Journal of Economics - Obsahy ročníkov

The aim of this paper is to identify the factors that contribute to the successful funding of crowdfunding projects, with a focus on conventional, social media and affective factors. Our unique dataset contains 267,830 Kickstarter projects from the U.S., Australia, Canada, the U.K., and Europe. In addition to determinants based on conventional factors, we study the textual characteristics of a project’s description and comments, including sentiment and emotional cues, extracted using a web scraper. We find that social media factors (such as social networks, comments on projects, the experience and social media capital of the project founder) as well as affective factors (emotional cues and sentiment related to project description) influence the success of projects in addition to the conventional determinants such as the funding goal, funding project duration, and project category. Our results are stable when we control for partial time periods, the geographic origin of the founder, and the founder’s social media capital and experience.

This paper contributes to research on the factors that have led to the decline of manufacturing employment in advanced economies by studying the impact of both import penetration and technological intensity on manufacturing employment between 2008 and 2018 using an extensive industry-level dataset for 28 EU countries. The findings make it clear that the growing share of Chinese imports in total extra-EU-28 imports significantly explains the declining trend in EU sectoral employment. The mentioned trend is shown to be mainly driven by the import penetration of Chinese consumer goods and less by the outsourcing of intermediate products. Yet, little evidence is found of technological intensity having a detrimental impact on sectoral employment outcomes. While the correlation between business expenditure on research and development per employee and employment growth was weakly negative, the share of information and communication technologies assets in total assets was positively correlated with both aggregate employment growth and the share of unskilled workers in the sector.

Digital services trade has definitely played an important role in the innovation of the bilateral trade cooperation mechanism between China and the Visegrád Group (V4), but the complementarity of their bilateral digital services trade has been little studied. We examine the complementarity of V4 countries’ digital services trade with China, based on the UNCTAD classification of ICT- enabled services. The results show that the V4 countries have complementarity with China mainly in education services, intellectual property fees, architectural and engineering services. However, we also find that the regulatory heterogeneity of digital services between China and the V4 countries is negatively associated with their bilateral trade. Therefore, China and V4 countries should better enhance regulatory policy synergy for future trade cooperation in digital services.

This study explores the influence of financial development on the shadow economy, alongside other possible determinants, for the CESEE region. To this objective, we used a panel dataset of annual figures for eleven CESEE countries from 2003 to 2019. To estimate the long-run coefficients, panel FMOLS and DOLS were employed. Our findings suggest that an increase in financial development and tax burden leads to the enlargement of the shadow economy. While improvements in institutional quality, trade openness, and economic freedom reduce the magnitude of the shadow economy. The study’s results offer various policy recommendations that can be used to combat the shadow economy in CESEE countries. Tax policy and institutional reforms are encouraged to pro-mote greater trust within institutions, enabling the shift of economic activities from the shadow to the formal economy.