We evaluate proposals for an independent fiscal authority put forward as a solution to excessive public spending. Our main conclusion is that shifting the responsibility to set broad measures of fiscal policy from the hands of the government to an independent fiscal council is not necessarily...

This study verifies whether the results of proportional capital income taxation on the risk-taking of a loss-averse investor will still hold when the return of a risky asset has a general continuous distribution. We extend the previous literature, which assumes a binomial distribution of asset...

The value added tax (VAT) rates have recently changed in the Czech Republic, and in this paper I simulate the impact of these reforms. They are an example of changes in indirect taxes that change the prices of goods and services, to which households can respond by adjusting their expenditures. I...

The scope of this paper is to empirically test whether the potential disincentive effects of the Czech social security system affected the labor flows from unemployment to employment over the period 1995–2005. Combining individual data from the Czech Labor Force Survey and the Czech Household...

We analyze the risk-return characteristics of nine European emerging stock market indices over the period from January 2000 to December 2013. We show that (i) the return distances declined and structural breaks in this characteristic are sparse; (ii) distances between standard deviations are more...

This paper investigates the links between institutional quality and government policy in banking sector development, using data from 80 low-, middle- and high-income economies during 1985–2007. In order to investigate the effect of economic, political and social institutions on bank-based...

There is consensus on the need for entrepreneurship (a micro phenomenon) to drive the larger macroeconomy. However, little research has been done on how specific macroeconomic policies might in turn impact entrepreneurship. This paper examines how one particular macroeconomic policy, capital...

The purpose of this paper is to provide estimates of price and income elasticities of Czech consumer demand, which can be used when analyzing the impact of exogenous price changes on consumer behavior. We estimate a demand system in which demand depends on income, prices and other socio-economic...

This paper investigates the differences between parameter estimates of monetary policy reaction functions using real-time data and those using revised data. The model is a New Keynesian DSGE model of the Czech, Hungarian and Polish small open economies in interaction with the euro area. Unlike...

In this paper assess the relative performance of US mutual funds using a non-parametric method such as data envelopment analysis (DEA). In particular, we assess the changes of mutual funds’ total productivity using the DEA-based Tornqvist productivity Index. The findings show significant...