Article Abstract:

This paper studies why public finances in Sweden have remained very strong during the current financial crisis. Unlike almost all other European countries, Sweden has had budget surpluses and a government debt ratio around 40 percent of GDP during the recent crisis. We attribute this to two important factors. First, Sweden entered the crisis with strong public finances and second that unemployment did not rise as much as normally during recessions. The Swedish fiscal framework that was introduced after the banking crisis in the early 1990s with expenditure ceilings, a top-down budget process, balanced budget requirement for local governments has played an important role. We show that the behavior of budget deficits has changed significantly recently, from a deficit bias to a surplus bias. Aggregate demand remained strong during the crisis even though exports fell sharply. As unemployment in the manufacturing sector increased, it was to a large extent offset by increased employment in the service sector.

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This paper uses the pooled mean group (PMG) estimator and a dataset restricted to OECD countries to examine the relationship between different levels of education, i.e. between education composition and growth. The PMG estimator allows a greater degree of parameter heterogeneity than the usual estimator procedures used in empirical growth studies by imposing common long run relationships across countries while allowing for heterogeneity in the short run responses and intercepts. Results point to a significant longterm relationship not only between higher education and growth but also between lower schooling levels and growth. This indicates that public spending on education in OECD countries should be spread across the different levels of education in a balanced way.

Article Abstract:

The benchmark risk-averse equilibrium model does not explain some of the outcomes obtained in experiments with first-price auctions. Nonetheless, the presence of non-linear bidding and the wide dispersion of bids have received little attention in the literature. I focus on these issues and revisit previous laboratory evidence with the help of model-based clustering techniques. The rejection of equilibrium models is found to be mostly due to the significance of non-linear bidding rules and the unexplained heterogeneity. With the use of a mixture model, the observations are classified into four groups or clusters. Significant differences between individuals and clusters are found, but so is a persistent within individual variation, which leads us to conclude that subjects do not commit to one particular bidding strategy and alternate across several processes.

Article Abstract:

The paper examines the reasons for the remarkable growth of transition economies’ export performance. We distinguish between foreign/EU market access and internal supply capacity factors. EU market access has been of great importance, while among supply capacity factors, stable institutional setup, structural reforms, and targeted FDI are in the forefront.

Article Abstract:

This paper mainly discusses the choice of managerial compensation contracts in Chinese family firms. Relation or guanxi in Chinese language is an important factor that should be considered because it can bring the shirking cost to the relation-based manager and the caring cost to the owner under Chinese-style differential mode of association (“chaxu geju”). Our theoretical analysis shows that under some conditions it is optimal for the owner to choose the efficiency wage contract, and that under other conditions it is optimal for the owner to choose the share-based incentive contract.

Article Abstract:

This paper investigates causal relationships and short-term interaction mechanisms among six Central and Eastern European stock markets and the USA stock exchange, while paying special consideration to the effects of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis. We employ daily observations for the six CEE stock indexes and also for the US market covering the period January 2006-March 2009, which is subsequently divided into two sub-periods corresponding to the pre-crisis and crisis period. The study reveals that the relationships among CEE stock markets are time varying. While before the crisis stock market linkages are limited, we find that during crisis these interactions become significantly stronger. Our results further suggest that the potential for diversifying risk by investing in different CEE markets is limited during financial turmoil. Other findings reveal the leading role of the Russian market in the CEE region before the crisis. Also, before the crisis CEE markets were significantly influenced by innovations in the USA market, thus explaining why they were affected heavily by the crisis, which has managed to spread immediately in the region.

Article Abstract:

This study deals with important issues related to the new political macroeconomics and its appliance to the economic movements in Serbia, which is a country of “new democracy” as well as with transition economy. In political macroeconomics, it is a known fact that the economic policy instruments can be used for political purposes – simulated improvement of economic indicators to win the elections. These options assume specific features in transition economies, such as the Serbian economy. The political instability in Serbia, reflected in frequent elections, as well as in the diversity in political and economic goals of the key political parties leading to increasing political uncertainty in both the pre-election and post-election periods, weakened the economic system. Simultaneously, using the economic policy for political purposes to support the “pro-democratic” and “pro-European” parties proved to be paradoxically justified.

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