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.     

Transit migration

Unauthorized international migration to the advanced countries has become increasingly more costly and indirect. The hazardous land and sea routes that pass through one or more transit countries offer liquidity‐constrained individuals an opportunity to economize on the pecuniary cost of migration as well as to work along the way to pay for the next leg of the journey. This paper analyzes the optimal behavior of transit migrants and examines its implications for the effectiveness of immigration control measures of the transit and final‐destination countries in deterring unauthorized migration. Strengthening of border controls at the final destination is shown to increase the relative effectiveness of internal enforcement measures of the transit countries, while tougher internal enforcement in the transit countries increases the relative effectiveness of border controls at the final destination.     

Monetary policy transmission mechanisms in Serbia: evidence from the fully-fledged inflation targeting regime

This article examines the effectiveness of monetary transmission mechanisms in the Serbian economy, covering the period from January 2009 (the point at which the formal switch to the fully-fledged inflation targeting regime was made) to December 2013. The results of the recursive VAR models suggest that the exchange rate and credit channels play a major role in the monetary transmission process, whereas this is not true in the case of the interest rate channel. However, the results of the non-recursive VAR models show that the role of the exchange rate has diminished over time. On the other hand, the credit channel has become much more influential. Thus, if one of the overriding objectives of adopting the explicit inflation targeting regime is to enhance the importance of other channels apart from the exchange rate channel, which could make monetary policy more effective in achieving price and financial stability, the switch to the inflation targeting regime is justified.     

An extended matrix of economic growth and corresponding dynamic system

This paper considers an extended matrix of growth and corresponding dynamic system. The aim of this consideration is to define and analyse different cases of interdependences based on the extended matrix of growth. The system on the basis of the extended matrix of growth is built on the general structure of sectors growth. This generalized structure is expressed by the direct and indirect growth rates among sectors and exogenous factors. The main characteristic of this system is that it can be formulated and examined under various conditions. This is because of the fact that growth is characteristic of all economic processes, and the extended matrix of growth has the capability of including and expressing the structural and dynamic aspects of the interdependence of processes. In this sense the extended matrix of growth is used to examine various systems of interdependence.     

Cost efficiency of Slovenian water distribution utilities: an application of stochastic frontier methods

This study estimates cost inefficiency and economies of scale of Slovenian water distribution utilities over the 1997–2003 period by employing several different stochastic frontier methods. The results indicate that significant cost inefficiencies are present in the utilities. An introduction of incentive-based price regulation scheme might help resolve this problem. However, the inefficiency scores obtained from different cost frontier models are not found to be robust. The levels of inefficiency estimates as well as the rankings depend on the econometric specification of the model. The established lack of robustness can be at least partly explained by different ability of the models to separate unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency. Newly proposed true fixed effects model (Greene, J Econom 126:269–303, 2005; J Prod Anal 23(1):7–32, 2005) appears to perform better than the conventional panel data models with respect to distinguishing between unobserved heterogeneity and inefficiency. On the other hand, different models produce fairly robust results with respect to estimates of economies of output density, customer density and economies of scale. The optimal size of a company is found to closely corresponds to the sample median. Economies of scale are found in small-sized utilities, while large companies exhibit diseconomies of scale.

The Glass Ceiling Puzzle,Legal Institutions,and the Shadow Economy

ABSTRACT

Scholarly studies in economics, sociology, psychology, and management emphasize the low number of women in management as one of the main indicators of gender discrimination in the labor market. This study investigates the differences in the percentage of women in senior management across forty-five countries. The results of the regression analysis show that women are more represented in senior management in developing countries than in so-called “liberal Western democracies.” Women also participate more in senior management in countries in which prejudice and discrimination against women are greater. The study presents empirical evidence for two economic explanations for these puzzling results: the weak functioning of the legal system and the large size of the shadow economy.     

Impact of an unexplained component of real exchange rate volatility on FDI: Evidence from transition countries

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of an unexplained component of real exchange rate volatility on FDI in transition economies. We make an attempt to overcome some problems associated with previous studies; the aggregation problem, inadequate measures of volatility, short-run focus and the endogeneity problem. Using a GARCH specification, we focus on long-run volatility, while we control for the endogeneity problem by applying SYS-GMM estimation. The obtained results show that the impact of the unexplained component of real exchange rate volatility on FDI differs among economic activities since 2000. As part of the re-estimation exercise, we use two alternative measures of volatility to avoid arbitrariness. The obtained results are to a large extent in accordance with the first one.     

Partial equilibria with convex capital requirements: existence,uniqueness and stability

We consider several risk-averse financial agents who negotiate the price of a bundle of contingent claims in an incomplete semimartingale model of a financial market. Assuming that the agents’ risk preferences are modeled by convex capital requirements, we define and analyze their demand functions and propose a notion of a partial equilibrium price. In addition to sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness, we also show that the equilibrium prices are stable with respect to misspecifications of agents’ risk preferences.