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Abstract
The financial industry has undergone several changes in recent years. One of these changes is the emergence of financial technology (FinTech) companies that are radically transforming the industry, posing a significant challenge to traditional commercial banks. In this study, we examined the responses of the Hungarian banks to the emergence of innovative FinTech startups and explored the benefits and barriers of the FinTech accelerator programs launched by banks. We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with top executives of banks, FinTech startups and scaleups, investors and regulators to identify the potential benefits and barriers during the cooperation between banks and FinTechs. The most important results of our research show that during the partnership, several advantages can be gained by both parties. Still, the realization of these benefits is significantly hindered by the excessive exploitation focus of banks. Ambidextrous internal champions or suppliers of the banks are needed for successful cooperation between FinTechs and banks.
Abstract
The paper relates to the paradigm of the middle income trap (MIT) and covers mid-run challenges to the Polish economic development. Our theoretical background is based on the concepts of comparative advantage and intra-industry trade, while the empirical analysis concentrates on a sample of 14 product clusters. Obtained results reveal the competitive position of the Polish goods leading in the global mid- and high-tech exports. These findings may serve for the evidence-based smart industry and trade policy-making in Poland, as well as of other emerging economies. The fundamental question is which industries could serve as the engines of international expansion and become likely winners.
Abstract
The present study utilises an autoethnographic research methodology for introducing, from a handball player's point of view, the culture in which her career unfolded (from the beginnings to the first few years after her retirement), and the most important characteristics that shaped her professional years in the Hungarian first league. This topic was chosen not only as sports economics considerations are important with regard to the career of a handballer, but also to highlight how an individual athlete experiences the processes occurring in such a sports culture. Moreover, this study addresses the gap in scientific literature on career management in handball. Utilising autoethnography in the field of sports is somewhat unique, therefore this study can also pave the way for future research work in this domain. The following five pillars in career management were identified as a result of the research: Significant Others, Local Grassroots, Star Position, Roller Coaster and Rebirth. This study can be valuable for future researchers in the area of career management, and it can also provide practical information for athletes, sports federations and sports businesses.
Abstract
Since the eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU), the movement from east to west has become the main driver of intra-EU mobility. Recently, the free movement of labour has been contested not only in the debates around Brexit, but also in other receiving countries. It is not on the political agenda, but several studies have highlighted the economic and demographic effects of massive emigration in eastern EU Member States. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the functioning of free movement. Economic integration theory assumes that migration continues until wages are equalized in the receiving and sending countries. This paper analyses the perception of intra-EU mobility in the literature and empirically tests whether there is a relationship between the dynamism of income growth in the receiving (Germany, Austria and Spain) and sending (Central and Eastern European) countries, and the dynamism of migration. The empirical results do not support the neoclassical assumption that an equalization mechanism can function, even in the long run. To cope with recent challenges, this paper argues that free movement should not be considered as an element of a spontaneous market mechanism, but as an economic-political product, based on a constitutional order.
Abstract
The idea that socialism depends upon cooperation, as capitalism depends on competition, has always been inherent in the conception of socialism. Yet precise models of market socialism – ones, that is, that are sufficiently articulated so as to be able to discuss and compute an equilibrium in the economy – do not model cooperation in production, or more generally, in economic behavior. We introduce a Kantian optimization protocol, which, in contrast to Nash optimization, models how individuals can cooperate in labor and/or investment decisions. We prove that the ‘cooperative equilibrium’, thus modeled, is Pareto efficient whenever, in addition to receiving wages and rents, profits are distributed not to shareholders, but to workers and investors in proportion to their contributions to the firm. Pareto efficiency is achieved when the firms entire output is distributed to factor owners and shareholders do not exist.
Abstract
The gains in economic welfare achieved over the last several generations depend on social as much as they do on technological innovations. Although much of the technological and commercial progress in question was driven mainly by self-interest and competition, effective functioning of governmental and legal systems and provision of public goods were crucial to social and economic progress, and these depended partly on social norms and motivations. Research suggests that the strengthening in recent centuries of cooperative dispositions embedded in human social psychology by long run evolutionary forces has played an important part in the escape of an increasing share of humanity from poverty. Behavioral economics and research on economic history, institutions and culture are shedding light on these connections and may provide guidance helpful to preserving late 20th century gains in the now rapidly shifting landscape.
Abstract
The focus of debate on capital theory still is on the macroeconomic aggregate production function, almost seventy years after Joan Robinson attacked this concept. It has turned out that reswitching is rare in large systems. Reswitching and reverse capital deepening once were the most effective arguments against the production function. Later it was shown that an approximate surrogate production function could be constructed, using the approach of random matrices. This seemed to weaken the critique, but a new one has emerged, which shows that the number of effective techniques on the wage curve is small and that the possibilities of substitution between capital and labour are quite restricted in the relevant range or profit. This paper reconstructs the path by which the new results were arrived at and presents a new variant of the proof of zero substitution.
Abstract
The complex co-evolution of economics as a scientific discipline is accompanied by two dilemmas which are reflecting ambivalent effects of two ideologies: economism and scientism. Economics may go wrong when certain tendencies occasioned by those inevitable “ideological” influences are ignored. Pertinent problems include pseudo-rationalist conceptions of policy advice and the failure to deal with the limited status of partial analysis and abstractive dichotomies (notably allocation – distribution), the status of core concepts such as scarcity, instrumental rationality, exchange, and contract, as well as the related abstraction from power, distribution, and human sociality relevant for non-contractual interaction in various spheres of social life, including the market economy.
Abstract
The paper begins with a brief reminder of the origin of economic sociology. It then surveys research by economic sociologists from the 1980s to the present, with a focus on their relation to political economy, which ranges from close to arm's length. Finally, beyond any differences between economic theory and economic sociology, the paper considers how both approaches can be connected in the socio-historical and economic study of economic inequalities by Thomas Piketty, and the use of matching markets by Alvin Roth.
