Volume 31 (2021): Issue 2 (June 2021)

The significance of retirement savings and private pension funds increased in the latest decades and gathered important amounts of capitals. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the macroeconomic effects of pension systems from an investment perspective in five Central and Eastern European countries. The analyzing process regarding several underlying macroeconomic effects of pension systems started from the premises that there is a strong connection between the structure of pension systems, the national economy and the development of the financial sector. The econometric tests were processed and applied by using pool data regression models and the method Pooled Instrumental Variables (IV) - Two-stage Least Squares (2SLS). The main conclusion highlights that the interest rate at deposits is correlated with the amount of incomes earned by population, inflation rate, severe material deprivation rate and the investment strategy of private pension funds.

This article aims to research the major changes in the Conceptual Framework of Financial Reporting; to find out the new gaps in the current document; to group the changes into categories; to analyze the current difficulties and consequences of these changes for a consistent understanding between standard-setters and practitioners. The Onion research model based on the quantitative data collection with elements of descriptive analysis was considered as important contributions to the research methodology of the Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting investigation. As a result, a comparative analysis of the financial reporting concepts was made between July 1989, September 2010, and March 2018. The implications of results are two-fold. On the one hand, the revised Conceptual Framework is a more comprehensive set of concepts that enhance the understanding between practitioners and standard-setters. On the other hand, it consists of the new gaps most of them in the ―Updating” category. It is concluded that this innovation complicates the reporting process for practitioners because it requires using of additional judgments. Besides, the investigation shows some IFRS are not justified within only the Conceptual Framework that might be the subject for further research.

This study examines price stickiness in the United States (US) corn market using annual series data, on the dollar price of corn per bushel, obtained from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis (FRED), between 1930 and 2017. The study implemented the Calvo price stick model based on an agent in a general equilibrium and New Keynesian type, simulated using DSGE-VAR. The approach permits the indexing formula to include expected corn inflation rather than lagged inflation. The results show that corn price inflation only persists by 2% every trading year, resulting from changes in the immediate future corn-price inflation and output-gap, respectively. The shock to stochastic term only causes a partial decline in the corn price, converging at a future date with its long-run equilibrium. The experiment confirmed that corn price fluctuations are beyond the purview of the domestic economy, and any attempt to impose price policies will offset the price setting, creating further distortions and a wider gap in the corn yield. The study provides fresh insight into the Calvo price stick model of the New Keynesian type and its use to forecast agricultural outcomes.

The study analyses the role of the petroleum pump price on the consumer price index in Nigeria, using the Nonlinear Autoregressive distributive lag method was used to estimate the time-series data, spanning from 1980 to 2020. The study reveals a long-run equilibrium was found between the consumer price index and petroleum pump price measures. The empirical results obtained revealed an asymmetric relationship between the petroleum pump price and the consumer price index in Nigeria. The study recommended that the policymakers should transparently commit resources into rehabilitation and maintenance of domestic refineries to enhance their functionality and as well reduce importation cost to curtail frequent petroleum pump price adjustment that spiral domestic inflation.

We used the last three waves of the European Quality of Life Surveys to analyze the happiness of older workers in Romania and the Visegrád countries. Applying ordinary least squares and ordered logit models we showed that being employed makes people happier ceteris paribus than being unemployed. This effect is the same for younger and older persons in the V4 countries, but there is an extra positive effect for older workers in Romania.