Did rent deregulation alter tenure choice decisions in the Czech Republic?

Our study is the first that explicitly links rent deregulation and the choice between owning and renting (the tenure choice) using household decisions over a 1‐year period. The rent deregulation process in the Czech Republic started in 2006, two years after joining the European Union. By design, the maximum regulated rent appreciation depended explicitly on real estate prices, which accelerated the pace of deregulation due to rapidly rising prices at the time. A unique dataset enables us to track the tenure choice of households from consumption surveys for subsequent years. The proportion of households that switched from renting to owning sharply increased among renters of regulated apartments. We show that this change was caused by the deregulation process. In contrast, rent deregulation makes owners and renters paying market rent less likely to change ownership status.     

DO MANAGERS MATTER: EVIDENCE FROM E‐SPORTS

Growing importance of human resources places the role of managers at the core of company efficiency. However, there are studies that demonstrate the efficiency of teams without a manager, so‐called self‐managed teams, is higher comparing with managed teams. Thus, despite the focus on managerial efficiency in the economic literature, the issue of whether a team needs a manager is far from settled. In this paper, we use a quasi‐experimental setting from e‐Sports (competitive video gaming) to understand whether the hiring a manager is of benefit to team performance. The empirical part of the study is based on endogenous switching regression model. This method allows investigating what performance of self‐managed team would be if it will have a manager and vice versa. The dataset includes the information of prize money and features of top e‐Sports teams in Counter‐Strike: Global Offensive (e‐Sports discipline) from 2013 to 2017. The main finding of this study is that managed teams perform better than self‐managed ones but this is not due to the manager. (JEL Z2, M54, L25)     

中国与捷克的贸易联系:部门分析

捷克与中国的贸易存在巨额的赤字。撇开捷克贸易赤字的出口一方,我们来看一下进口。捷克是中国对欧盟进口的门户吗?中国的进口是否被用到了进一步加工领域?文章分析了影响贸易赤字的各个因素,比较了捷克与欧盟15国及波兰、匈牙利和斯洛伐克从中国的进口情况。分析表明,捷克从中国的进口表现出与其他国家非常不同的发展趋势,不仅进口量巨大(占GDP的比重),而且在投资品和进一步加工产品方面有快速的发展。对格鲁伯—劳埃德产业内贸易指数的计算表明,在所有测算国家中中捷贸易的数值最低。该研究验证了一个假设:捷克是中国进入和拓展欧盟市场的一个立足点。     

Impacts of increased bioenergy demand on global food markets: an AgMIP economic model intercomparison

Integrated Assessment studies have shown that meeting ambitious greenhouse gas mitigation targets will require substantial amounts of bioenergy as part of the future energy mix. In the course of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), five global agro‐economic models were used to analyze a future scenario with global demand for ligno‐cellulosic bioenergy rising to about 100 ExaJoule in 2050. From this exercise a tentative conclusion can be drawn that ambitious climate change mitigation need not drive up global food prices much, if the extra land required for bioenergy production is accessible or if the feedstock, for example, from forests, does not directly compete for agricultural land. Agricultural price effects across models by the year 2050 from high bioenergy demand in an ambitious mitigation scenario appear to be much smaller (+5% average across models) than from direct climate impacts on crop yields in a high‐emission scenario (+25% average across models). However, potential future scarcities of water and nutrients, policy‐induced restrictions on agricultural land expansion, as well as potential welfare losses have not been specifically looked at in this exercise.