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Abstract
Providers of insurance used to have no other choice than to absorb the behavioral externalities of their policy-holders. New technology coupled with the incentives of low-risk consumers has made it possible for firms to price-discriminate on the basis of behavioral risk and thus internalize behavioral externalities. While cost-internalization is generally a positive development, the introduction of behavioral tracking technologies also introduces new economic and social costs. This paper explores the economic and moral trade-offs of adopting behavioral tracking technologies in various insurance settings.
Abstract
This paper examines the drivers and the size of the shadow economies of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. It also investigates the tax losses associated with these shadow economic activities in all three countries. The Multiple Indicators and Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model is applied and uses time series data covering the period 1990–2019. The key findings show that the sizes of the shadow economies of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are 10.44, 11.18 and 20.47% respectively. The results also show that the average size of the shadow economies between 1990–2019 was 14.92% in the Czech Republic, 18.72% in Hungary and 22.85% in Poland. The Czech Republic loses 3.13% of tax revenue from goods and services and 2.83% from incomes and profits as a result of the shadow economy, while Hungary loses 5.05% of tax revenue from goods and services and 1.68% from incomes and profits. Poland loses 5.25% of tax revenue from goods and services and 4.34% from incomes and profits.
Abstract
For the further development and more efficient operation of the sharing economy, a fast and inexpensive peer-to-peer payment system is an essential element. The aim of this study is to outline a prototype that ensures the automation and decentralization of processes through smart contracts without blockchain technology. The model has been built based on the narrative that a community currency created through smart contracts can promote genuine practices of sharing as opposed to the profit-oriented approach that most of the currently operating sharing economy platforms have. Features of the model, such as ease of use, high-speed transactions without transaction cost are benefits that can provide a more efficient alternative to the traditional or to the cryptocurrency-based centralized sharing economy platforms.
Abstract
The main aim of the article is to identify unintended consequences of economic policies to combat climate change, in the short and long run, using the example of the Czech economy. The short term impacts are assessed by world input-output analysis in order to capture direct and indirect channels affecting the Czech automotive industry. Optimistic, realistic and pessimistic scenarios of decrease in demand for cars due to the imposition of environmental taxes in the European Union and the rest of the world are presented. The results show adverse impacts on Czech gross domestic product from 1.6 to 4.9 percentage points. The economy is expected to change its structure and reallocate factors of production to an alternative use, but there is a risk of suboptimal allocation, which might reveal losses from less efficient allocation of labor and capital. Therefore, the analysis of the relationship between economic welfare and the quality of the environment is conducted. Data on the Czech economy confirm the hypothesis of an environmental Kuznets curve and point to unintended consequences of overly ambitious policies to mitigate global climate change. If economic welfare excessively declines, there would be a significant risk of undermining people's will to invest into environmental protection.
Abstract
Kornai (2014) described the problems of municipal indebtedness in Hungary and analysed the process of bailout carried out between 2011 and 2014. In the same period, the central government also reformed the local government system, which included serious limitations of their financial independence. This study re-examines the state of the soft budget constraint (SBC) of Hungarian local governments. To start, the general theoretical framework of SBC is introduced. Then, the budget constraint on the Hungarian local governments before the bailout is described briefly, followed by an assessment of the corresponding measures which were expected to offset the negative messages of the completed bailout and to harden the budget constraint. The study concludes that the central government decided to harden the budget constraint through the introduction of new hierarchical mechanisms, while the development of fiscal discipline stopped. On the one hand, this resulted in the consolidation of municipal budgets, but on the other, it was accompanied by a serious limitation of local autonomy, projects and borrowing in general, while the central government employs specific administrative tools to show favour to some settlements according to its (political) interests.
Abstract
The literature has not settled down on safe haven property of gold in the emerging and developing countries. Therefore, we revisit the international evidence on hedging and safe haven role of gold for 34 emerging and developing countries with a span of daily data covering January 2000–November 2018. We employ the GARCH-copula approach to estimate the lower-tail extreme dependencies of the joint distribution of gold and equity returns. We also introduce a new definition for the strong safe haven property of an asset. Our findings indicate that while gold serves as a hedging instrument for all countries in our sample, we got evidence of weak safe haven property for gold, for domestic investors, only in 20 countries, and a strong safe haven asset (SHA) only in 9 countries.
Abstract
One of the many consequences of financialization in the past decades has been the significant appreciation of the importance of financial markets' liquidity. In order to maintain financial stability, one must have a clear understanding of the sources of market liquidity (ML). A finer comprehension of liquidity and its direction would help policy makers in fine-tuning the current regulations while also identifying each of the elements that compose it. In this paper, a recursive vector autoregressive model is utilized to empirically analyze how to detect the causality relations between funding and ML in four post-communist countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland). For the analyses freely accessible data on the balance sheets of aggregated banking sectors was utilized with the overall aim of finding a proxy for funding liquidity (FL) in every examined country. As a proxy for ML, government bonds' bid-ask spreads were utilized in the model. The paper provides an empirical evidence that FL drives ML in each economy. The results are clear, statistically significant and robust. They can be understood as evidence for the importance of the role of the trader's FL for the liquidity of financial assets' markets. The results of the paper have important implications for monetary policy, as well as micro- and macro-prudential regulation.
Abstract
Entrepreneurial innovation is a complex phenomenon. Experimenting with research designs that could claim some degree of generalizable linking between the individual and external influencing factors is challenging. However, progress even in research niches can contribute to a more structured understanding of the process. This article focuses on the first stages of entrepreneurial innovation, using a novel questionnaire design. Responses were collected from two Hungarian universities (147 and 127 responses, respectively) and analysed using Structural Equation Modelling. The results confirm that entrepreneurial innovation success in the early stage is shaped by macro-level factors, which have an influence on risk perception through locus of control. The paper makes two contributions, demonstrating (1) the possibility of using questionnaire survey for analysing multiple levels if the narrative is under control, and (2) how individual entrepreneurs approach the start of their innovation-based business, upon which personality and environmental factors both have significant impact.
Abstract
This paper investigates the role of extra-regional capabilities in regional economic development in a Central and Eastern European context. This is done by analysing the association between the related variety of manufacturing import and export of domestic- and foreign-owned firms on the one hand, and regional employment in manufacturing export on the other. By means of a panel regression framework applied to the Hungarian microregions between 2000 and 2011, we find that domestic firms, in particular, benefit from the related variety of export activities in the regions, while import related to existing export activities is beneficial amongst both foreign and domestic firms. Furthermore, bridging the technological gap between foreign companies and the host economy requires stronger technological relatedness, unless domestic firms have experience in importing.
