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Healing Incantations

Author(s): Roman Doušek / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: Moravia; healing herbs; Health;

In the realm of magic behavior and attitude, there are a noteworthy number of common phenomena throughout Moravia that often crossed the national and linguistic borders. This article does not address the level resulting from the universality of the phenomenon of magic as a principle of thinking on which it is based, such as a conviction of the existenceof a power which is transferrable despite distance and time – that is in the presentand for the future – thanks to the bounds between particular objects and phenomena; or the opinion that symbols based on a contactand a similarity to the symbolized are in an active contact to it, can take over its strength or to influence it.

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Peddlery

Author(s): Daniel Drápala / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: Peddlery; cultural integrity; rural and urban environment; 18th-19th century;

The principles of cultural integrity can be recognized in the operation of some specific professions as well. During the 18th century, there was a gradual increase in the volume of clerical work dealing with peddlery, especially peddling trade, in Central Europe. The state administration and the bureaucratic apparatus of lower degrees simply responded to the fact that villages and towns were visited nearly daily by peddlers offering goods or services.

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Territorial Differentness

Author(s): Roman Doušek / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: 19th century; folk culture; Czech lands; cultural phenomena; geographical areas;

In the second half of the 19th century, the attention of ethnographic researchers was drawn to local variations in the same phenomena within folk culture. By the end of the century, the first typologies in accordance with this point of view were compiled in the Czech lands. This tendency to compiletypologies corresponded to the view of the social sciences and culture at that time, which stressed the interrelation between specific cultural phenomena and the demarcated geographical areas where these phenomena were often found.

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Would the Russian Economy Turn into a Lost Decade?

Author(s): Miloš Bikár,Katarína Vávrová,Marina Sedliačiková / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: fiscal and monetary policy; commodity prices; exchange rate volatility; currency movements; public finances;

During the last couple of years the Russian economy was marked by a severe problems, those could turn into a quite long-lasting recession. The economic sanctions and low commodity prices caused significant damage and economic turmoil. The corporate and state-controlled investment into Russia significantly fell jointly with sharp rubble depreciation against major currencies. The paper deals with the analyses and predictions of the Russian economy development and the main factors influencing the current and future economy and the structure of GDP. The objective of this article is to analyse the time-varying nature among Russian GDP, oil prices and some major macroeconomic variables. The results of the carried out research reflected that the oil prices has played a key role and has indeed changed the nature of correlation relationship between analysed variables. The paper highlights the monetary policy including currency prediction, public debts, inflation levels, as well as commodity export dependency.

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Oil Price and European Stock Markets

Author(s): Gábor Bóta,Mihály Ormos / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: asset pricing; oil price;

In this paper we investigate the effects of oil price changes on European stock returns. We run regressions for extended versions of different market equilibrium models: (standard CAPM, Fama-French 3 factor model, Carhart four-factor model) incorporating oil price changes. We also separate different market situations based on the oil price. Our results suggest that from among the investigated European industry indexes oil and gas companies have higher exposure to oil price changes than other companies from other industries. When examining the broad oil and gas industry on a sub-sector level we can detect some significant differences.

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Specific Factors of the Contemporary Development of the Czech Real Estate Market

Author(s): Roman Brauner / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: financial system; interest rate; real estate market; central banks; inflation;

The paper deals with the problems of the present development of the Czech real estate market in the conditions of long-term artificial under-valuation of the Czech koruna by the Czech National Bank. Primarily it analyzes the Czech real estate market development during the past 10 years, and investigates specific factors which influenced it in the course of that period. An integral part of the subject is also comparison of the Czech real estate market with other markets in the Czech Republic, mainly the stock and bond markets. Further, dependence of interest rates is analysed. In conclusion the paper predicts a future development based on the reached results, which would occur in case the artificial under-valuation of the Czech koruna continues over the long term.

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Testing for Information Asymmetry in Automobile Insurance: Sample from Slovak Republic

Author(s): Zuzana Brokešová,Erika Pastoráková,Tomáš Ondruška / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: moral hazard; adverse selection; insurance; motor insurance;

Neoclassical economics assume perfect information to all market participants about prices and quality of goods and services offered in the market. However, in many cases individuals remain only partially informed, resulting in state where some market participants have more information than the others. Importance of information balance increases significantly, especially, in the case of services with no immediate outcome, such as financial products, and particularly insurance. The paper focuses on the information asymmetry in insurance market. We use the micro-data about automobile insurance from Slovak insurance company to verify presence of information asymmetry in insured-insurer relation. Based on the results of the empirical data analysis, we have not find any correlation between coverage and loss in our dataset. This result does not prove absence of information asymmetry in the insurance market and it could imply that private information of individuals affects this analysis.

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The Limitations of E-commerce Development in Full Operating Cycle Firms: V4 Countries Case

Author(s): Emilia Brożyna,Grzegorz Michalski,Guenter Blendinger,Ahmed Ahmidat / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: financing e-commerce; financial analysis; financial performance; V4 financial reality; financial liquidity management;

Financial efficiency of an entities operating in full operating cycle conditions is influenced by environmental characteristics. That paper analyzes one of the financial results measured by cash tied in inventories in e-commerce full operating cycle financially constrained V4 entities. In recent decades, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe there are significant changes in national economies. Many of them joined the European Union in 2004. Among the EU Member States noteworthy is the largest group of countries of Central and Eastern Europe: Czechia, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. On 15 February 1991 they have concluded an agreement on the formation of the Visegrad Group. It was aimed at expanding cooperation between these countries and in the initial phase of accession to the European Union and NATO. Analysis of the changes that have taken place in companies using online sales in the countries of the Visegrad Group is the subject of this article.

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Optimising the Slovak Tax Policy and Tax System Performance

Author(s): Emil Burak,Juraj Nemec / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: tax administration; Slovakia; optimizing; opinion of tax officials;

There is a rich body of general scientific research dealing with issues such as optimum tax systems and optimum tax policies; however, there is limited scientific research focused on these issues specifically in Slovakia. To help fill this gap, our paper defines and discusses the most significant elements of the future optimisation of the Slovak tax system. The paper is based on primary and secondary data; it combines qualitative and quantitative research methods. The paper’s main basis is the comparison of perceived needs by tax officials, collected in the course of our research, with existing evidence. The most frequent responses (simplify tax collection, decrease tax bureaucracy, provide better information about the tax system to businesses and citizens, increase the level of risk connected with tax evasion, and improve tax administration services) are very much in line with the positions of existing scientific and professional literature. However, the second most frequent answer, to decrease the tax burden, indicates a level of tax illusion even at the level of tax administration professionals.

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Comparison of the Efficiency of Selected European Banking Sectors

Author(s): Liběna Černohorská / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: bank; banking sector; banks efficiency; cluster analysis; the Principal Components Analysis;

There is no generally accepted concept of efficiency nor is there a uniform system of indicators for measuring bank efficiency. It is even possible to use the method of financial analysis to measure bank efficiency. In this paper, the following ratios are used for measuring bank efficiency: ROA, ROE, total assets, nonperforming loans/total loans, quick liquid assets/total assets, quick liquid assets/short-term liabilities, loans/deposits, and capital adequacy. The goal of this paper is to assess the efficiency of Czech banks using cluster analysis on the basis of selected ratios and to conduct a comparison with bank efficiency in Poland, Austria, Greece, Portugal, France, and Slovakia. The collective ratios for the entire banking sector will be compared for the selected countries for the years 2010–2014. The cluster analysis demonstrates that the Czech banking sector is the most similar to the Slovakian sector. According to a combination of selected ratios, it is possible to designate the cluster composed of the Czech and Slovak banking sectors as being the cluster with the highest banking sector efficiency. It differs extensively from the cluster of Greece and Portugal.

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Investment in Renewable Energy Technologies from the Perspective of Polish Venture Capital Funds

Author(s): Karolina Daszyńska-Żygadło,Tomasz Słoński,Magdalena Ligus / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: renewable energy; venture capital; environmental innovation; environmental policies;

In the recent years ambitious targets to increase the share of renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions have been adopted by governments around the world. Variety of policies have been introduced. The question is what is the business potential and market response to that. This article adds a new perspective to the debate of business potential of investments in renewable energy sector. The aim of the paper is to focus on the venture capitalist interested in the new clean technology development and its diffusion. We analyze venture capitalists’ perception of investing in projects from that sector, possibilities of financing and barriers that they meet in the process. We conducted survey and field study with managers of private equity funds from Poland. Our research results show that in the overall business history of the surveyed entities 67% of funds invested in projects related to renewable energy sector. In order to assure specific competencies for investing in renewable energy sector they were using external experts in most cases or past experience. If they specialize in the RE sector investments they were likely to employ their own experts in the investment department While main reason for not investing in that sector was lack of competence, but also unstable situation in the sector.

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Sustainable Value Creation - performance of European Manufacturing Companies

Author(s): Karolina Daszyńska-Żygadło / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: sustainability; value creation; opportunity cost;

The research problem of this paper is how to measure the impact of corporate sustainability performance on company’s value. Its aim is to show this impact in monetary terms, using opportunity costs based approach. Sustainable Value method presented and tested in this paper integrates environmental, social and economic factors. It measures the value created or destroyed by the company with the usage of particular set of resources, the value is referenced to the benchmark’s value creation that could potentially be realized with the same set of resources. Research was conducted on manufacturing companies from EU-15 countries. It analyzes the prospects and advancement in sustainable value creation as well as mitigation of negative environmental impact in reference to value created by companies examined in the research of Figge, Hahn and coauthors in ADVANCE project (2006). Results show that majority of companies which were creating sustainable value in the period of 2001-2003 continued to obtain positive values in the period of 2004-2012, the same applied to value destructing companies.

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Systemic Risk Indicators in the Eurozone: An Empirical Evaluation

Author(s): Oleg Deev,Martin Hodula / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: systemic risk measures; Markov-switching models; DCC-GARCH models;

In this brief paper, we use combination of Markov-switching models and dynamic conditional correlation models to ex-post evaluate the performance of three widely used systemic risk measures (SRISK, CISS and term-spread) based on their ability to predict financial turmoil. We first compare systemic risk measures based on their dynamic correlations. Second, we identify three regimes for each indicator and evaluate them based on their ability to capture crisis information. We found that in practice, the correlations between studied systemic risk measures are indeed high and indicators are successful in capturing regimes of high financial stress. We have however, identified a few periods when the indicators are not overlapping, especially in pre- and post-crisis period.

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Analysis of the Relationship between Taxes and Social Benefits and Transfers in the EU

Author(s): Nadiya Dubrovina,Jana Péliová,Erika Neubauerová / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: taxes; social contribution; social benefits; social transfers; econometric modeling;

Taxes have main contribution to the government revenue, tax revenue made up about 90% of total government revenue in the European Union. Government revenue, expenditure and deficit/surplus are main objectives of fiscal policy and the analysis of their dynamics plays very important role in the formation and coordination of the strategic and tactic tasks for socio-economic development in the countries. For the more detail analysis of dependence between taxes and social benefits and transfers we used time series of these indicators for EU countries. For the modeling the initial data as absolute values of the different taxes, social contributions and social benefit and transfers per inhabitant were used for 2002-2012. It should be noted that most of time series included linear trends that is why for the panel data analysis we used the first differences of these indicators. These models explain the complicated relationship between changes of taxes, social contributions and social benefits and transfers with individual countries effects (fixed effects) for each EU countries and can be used for prediction of features of social benefits and transfers as results of changes in fiscal policy in different EU countries.

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The Role of Life Insurance in the Context of Cover the Needs of the People in the Czech Republic

Author(s): Eva Ducháčková / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: life insurance; death; unit linked life insurance; technical provision of life insurance; risk portion of premium; investment portion of premium;

The life insurance is considered to be an instrument to cover the needs of people, on the one hand, a tool of covering the consequences of the risk (death and other risks – accident, invalidity, illness etc.), and on the other hand, a tool for savings to cover the needs of people in post-productive age. At present, many factors affect the development of life insurance and especially its efficiency. In the use of life insurance as a means of addressing the needs of people in old age is in the last period on the Czech insurance market a number of problems. The problems arise from the form of life insurance products, from regulatory approaches in life insurance, from approaches to selling life insurance contracts. The paper focuses on the analysis and evaluation of the role of life insurance in current conditions and on the question of consumer protection issues in connection with the life insurance. The aim of the paper: analyze the role of the life insurance by the cover the needs of the people nowadays in the Czech Republic in the context new changes on the market, in the new conditions on the insurance market.

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Quality and Efficiency of Bank Branch Services

Author(s): Vlastimil Farkašovský,Ľubomír Pinter / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: quality; technical efficiency; the SBM model; correspondence map; cartogram;

The goal of the paper is to deepen understanding between the two key indicators of bank branch production, the quality of services and the technical efficiency. The indicator of service quality is a composite indicator harmonized at the European level that includes the assessment of three main areas: the quality of customer service, the quality of sale of financial products, and customer satisfaction. The technical efficiency of the bank branches is analysed with the aid of non-radial SBM model by Tone. A spatial aspect is found to be a factor that affects both, quality and technical efficiency of the bank's branches. The paper reveals, that individual managers have still enough room to improve their skills in managing their branches.

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The Access to Instrument of Countercyclical Capital Reserves in the European Union and the USA

Author(s): Luboš Fleischmann / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: countercyclical capital reserve; Basel III; regulatory capital; cyclical risk capital ratio;

Repeating financial crisis brings new actions in regulatory rules of the financial markets each time. Regulatory authorities seek to increase the resilience of the banking sector through modified and brand new instruments, especially against cyclical risks associated with fluctuations in credit activity. The same is happening in the post-lehman approach to macro-prudential tools. This paper deals with the impact of countercyclical capital reserves, one of the new supplementary capital reserves, which introduces the Third Basel Accord (Basel III). The paper analyzes the objectives of the countercyclical capital reserve instrument and the method for determining its amount. A comparison is performed among rates set in other European Union countries and approach to the countercyclical capital reserve in the USA. The method also carries out a comparison between the European and American approach. The primary question of the paper is answered using empirical data that relates to the effectiveness of the chosen instrument to achieve the objective, which is to ensure the stability of the banking sector during the crisis and what rate of the countercyclical capital reserve matches the above objectives. The paper also aims to assess whether the tool can fulfill the high expectations of regulatory authorities.

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Hedging of Portfolios and Transaction costs

Author(s): Hana Florianová,Tomáš Dráb / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: warrants; hedging; portfolio; transaction costs;

The aim of this paper is to decide whether to rebalance hedged portfolios often to reduce risk or to rebalance them less often to lower transaction costs. In this paper we use delta-hedging for portfolios consisting of warrants and shares. We focus on how portfolio rebalancing works on real financial markets with an emphasis on situation on European stock exchanges. The motivation for this research is to gain knowledge for investing in real markets more effectively than just by using theoretical methods. In our research we achieved interesting results under the terms of transaction costs and different frequency of rebalancing portfolios. We constructed 30 portfolios consisting of American style plain vanilla call warrants and correspondent amount of underlying shares. We compared one week and two weeks period of rebalancing with no rebalancing. The results are that you pay more money on transaction costs to reduce one percent of risk as the rebalancing is more frequent.

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Comparative Study of Banking Sector in Republic of Moldova and Czech Republic

Author(s): Irina Frunza / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: banking system; financial indicators; efficiency; banks; Moldova; Czech Republic;

The paper deals with the factors affecting the development of the Moldovan banking system and what experience can Moldova take from Czech Republic to meet the standards of EU integration. In this meaning, was evaluated the situation in the sector compared to the banking system from Czech Republic, based on series of conventional indicators. The result explain the causes of high cost of credit, high levels of inefficiency and the systemic weaknesses, as well as other major factors hindering dynamic development of the banking sector. The experience of the Czech Republic as an EU Member State, is useful for Moldova in terms of transformation of the banking sector into a competitive and functional, which meets the requirements of the post-transformation economy and meet the EU accession standards. Research results highlight the main features of the banking system and solutions for a stable banking system with high performance.

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Competitiveness Assessment of Slovak Republic Regions

Author(s): Beata Gavurova,Tatiana Vagašová,Viliam Kováč / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Keywords: competitiveness; region; Slovak Republic;

The issue of competitiveness is directly related to international trade. The theories explain the factors of international trade in such a way that there is visible indication of a need to change an approach to understand competitiveness in economic policy. Despite the fact competitiveness is discussed in many studies, there is still no clear definition of this term in the literature. Competitiveness can be viewed from multiple angles. Therefore, it can be analysed at the international level and at the national level too. Besides this introduction, the theoretic part of the paper offers an overview of the approaches applied to not only describe competitiveness as part of trade, but also to measure it and to evaluate it. The special attention is paid to the analysis devoted to the Slovak regions. Local targeting lies in observation the data from the particular regions. One of the approaches understands competitiveness in form of gross domestic product. Our analysis takes it in this way. There are the eleven indicators selected that are able to model the level of competitiveness. These indicators are based on distribution of population, patents, households’ income, employment, tertiary educated employed population, unemployment, economic activity of population, health insurance, criminality, municipal waste, and road network.

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