Volumen 17 (2017): Heft 4 (December 2017)

The article concentrates on the impact of selected aspects of governance - the level of autonomy and the involvement of stakeholders in the internal governance of a university - on the research performance of universities measured by indicators of international university rankings in cross-country comparisons. The analyses are geographically situated in Europe. They follow two paths which are from the theoretical point of view based on the concepts of the principal-agent problem and stakeholder theory. Using linear regression, the author identifies statistically significant aspects of governance and compares them with results of previous studies. The findings serve as a basis for a discussion regarding how to create appropriate conditions for universities in order to improve their prospects for international success in research. The limitations of the results relating to the data, methodology and their application in the European context are discussed and general recommendations are formulated.

In recent years, there has been extensive research on the conduct of monetary policy in small open economies that are subject to inflation and output fluctuations. Policymakers should decide whether to implement strict inflation targeting or to respond to the changes in output fluctuations while conducting monetary policy rule. This study aims to examine the response of alternative monetary policy rules to Turkish economy by means of a DSGE model that is subject to demand and technology shocks. The New Keynesian model we used is borrowed from Gali (2015) and calibrated for the Turkish economy. Welfare effects of alternative Taylor rules are evaluated under different specifications of central bank loss function. One of the main findings of this paper is that in the case of a technology shock, strict inflation targeting rules provide the minimum welfare loss under all loss function configurations. On the contrary, the losses are weakened if the monetary authority responds to output fluctuations in the presence of a demand shock. Finally, there exists a trade-off between the volatility of output and inflation in case of a technology shock, while the volatility of both variables moves in the same direction in response to a demand shock.

This paper focuses on transparency in lobbying as perceived by in sample organisations in the Czech Republic. The paper’s aim is to study how lobbying and its impact on decision-making practices are perceived by organisational representatives and to empirically assess the perceived transparency of lobbying with a view to the potential introduction of lobbying regulations and their role in Czech democracy. Data for the study was gathered from a sample of business institutions in the Czech Republic. In total, 73 organisations/institutions took part in the survey. One respondent was questioned per organisation/institution. 90 % of respondents perceive that transparent and regulated lobbying has a positive impact on democracy. Moreover, according to the respondents, lobbying facilitates more competent decision-making among politicians, brings more information into the decision-making process and makes the process more efficient. There has been a significant shift in the perception of lobbying over the past ten years in the Czech Republic. Regulations aimed at legitimizing lobbying are seen as having a positive impact on democracy.

This article provides some new empirical perspectives on the relationship between oil-market fluctuations and technological structure of EMU export. We rely on a time-varying parameter VAR model to capture the reaction of different technological structures of EMU export to various oil-market innovations in the period 2002-2015. Our results can be summarized as follows: (1) increase in crude oil production is likely to reduce oil prices and therefore increases all EMU exports due to lower production and transportation costs; (2) increase in global demand is more likely to be transmitted to goods with higher added value; (3) high-tech exports decrease in the first months after the global demand shock as a result of a delayed investment decision process; (4) increasing oil prices yield only marginal effect on EMU export.

The goal of the paper is to evaluate the economic efficiency of tour operators in the Czech Republic in the period 2007-2014 using data envelopment analysis (DEA) models and prove the link between economic efficiency and profitability and to find out if profitability is a good proxy for economic efficiency. Data was exported from the database Albertina CZ Gold Edition. We calculated the efficiency score using CCR (Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes) and BCC (Banker, Charnes and Cooper) models based on 3 inputs and 1 output. In the years 2007 to 2010, the efficiency score of almost all the companies was higher than 0.5; however, in years since 2011, we revealed significant differences in the efficiency of individual firms and only about 40 percent of tour operators achieved an efficiency score higher than 0.5. Using Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients, our findings show that, in the case of the Czech tour operator market, profitability ratios do not correspond with firm efficiency. Profitability ratios are not a good proxy for economic efficiency and should not be used as the only firm criterion of performance.

This study explores the firm-level relationship between earnings quality and investment efficiency. Higher quality of reported results has the capacity to positively impact the efficiency of company’s investment levels by over- and underinvestment reduction. The research is carried out on the sample of 7546 companies from Eastern Europe for the period 2010-2015. Eastern European countries have a unique institutional and business environment that is relevant to the purpose of this paper. We divide the sample into 2 fundamentally different economic sectors - industrial and retail - and test the significance of each factor in the main relationship. We also examine the factor of the firm’s ownership form by comparing earnings quality with investment efficiency values between public and private companies. Our main results show that a higher earnings quality mitigates both overinvestment and underinvestment issues. The relationship between earnings quality and underinvestment turns out to be stronger in the industrial sector. As for the comparison of public and private firms, public companies on average demonstrate a higher earnings quality and lower overinvestment issues.