The role of banks in CESEE countries: exploring non-standard determinants of economic growth

This paper explores the finance–growth nexus in 14 countries from Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe (CESEE) over the 1995–2015 period. It investigates whether including two ‘non-standard’ variables, i.e. a credit cycle dummy and foreign bank relevance, deepens our understanding of the role of a typical financial determinant of economic growth, i.e. bank credit. We find evidence of a negative impact of bank credit on economic growth and the significance of cyclical fluctuations of bank credit. In contrast, a higher market share of loans granted by foreign-owned banks in a cyclical upswing and stock market capitalisation are found to have a proactive effect on growth.     

How do different background variables predict learning outcomes?

This article is a part of a research project aimed to find out how different background variables are related to learning outcomes in school subject Sloyd as found in the national evaluation of the Finnish National Board of Education. Results from this larger research project were previously published in this journal, where pupils’ readiness for Self-Regulated Learning were reported. Since then, pupils’ experiences of classroom techniques, attitudes towards the subject, leisure time interests and learning within the two domains of the subject (Technical Domain and Textile Domain, as the subject is usually divided in Finland) have been studied and results have been published in different journals. In this article, a new Structural Equation Model concludes the previous results. The new model highlights two paths of how the use of different learning orientations can predict successful learning outcomes. These paths can be followed using two pedagogical models: the Exploratory Production Approach and the Domain Specific Approach. Experiencing Learner-Centred Learning predicts positive attitudes and success in Exploratory Production activities. Experiencing Collaborative Learning predicts success in domain specific learning outcomes. Success in Exploratory Production predicts successful learning outcomes in both domains. The conclusion is that regulatory knowledge, “why”, is related to production activities and it is processed prior to domain specific knowledge, “what” and “how”. To develop the subject and pedagogy for schools and teacher training, it is not important to follow an approach defined by the domains (technical or textile). It is more important to teach pupils how to manage in the modern technological world and to understand why they need to be able to improve their life-world through Exploratory Production activities.     

Jean Tirole,Nobel Prize Winner

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for 2014 to Jean Tirole, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), Toulouse, France ‘for his analysis of market power and regulation’. What commonly characterizes Jean Tirole's work is a combination of rigorous scientific analysis of markets and provision of useful scientific insights and policy guidance for regulation and competition policy in such markets. This paper focuses on two of Tirole's papers, both co-written with Jean-Charles Rochet, which probably best exemplify his policy-oriented research. It summarizes and then explains how the theory that these papers develop led to the implementation of a new policy regulating the payment card industry in the European Union.     

Going Native: Effects of Disclosure Position and Language on the Recognition and Evaluation of Online Native Advertising

Despite recent industry attention, questions remain about how native advertising is perceived and processed by consumers. Two experiments examined effects of language and positioning in native advertising disclosures on recognition of the content as advertising, effects of recognition on brand and publisher evaluations, and whether disclosure position affects visual attention. Findings show that middle or bottom positioning and wording using “advertising” or “sponsored” increased advertising recognition compared to other conditions, and ad recognition generally led to more negative evaluations. Visual attention mediated the relationship between disclosure position and advertising recognition. Theoretical, practical, and regulatory implications for disclosures in native advertising are discussed.     

Predictive Power of Personal Factors in Studying Students' Perception of Sales Profession in Poland

Since Poland has become a member of the European Union, free market activities have increased dramatically. The purpose of this study is to explore university students' perceptions of personal selling as a career in Poland. Using logistic regression and Z-test methodologies, we analyzed the perceptions of 114 students. The results confirm the findings of previous studies that personal factors play a significant role in predicting students' perception of sales profession as a career. The findings presented in this study show that Polish students have a biased perception about sales as a career; however, interestingly, few dimensions show a significant effect. Understanding students' perceptions of the sales profession will help corporate recruiters achieve their goals by selecting those students most likely to excel in sales careers.     

What explains the performance of students in a heterogeneous environment? Conditional efficiency estimation with continuous and discrete environmental variables

Efficiency estimations which do not account for the operational environment where production units are operating in may have only a limited value. This article presents a fully nonparametric framework to estimate relative performance of production units when accounting for continuous and discrete background variables. Using insights from recent developments in nonparametric econometrics, we show how conditional efficiency scores can be estimated using a tailored mixed kernel function with a data-driven bandwidth selection. The methodology is applied to the sample of Dutch pupils from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment (OECD PISA) data set. We estimate students' performance and the influence of its background characteristics. The results of our application show that several family- and student-specific characteristics have a statistically significant effect on the educational efficiency, while school-level variables do not have impact on performance.     

Intra- and inter-regional spillovers between emerging capital markets around the world

In this paper, returns and volatility spillovers between emerging capital markets of Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South-East Asia are investigated. We distinguish between spillovers from countries located in one region (intra-regional) and in different regions (inter-regional) after controlling for shocks originating at home and on the global market. Both intra- and inter-regional spillovers are significant, with the former being more pronounced than the latter. Our findings indicate that linkages between emerging markets are not solely due to their common dependence on the global capital market and highlight the importance of common factors in intra-regional interdependencies.     

The Performance of Trading Firms in the Services Sectors – Comparable Evidence from Four EU Countries

We examine trade complexity and the implications of adding additional dimensions of trade for firm performance among services producers. We use unique firm‐level data to compare these patterns across four EU countries. Overall, services firms are relatively less engaged in trade than manufacturing firms; they mostly trade goods and are more likely to import than to export. Trade in services is quite rare; services are more likely to be traded by firms already trading goods. Trading firms in the services sectors are significantly larger, more productive and pay higher wages than non‐traders. Two‐way traders outperform one‐way traders. Changes in trading status by either adding another dimension of trade (imports, exports) or another type of product (goods, services) are infrequent and are associated with significant preswitching premia. In contrast, learning effects from switching trading status are uncommon. This points to significant fixed cost of being engaged in trade and confirms some previous findings that trading services firms have similar traits as their manufacturing counterparts. Apart from greater trade participation in smaller countries, we do not observe systematic differences in terms of trade or switching premia between the four countries that might be attributable to differences in country characteristics.     

Evaluation of investment subsidies: when is deadweight zero?

In the evaluation of investment subsidies one of the critical issues concerns the assessment of deadweight, that is, the degree to which projects would have been carried out without grant assistance. With the increasing restrictions on and cuts in subsidies for investment projects in the EU countries maximisation of the impact of the public resources that remain can be achieved through their allocation for projects with minimum deadweight. This paper studies the profile of subsidised zero deadweight investment projects – projects that would be abandoned without public subsidies – in Finland. The empirical analysis is conducted using micro level data on investment projects by private sector firms. The data set comprises 3,423 projects that were granted public investment subsidies between 2001 and 2003. Our results show that the likelihood of zero deadweight is significantly dependent on the characteristics of the subsidised firm, the characteristics of the investment project and the location of the subsidised firm.     

R&;D,International Trade and Creative Destruction—Empirical Findings from Finnish Manufacturing Industries*

The determinants of productivity-enhancing micro-level restructuring are examined empirically with a panel of the twelve Finnish manufacturing industries. It is hypothesized that R&D leads to productivity diversity among plants, which in turn leads to the gradual reshuffling of input shares in the presence of dynamic competitive pressure. The effect of the creative destruction on industry productivity growth is measured with the between-component of productivity decomposition. Econometric results indicate with reasonable robustness that R&D generates creative destruction with a lag of several years. Some evidence is found that imports stimulate productivity-enhancing restructuring, especially when domestic R&D is low.JEL classification: O12, 014, 019, O31, O47*This paper is based on the chapter 8 of my PhD thesis which has been accepted by the Helsinki School of Economics (2003). The research has received financial support from Tekes (the National Technology Agency), and from the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation. This paper has benefited from comments by Petri Böckerman, Pekka Ilmakunnas, Kabor Kezdi, and Petri Rouvinen, to whom I am grateful. I am also thankful to the referees for helpful comments. Lisa Roponen has checked my English. An earlier version of this paper has been presented at the EARIE 2002 conference in Madrid and at the Summer at CEU Workshop in Budapest in 2003. Data work and computations have been carried out at Statistics Finland, in accordance with the terms and conditions of confidentiality. I also wish to thank many individuals at Statistics Finland for their guidance regarding the properties of the data. Please contact the Research Laboratory of the Business Structures Unit, Statistics Finland, FIN-00022, Finland, for access to these data. The usual disclaimer applies.