The author in this paper considers the question of the use of indices of concentration and competition in the banking market. As example he chose the Serbian banking sector during the second half of the 2010s. The analyses are based on the data of bank financial statements for relevant years, as...

Several factors are responsible for difficulties in describing the behaviour of commodity prices. Firstly, there are numerous different categories of commodities. Secondly, some categories overlap with other categories, while others indirectly compete in the market. Thirdly, although essentially...

The paper presents an estimate of the expenditure requirements to be used as a benchmark in the identification of best practices in the spending behavior of the municipalities. In order to distinguish the determinants of theoretical expenditure requirements with respect to those relating to...

Global Value Chains are a dominant feature of today’s global economy, yet their empirical analysis is still incipient. Building on a recent OECD-WTO database and the results of an on-going research program at WTO, the present essay contributes at filling this gap, after introducing the main...

We address the problem of selecting the common factors that are relevant for forecasting macroeconomic variables. In economic forecasting using diffusion indexes the factors are ordered, according to their importance, in terms of relative variability, and are the same for each variable to...

With the rise of global value chains, effective protection rates (EPRs) provide important insights on the impact of nominal tariffs on the competitiveness of industries. Building on the results of the OECD-WTO Trade in Value-Added TiVA database, the paper analyses the evolution of EPRs in about...

The factor-augmented vector autoregressive (FAVAR) model, first proposed by Bernanke, Bovin, and Eliasz (2005, QJE), is now widely used in macroeconomics and finance. In this model, observable and unobservable factors jointly follow a vector autoregressive process, which further drives the...

This paper investigates the role of textual information in a U.S. bank merger prediction task. Our intuition behind this approach is that text could reduce bank opacity and allow us to understand better the strategic options of banking firms. We retrieve textual information from bank annual...

The concept of formation of the equilibrium exchange rate on the conversion market was developed, taking into account foreign trade, capital flows and other components of the balance of payments. As the main determinants of theoretical-structural model of the dynamics of the exchange rate equal...

This article assesses the communication of the European Central Bank (ECB) using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. We show the evolution of discourse over time and capture the main themes of interest for the central bank that go beyond its traditional mandate of maintaining price...