Ekonomická revue. 2021, roč. 24
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/10084/148822
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Item type: Item , Book Review: The Economy and Business Environment of Vietnam. Edited by Roderick Macdonald(Vysoká škola báňská - Technická univerzita Ostrava, 2021) Dieu, Ngyuen Thi My; Schwarz, MichalItem type: Item , Gender Gap in Earnings in China: A Cross Sectional Study(Vysoká škola báňská - Technická univerzita Ostrava, 2021) Meng, YajunThe privatization of the Chinese economy and the mobility of the labour force from rural areas to urban areas are increasing the pressure of gender wage inequality in China. This paper analyses the gender wage gap based on microdata from the Chinese General Social Survey conducted in 2015. The methodologies employed in this paper include the Mincer earnings function (1974) and the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition (1973). The empirical results reveal that the gender wage gap was over 20% in China in 2014. Education has a significantly positive influence on wages, but the rate of return of education on wages differs for male and female groups. The effects of education on wages in various regions in China are different. Education contributes to narrowing the difference in wages between female and male workers in West China.Item type: Item , Efficiency comparison of selected OECD life insurance markets using a three-stage DEA(Vysoká škola báňská - Technická univerzita Ostrava, 2021) Guan, BiweiThis paper compares the efficiency of 12 selected OECD life insurance markets from 2013 to 2019 through the three-stage DEA model, identifies ways to improve the efficiency of the potentially inefficient insurance markets, and determines how environmental factors influence the efficiency score. The major contribution of this paper is that, by using the three-stage DEA model and eliminating the impact of environmental factors on efficiency, the results are more accurate than those of previous studies. We find that the environmental factors have little effect on the German, Irish, and Italian life insurance markets, which perform well. However, after removing the influ-ence of environmental factors, the technical efficiency of the Belgian, Greek, and Hungarian markets decreases signifi- cantly.Item type: Item , Performance evaluation of optimal portfolios during market crises(Vysoká škola báňská - Technická univerzita Ostrava, 2021) Wang, AnlanIn studies on portfolio selection problems, classical portfolio optimization models have been expected to generate strategies that perform better than the random investments made by people who lack professional investment knowledge. In this paper, to test the efficiency of portfolio optimization approaches, we evaluate the historical performance of the strategies obtained by applying classical portfolio optimization models. To undertake the evaluations, in our empirical analysis, we apply two individual samples that cover the period of the global finan- cial crisis, 2007–2009, and the period of COVID–19 pandemic, respectively. According to the analysis results, we find that minimizing the chosen risk measure/maximizing the chosen performance ratio in the in-sample period does not guarantee the lowest/highest value of the strategy portfolio in the out-of-sample period.Item type: Item , From freemium to premium: The conversion capability of digital nudges(Vysoká škola báňská - Technická univerzita Ostrava, 2021) Gyulai, ZsófiaCompanies attempt to sway consumers’ decisions at various points in the buying process. Their so-called “nudg- es” are one of the effective techniques that they use to influence the process. Nudges subtly guide the decision maker towards a predetermined outcome while preserving the freedom of choice. The aim of this study is to classify digital nudges and investigate their effect on conversion. During the investigation, the following approach was used to analyse web analytics data from an SaaS provider. First, conversion data were obtained and com-pared with those from the year before and the year after the use of digital nudges. Then, in the two periods, the number of upgrades – from the freemium to the premium package – was assessed, taking into account whether the number of upgrades came directly from clicking on a nudge. Digital nudges help to improve conversion rates while maintaining custom- ers’ “normal” proclivity for page leaving. Loss aversion nudges were found to have the greatest tendency to convert throughout the study.Item type: Item , Numerical pricing of American options on extrema with continuous sampling(Vysoká škola báňská - Technická univerzita Ostrava, 2021) Hozman, Jiří; Tichý, TomášOne of the typical option classes is formed by lookback options whose values depend also on the extrema of the underlying asset over a certain period of time. Moreover, incorporating the American constraint, which admits early exercise, has increased the popularity of these hedging and speculation instruments over recent years. In this paper, we consider the problem of pricing continuously observed American-style lookback options with fixed strike. Since no analytic formulae exist for this case, we follow an approach that formulates the corresponding option pricing problem as the parabolic partial differential inequality subject to a constraint, handled by a penalty technique. As a result, we obtain the pricing equation restricted to a triangular domain, where the path-dependent variable appears as a parameter only in the initial and boundary conditions. The contribution of the paper lies in the proposal of a numerical scheme that solves this option pricing problem. The numerical technique proposed arises from the dis- continuous Galerkin that enables easy implementation of penalties and weak enforcement of boundary conditions. Finally, the capabilities of the numerical scheme are demonstrated within a simple empirical study on the reference experiments.Item type: Item , Offshoring and reshoring of manufacturing activities: a two-country evolutionary model(Vysoká škola báňská - Technická univerzita Ostrava, 2021) Lamantia, Fabio G.; Radi, DavideIn this paper, we consider a two-country model to study the offshoring and reshoring of manufacturing activities. A multinational enterprise (MNE) can offshore its production, or part of it, in a technologically laggard country to take advantage of a lower labour-productivity remuneration and a lower minimum wage. The concentration of the manufacturing activity in a single country causes an increment of the bargaining power of workers that mirrors in a higher labour cost. These disadvantages of the agglomeration may favour an offshoring process, which, however, empirical evidence suggests to be slow. The investigation underlines that an industrial policy that aims to increase the within-country (technological) spillovers that, on their own, increase the labour productivity in the technological-leader country, is necessary to incentivize an MNE to reshore the manufacturing activity. The economic-policy implications are confined to a monopolistic configuration of the manufacturing activity and to a market that does not distinguish the geographical origin of the goods.Item type: Item , Final look at GDP forecasting by Czech institutions(Vysoká škola báňská - Technická univerzita Ostrava, 2021) Šindelář, JiříThis paper deals with the evaluation of Czech institutions¶ (the Ministry of Finance and the Czech National Bank) real GDP growth forecasting performance between 1995 and 2015. Contrary to the author¶s previous papers on this topic, the set-up was altered, in order to assess an 18-month-long annual prediction and set a third estimate as the real-time data input. Using a battery of three error measures (MAE, RMSE, MASE) augmented by the Wilcoxon and Kruskal±Wallis tests, we have found that the MF and the CNB forecasts do not contain a systemic bias. Also, despite some isolated performance deficiencies (i.e. during the recession periods), the accuracy of forecasts prepared by both the MF and the CNB does not differ significantly from the benchmark forecasts of international institutions. Our outcomes hence correspond with the results of previous studies, implying that the changed data set-up does not affect the predictive accuracy of both institutions