

In this paper, we examine the effects of Czech monetary policy on the economy within the vector auto regression (VAR), structural VAR, Bayesian VAR with sign restrictions, and factor-augmented VAR, frameworks. We document a well-functioning transmission mechanism similar to the euro area countries, especially in terms of persistence of monetary policy shocks. Subject to various sensitivity tests, we find that a contractionary monetary policy shock has a negative effect on the degree of economic activity and the price level, both with a peak response after one year or so. Regarding prices at the sectoral level, tradables adjust faster than non-tradables, which is in line with microeconomic evidence on price stickiness. There is no price puzzle, as our data come from a single monetary policy regime. There is a rationale in using the real-time output gap instead of current GDP growth, as using the former results in much more precise estimates. The results indicate a rather persistent appreciation of the domestic currency after a monetary tightening, with a gradual depreciation afterwards.     

Who Owns the Land? Gender and Land‐Titling Programmes in Latin America

The main focus of state intervention in Latin American agriculture in the 1990s was on land-titling programs, designed to promote security of tenure and enliven land markets. A review of seven of these projects suggests that they were often designed without sufficient attention to civil codes and marital regimes that protect women's property rights. They often ignored that a household's endowment of land may consist of three forms of property: the wife's, the husband's and jointly owned property. By assuming that the family farm is owned by the male household head, these projects trampled upon women's ownership rights. Nonetheless, the share of female beneficiaries of land-titling projects has been much higher than the share of women adjudicated land under the agrarian reforms of previous decades. This is partly because the primary way that women acquire land is through inheritance, and inheritance appears to be more gender equitable than other manners of acquiring land. It is also due to the impact of the more gender-equitable agrarian legislation of the current period, itself a product of the impact of women's movements on the state.     

Validation of an instrument to measure absorptive capacity

Absorptive capacity is an ability firms should develop if they wish to adapt to changes in an increasingly competitive and changing environment and to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. Despite the increase in literature on absorptive capacity, some ambiguity remains in determining the dimensions that shape the construct. Thus, no measurement instrument can be adapted to these dimensions. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the literature on absorptive capacity by using a resource-based view to present an alternative measurement instrument for absorptive capacity. This instrument differentiates between the phases of acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation of knowledge, as well as between the two dimensions of absorptive capacity (potential and realized), to reduce the problem of measuring and identifying the dimensions that shape this important construct. The instrument’s validity and reliability are guaranteed and have been tested using data from 168 Spanish organizations.