Spatio-temporal determinants of the structural and productive transformation of regions in Central and East European countries

This paper investigates the determinants of the structural (between-sectoral) and productive (within-sectoral) transformation of 56 NUTS2 regions in Central and East European (CEE) countries over the 2008–2014 period. Over the analysed period, a transformation of the analysed regions has taken place towards the tertiary sector and high value-added activities. The results from a spatial panel Durbin analysis reveal the existence of product-space linkages and point to a productive transformation towards high technology-intensive activities as an important driver of industrial development. Equal access to digital infrastructure in urban and rural areas and transfer of skills, knowledge and resources through the inflow of foreign investment and imports of production inputs increase the contribution of manufacturing to regional employment. The effect of profit tax reductions on the share of manufacturing employment is about five times larger than the effect of government subsidies to production.     

Underground economy and aggregate fluctuations

This paper explores the role of underground economic activities as an explanation of differences in registered aggregate fluctuations. In order to do so, we introduce an underground economy sector in an otherwise standard Real Business Cycle model and calibrate it to the USA economy. We find that, at low frequencies, Europe fluctuates more than the USA, while its participation rate is smaller. The existence of underground activities rationalizes the negative relationship between participation rates and fluctuations of registered output. Our model accounts for 44.3% of the differences in aggregate fluctuations between the USA and European economies. Finally, the model generates implied sizes of the underground economy of 3.2% and 7% of the American and European output, respectively, which are in the range of those found in the empirical literature.     

Promoting Employee Flexibility Through HR Practices

Current competitive environments have created a growing interest in employee flexibility in firms. Recently researchers have differentiated between two facets of employee flexibility: behavior flexibility and skill flexibility. This study proposes a model of relationships between these two facets of employee flexibility and the extent to which HR practices influence them. This model is tested by estimating structural equation models on a sample of 226 commercial departments in Spanish companies. The results of the study show that the two facets of employee flexibility are interrelated, in that skill flexibility influences behavior flexibility. Furthermore, findings confirm the influence of job enrichment on employee flexibility and the significant effect of the internal fit among HR practices on employee flexibility. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Public Capital Formation and Regional Development in Spain

This paper uses a vector autoregression (VAR) approach to evaluate the effects of public investment on private sector performance in Spain. Empirical results suggest that public investment positively affected private investment, employment, and output at both aggregate and regional levels. The regions that benefited the most from public investment in the last two decades were Cataluña, Madrid, and Pais Vasco. These regions are among the largest economic areas in the country and among the ones with the highest GDP per capita. Accordingly, public investment, while an important factor for aggregate economic growth, has also been a source of increasing regional asymmetries.     

A re-examination of international portfolio diversification based on evidence from leveraged bootstrap methods

This article investigates the issue of international portfolio diversification with respect to the three largest financial markets in the world—namely the US, Japan and the UK. In addition to making use of traditional portfolio analysis, we also suggest a procedure to calculate bootstrap correlation coefficients that can take into account the dynamic structure between the markets as measured by bootstrapped causality tests. Weekly data is used. The results from the first approach are supporting international diversification. The bootstrapped causality tests provide additional empirical support for this conclusion since the size of the causal effects is negligible and the bootstrap correlations are similar as the standard ones.     

Introducing Practical Wisdom in Business Schools

This article echoes those voices that demand new approaches and ‹senses’ for management education and business programs. Much of the article is focused on showing that the polemic about the educative model of business schools has moral and epistemological foundations and opens up the debate over the type of knowledge that practitioners need to possess in order to manage organizations, and how this knowledge can be taught in management programs. The article attempts to highlight the moral dimension of management through a reinterpretation of the Aristotelian concept of practical wisdom. I defend the ideas that management is never morally neutral and that Aristotelian practical wisdom allows the recovery of moral considerations in management practice. I analyze the impact and implications that the introduction of practical wisdom in business schools entails for the conception and objectives of management education. This view reconfigures management education in terms of attention to values, virtues and context. Therefore, management programmes should prepare students to critically evaluate what they hear and to make decisions coherent with their values and virtues. In the final section, I reflect on the pedagogical implications of this approach. I point out that an integrated model of ethics and practical wisdom promotes education of cognition and education of affect as well. I provide an example to illustrate my perspective and to support my conclusions.     

A data mining approach to financial time series modelling and forecasting

This paper describes one of the relatively new data mining techniques that can be used to forecast the foreign exchange time series process. The research aims to contribute to the development and application of such techniques by exposing them to difficult real-world (non-toy) data sets. The results reveal that the prediction of a Radial Basis Function Neural Network model for forecasting the daily $US/$NZ closing exchange rates is significantly better than the prediction of a traditional linear autoregressive model in both directional change and prediction of the exchange rate itself. We have also investigated the impact of the number of model inputs (model order), the number of hidden layer neurons and the size of training data set on prediction accuracy. In addition, we have explored how the three different methods for placement of Gaussian radial basis functions affect its predictive quality and singled out the best one. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of oil prices on stock prices: fresh evidence from asymmetric causality tests

This article investigates the causal impact of oil prices on stock prices in each G7 market as well as in the world market. An asymmetric causality test developed by Hatemi-J is used for this purpose. Since the underlying data appears to be non-normal with time-varying volatility, we use bootstrap simulations with leverage adjustments in order to produce more reliable critical values than the asymptotic ones. Based on symmetric causality tests, we find no causal effect of oil prices on the stock prices of the world market or any of the G7 countries. However, when we apply an asymmetric causality test, we find that increasing oil prices cause stock prices to rise in the world, the U.S. and Japan while decreasing oil prices cause stock prices to fall in Germany. This may imply that the world, the U.S. and Japanese stock markets consider increases in oil prices as an indicator of good news as this may mean that there is an increase in oil demand due to an expected growth in the economy while the German stock market treats decreasing oil prices as a signal of an expected contraction in the economy.     

BRIC and GIPS – who drives who? Evidence from newly developed asymmetric causality tests

We investigate the asymmetric causal interaction between the stock markets of the GIPS (Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain) and those of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) based on a newly developed asymmetric causality test by Hatemi-J (2012) [Hatemi-J, A. 2012. “Asymmetric Causality Tests with an Application.” Empirical Economics 43: 447–456. doi:10.1007/s00181-011-0484-x]. We confirm a significant stock market interaction between the two blocs in which the BRIC drives the GIPS but not vice versa. Thus, the BRIC seems to be more influential on the GIPS than the GIPS on the BRIC. However, this interaction occurs only during downmarket conditions but not during upmarket times. The BRIC pulls down the GIPS during bad times but does not pull them up during good times. These results have significant implications for international policymakers and provide further evidence on the existence of asymmetric causal interactions between financial markets.