<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

The service quality literature focusing on higher education has been expanding rapidly parallel with the increasing marketization of the sector which poses new challenges against institutional improvement efforts and the applied management toolkit. The primary objective of our paper is to demonstrate the results of a surveying carried out in the Hungarian higher education system. The participating students evaluated the importance of quality attributes that were previously defined at the programme and the institution levels of operation and also rated the performance they had experienced along the same attributes. Both the quantitative and the qualitative results demonstrate that the student perceptions about the institutional image primarily stem from their service quality perceptions gained at the programme level defining the total student experience. Therefore, the institutional actions aiming service quality improvements should incorporate the programme level experiences of students both for enhancing total student satisfaction and institutional reputation.
</abstract>

Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Defining Service Quality Attributes at Different Levels of Operation in Higher Education Institutions: How Could the Service Quality Perceptions of Students Contribute to a Better Understanding of Improvement Directions?

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This study investigated the reaction of German stock market volatility (Dax index) to the European Central Bank (ECB)’s unconventional monetary policy (UMP) announcements. The financial crisis of 2008 proved that the traditional monetary policy’s tool (the short -term interest rate) has lost its effectiveness to meet the new challenges. So, the key central banks, ECB included, had to implement the new, untested and nonstandard monetary policy which so called unconventional monetary policy. In this study, we used the ECB’s shadow policy rate approach to extract unconventional monetary policy. Also, We employed GJR GARCH (p,o,q) model to estimate the volatility in the German stock market. Then we calibrated both OLS (linear regression) and Markov-switching (probability-matrix of regime changes) models to examine the reaction of German stock returns volatility to UMP announcement by ECB for a period from January 2006 to December 2019. The results delivered by both models showed that the ECB’s UMP had a strong and negative effect on the volatility of the German stock market. Also, both models showed that the past German stock volatility has a significant and negative effect on the dependent variable, while the volatility of the German stock returns is a function of the global volatility estimated by the VIX index. Moreover, the results showed that the Markov-switching regression model provides a better illustration of the stock market volatility impact of UMP than the OLS model because it can represent the changes into the two different regimes named ordinary regime and quantitative easing (crisis) regime. Furthermore, under the Markov-switching regression model, we can see how the output gap and the inflation gap influence the volatility of the Dax index, while the results of the OLS regression model showed that there is no significant relationship between the output gap and the inflation gap with the German stock market volatility.
</abstract>

University of Szeged, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

The Impact of ECB’s Unconventional Monetary Policy on the German Stock Market Volatility

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This paper analyses household financial fragility during the COVID-19 pandemic. Considering the barging theory in households’ decision-making, this paper proposes that women’s financial literacy and their involvement in paid and unpaid work will influence family financial fragility in times of crisis. The results show that women’s financial literacy, their participation in the labour market, and their financial independence have a significant and positive effect on the family’s financial situation during the pandemic. Moreover, the level of women’s unpaid work was identified as a significant element that jeopardizes family financial stability. The results further support the bargaining power theory regarding a better understanding of the complexity of decision-making within households. The results point to a new channel for preserving family financial stability, through the improvement of women’s financial literacy and the development of institutional and social support for their participation in the labour market.
</abstract>

University of Split, Faculty of Economics

Household Financial Fragility During COVID-19: the Power of Financially Literate Women

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The financial sector has always been recognized as a traditional activity. One of the biggest challenges facing the financial sector recently is the introduction of new technologies. Financial innovations, and especially the development of financial technologies (FinTech), contribute to changing the way the entire financial system, including the banking sector, changes in the digital economy. The changes brought about by financial innovations and technologies condition all market participants, and especially banks, to continuously improve their business in order to keep up with the competition. FinTech enable easier access to financial services, improvement of traditional services, provide greater efficiency, lower costs and automation of regulatory reporting. They have changed the way we perceive financial institutions. Banks can increasingly be seen as an application on the phone and computer through which financial services can be performed, less and less as a grand building that instils confidence. However, it should be borne in mind that the application of financial innovations, in addition to the advantages, carries with it many risks, in a way that it can be said that digital technologies change existing ones, but also bring new risks in the field of financial services. The key risks caused by these technologies include strategic, operational and cyber risk, the risk of business compliance with data protection regulations, as well as liquidity risk. The importance of outsourcing risk is not negligible. It is precisely because of the speed of change and innovation that new risks are constantly emerging. With the growing importance and number of these firms, as well as the speed of their cross-border transactions, the fact is that it is necessary that these firms must adjust the way they measure risk in accordance with the speed and pace of their development. The importance of risk management must be one of the key points for FinTech companies, both now and in the future. Due to the observation of advances in financial technologies and the assessment of the risks that financial innovations bring, there is a need to harmonize regulatory frameworks, in order to ensure that none of the financial service providers would be at a disadvantage. However, regulatory bodies must carefully consider the dynamics and manner of regulation, bearing in mind that in a rapidly changing environment, excessive and rapid regulation carries the risk of undesirable outcomes in a way that does not exploit the full potential of innovative technologies. The development and increasing use of financial technologies affects the activities of all participants in the financial market, which imposes the need for continuous learning and adaptation of users and providers of these services, as well as supervisors and regulators. An additional challenge for financial institutions is the fact that competition in the provision of financial services comes from IT companies, which necessarily imposes the need to adapt its business models. Financial institutions are facing one of the biggest business challenges. All this brings special challenges for the creators of regulatory standards (RegTech) and the development of supervision based on new technologies (SupTech).
</abstract>

The Darker Side of Fintech: the Emergence of New Risks

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An important feature of every financial system throughout history is its capability to facilitate transfer of money in a secure and cost efficient manner. Cryptocurrencies as sources of innovative solutions – especially Bitcoin as their most prominent representative – have offered a completely new transmission system for a piece of information that can contain and carry value. There are many approaches to evaluate (un)successfulness of Bitcoin as money, and arguably one of the most important is to assess the fulfilment of its inventor’s original proposition: can it be used to send money directly and securely abroad, to international destinations, without fear of double-spending? Moreover, by removing institutions and their fees from the system hierarchy, can it be done for a lower price? The objective of creating Bitcoin network (among others) was to promote democratization of finance by enabling monetary transactions over the internet without unnecessary intermediaries inserting and charging multiple layers of fees. In decentralized, distributed blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum subjects are incentivized to collectively maintain the public ledger (blockchain) by collecting block rewards (“coinbase”) and transaction fees. Block-chain maintenance is known as mining, and miners are compensated for their effort in the form of fees (and coinbase rewards) for verifying transactions. The objective of this paper is to examine and compare fees for transferring money internationally by means of Bit-coin network, in contrast to using traditional pathways, mostly banks, and in this manner to scrutinize the proof of concept and one of the cryptocurrency solutions to the issue of money transfer. By doing so we are attempting to provide answers to the questions of functionality and cost-effectiveness of an alternative financial system based on the blockchain technology. Transaction fees for international payments made by Bitcoin are compared by analysing a novel dataset obtained from World Bank and Croatian National Bank (CNB). CNB’s data is not publicly available, and was attained for this paper specifically. It contains 1.400 types of fees charged by the 23 banks operating in Croatia for the period of October 2018 to February 2022. Bank fees for international transactions were matched with Bitcoin fees in the same period, with the data taken from Blockchain.com online service. On average, to send 1,000 USD abroad by using Bitcoin network required approx. three times less in fees than by using banks in Croatia. The calculation structure of bank fees, also presented in the paper, required higher costs for sending lower amounts (in terms of percentage); when transferring 200 USD banks worldwide charged on average approx. 30 times more in fees than Bitcoin miners. Additionally, transaction fees for international remittances were analysed with quarterly data from World Bank. Comparative analysis of these and Bitcoin fees was made, and it is clear that (on average) sending money abroad via Bitcoin network bears significantly lower costs for the end user, especially when transferring lower amounts. Due to the non-normality of the distributions of the underlying variables, non-parametric tests were applied and the null hypothesis that transaction costs have identical medians was rejected. In conclusion, when needing to transfer money internationally users can obtain significantly lower costs by using decentralized technologies such as Bitcoin’s blockchain. This finding validates one of the key propositions of the distributed ledgers. Rather than focusing on wild daily Bitcoin price swings and its volatility, Bitcoin network functions as a cost-effective international payment system and proves itself as an alternative to traditional money transfer schemes.
</abstract>

Overseas Transaction Fees: Sending Money via Bitcoin vs. Banks

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This paper aims to identify performance differences between conventional European equity indices and ESG indices. Conventional European equity indices are tools both institutional and retail investors use to understand the overall state of the market, as well as a benchmark for comparing investment decisions. ESG indices or sustainability indices are different from conventional market indices and can provide information to investors about the firm’s sustainability performance, they are new and constantly developing stock market indices taking into account environmental, social, and governance considerations. The indices were analysed by multivariate analysis. Since we could collect data by country only for conventional indices, cluster analysis based only on those indices was performed. The following variables of conventional indices were analysed: year-to-date price return, annualized 3-year price return, annualized 5-year price return, and annualized 10-year price return. The paper also compares ESG indices and conventional indices, and in most cases, they have no significant performance differences.
</abstract>

Performance Differences between ESG Indices and Conventional Market Indices: a Multivariate Analysis of Indices

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In the context of current deglobalization trends this research aims to investigate the need for changes in tourism supply system by analysing perception and expectations of procurement managers and suppliers of goods and services related to growing inflationary pressure on business costs and raising concerns about vulnerability and instability of the global supply chains. Based on survey and semi-structured interviews conducted among hotel procurement managers and local suppliers in popular seaside tourism destinations in Croatia, this research provides empirical evidences of the necessity to strengthen local capacities for the production of goods and service delivery using local resources in accordance to the principles of sustainable tourism development. The greatest concern respondents showed regarding the rising prices of energy, which was expected due to actual political situation in Europe. Study also provides some policy recommendations for ‘reinventing’ local production of goods and services for tourism-related purposes.
</abstract>

Building a Resilient Local Economy: The Influence of Global Crises on Deglobalization of the Tourism Supply System

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Zagreb International Review of Economics and Business

 ZIREB is an international journal of economics and business. It covers wide range of topics in macroeconomics, microeconomics, management, marketing and tourism. In general, it delivers relevant scientific research in the field of economics and business and offers empirical insights on current economic development and political economy issues as well as on current developments in marketing, tourism and management research.  ZIREB is edited by Faculty of Economics and Business in Zagreb and it is managed by a team of academic researchers from universities all over the world.  ZIREB is published as a semiannual journal by the Faculty of Economics and Business in Zagreb. The first issue was published in May 1998. Every two years ZIREB is published three times a year. This Special Conference Issue consists of selected papers presented at the international conference "An Enterprise Odyssey" which is hosted by Faculty of Economics and Business.  Why subscribe and read ZIREB is an economics and business journal directed at scientific and academic researchers who are interested in new insights and research methods in the field of economics and business. The journal welcomes research on topics related to respective countries or on regionally relevant topics. Furthermore, professional papers, short papers, review articles and book reviews are also welcome.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 

Volume 25 (2022): Issue s1 (December 2022) - Special Conference Issue

Zagreb International Review of Economics and Business

Volume 25 (2022): Issue s1 (December 2022)

Special Conference Issue