Journal of Economics - Obsahy ročníkov

The formation of perceptions and expectations regarding the availability of external financing is a critical area of research for monetary policy, particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing energy crisis. This study utilizes data from the semiannually conducted Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE). The data covers the time period from April 2014 to September 2022. Our aim is to investigate how SMEs perceive and expect the availability of bank loans, credit lines, and trade credits. Our findings highlight that past experiences and changing demands for financing are significant drivers in shaping both past perceptions and future expectations. Behavioral factors such as loss aversion and rational inattention play a crucial role in influencing managerial decisions. These insights help explain the persistent low credit dynamics observed since the financial crisis and suggest similar trends may follow the current economic disruptions. Our results underscore the importance of considering behavioral elements and past experiences in designing effective monetary policies to support SMEs’ access to finance.

In contrast to the pre-Covid-19 pandemic and post-Great Recession periods, when a significant part of mainly advanced economies experienced a lowgrowth, low-inflation macroeconomic landscape, the post-Covid-19 pandemic period has seen a dramatic shift, with notable increases in the inflation rate while economic growth has remained largely sluggish. In this study, we estimate the underlying causes of the recent inflation spikes and quantify the contributions of individual factors such as production costs, imported consumption and corporate profits to consumer price inflation in Slovakia over the period 2021 – 2023. This is done by using the methodology of the adjusted input-output (IO) price model, which was adopted from Dhingra (2023). The results suggest that excessive corporate markups and profits, input prices and imported inflation have played the most profound role in the overall rising trend of consumer price inflation in the recent period.

Many authors point out that family businesses in the CEE region due to a different historical development might exhibit specific features and because of that deserve specific attention. The presented paper aims to contribute to this effort by exploring factors driving the performance of family businesses in the Czech Republic, in course of the research a panel of 7,995 businesses was analyzed by using the linear mixed effects model. The common problem of missing data, especially on micro-enterprises, was addressed by using CHAID methodology. We found that the factors driving family business performance differs between micro and SMEs segments of businesses, while the effect of families is most significant in terms of the model’s slope rather than constant.

This paper examines institutional determinants of bilateral trade in a thorough fashion, paying special attention to the issues of selecting institutional measures (using a composite measure institutional dataset 1990 – 2010), institutional endogeneity and state of the art gravity trade. In terms of the institutional focus, we emphasize that institutional distance can be an even more relevant determinant of trade than institutional quality on its own. We derive a theoretical gravity equation and test it empirically on a world panel of bilateral country trade flows for two decades. We find that not all types of institutions matter for bilateral trade to the same extent. The significant marginal effects discovered can be seen as the push factor of origin’s legal institutions and the pull factor of destination’s political and economic institutions. More importantly, we highlight the importance of the effect of institutional distance on trade, showing that economic distance affects trade significantly and negatively, as expected through trade costs, while political institutional distance increases trade, pointing to alternative ways of trade enhancement.