Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries....

Unemployment belongs to the most serious economic and social problems of developed countries. Usually, the rate of unemployment is analysed. Another problem is the duration of unemployment and especially long-term unemployment. The unemployment duration in the Czech Republic in 2010 is analysed...

In the article the length of unemployment in the Czech Republic is treated. A nonparametric estimate of its survival function is constructed using maximum likelihood estimation for the groups of men and women and both groups are compared. The positive influence of education on the length of...

The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...

We provide an overview of problems related to variable selection (also known as feature selection) techniques in decision-making problems based on machine learning with a particular emphasis on recent knowledge. Several popular methods are reviewed and assigned to a taxonomical context. Issues...