Journal of Economics - Obsahy ročníkov

In this paper, we assess the classification performance of the re-estimated Altman’s Z’-Score model for a large sample of private SMEs in Slovakia. More specifically, we assess transferability of the revised Z’-Score model (Altman, 1983) and explore the impact of the non-financial company-specific and macroeconomic variables. The dataset covers the period from 2009 to 2016 and contains 661 622 company-year observations about 149 618 individual companies with 1 575 failures. The discriminatory power of models is tested in out-of-sample period. We find that even though the model with re-estimated coefficients achieves better discrimination performance, it is not statistically different from the revised Z’-Score model. The non-financial variables improve the discriminatory performance significantly, whereas the macroeconomic variables do not. The latter even worsen the out-of-sample and out-of-time discriminatory performance. Keywords: Altman’s Z-Score model, failure prediction, default, non-financial information, macro-economic variables, Slovakia; JEL Classification: G32, G33, C52

In this paper, the regional efficiency of healthcare facilities in Slovakia is measured (2008 – 2015) using a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The window DEA was chosen since it leads to increased differentiation of results, especially when applied to small samples, and it enables year-by-year comparisons of the results. Two inputs (number of beds, number of medical staff) and two outputs (use of beds, average nursing time) were chosen as variables in output-oriented 4-year window DEA model for the assessment of technical efficiency in 8 Slovak regions. As the regional efficiency is driven by natural, historical, macro-economic and political conditions, in the next stage the impact of environmental factors on efficiency is examined. The results have confirmed that the public costs, private costs, departments, higher education, population over 65, life expectancy, wage costs, population size and income inequality indicator s80/s20 are statistically significant and therefore affect the efficiency of healthcare facilities in Slovakia. Keywords: regional efficiency, data envelopment analysis, window analysis, regression analysis; JEL Classification: C61, I11, R11, R58

The Czech tax sharing system essentially respects the basic principles de-scribed by contemporary theoretical approaches. The purpose of this paper is to examine how changes to its parameters influenced the municipal revenue distribution in relation to revenue equality and uniformity. We simulate different models of tax sharing with the full sample of Czech municipalities between 2010 and 2016. The impact of different parameterization is evaluated using the Gini coefficient. By comparing different scenarios, we conclude that the recent changes contribute to the equality of municipal tax revenue sharing per capita. Nevertheless, the conclusion should be interpreted in a broader context, e.g. concerning grants provided by the central government to municipalities. Keywords: tax sharing, tax revenues, municipalities, Gini coefficient; JEL Classification: H71, H77, R51

A standard indicator for the amount of wages is the average value, i.e., the arithmetic mean. The average wages are regularly published as one of the economic quantities in which all employees are interested. As a matter of course it is often said that about two-thirds of employees do not achieve the average value of wages. One of the reasons for this fact may be the existence of high wages – that is, wages substantially higher than most of the others. We will see in this paper that, even if there are not many such wages, they may have a strong effect on the average value. Our calculations will show this effect on particular data. We will exclude the high wages from the complete set and recalculate the average values after such exclusions. We will also study the proportion of the high wages in the quantity and amount of all wages. We will also be interested in the value of the median and how this value is changed by excluding the high wages. Another observation is that the high wages and their effects on the average values is predominantly a domain of men – this influence is much smaller for women. Keywords: average wage, extreme wage, percentile measures, median; JEL Classification: A10, C01

The paper focuses upon the predictive validity of Chrastinová’s CH-Index and Gurčík’s G-Index devised for predicting financial distress of Slovak agricultural enterprises and confronts them with Altman's bankruptcy formula. Its aim is to verify whether these out-dated models preserve their usefulness in newer conditions of Slovak agribusinesses and whether they may be improved by redefining the cut-off points used in separating distressed and non-distressed enterprises. Using a data sample on Slovak agricultural enterprises for the period from 2009 until 2013, it is ascertained that the G-Index with redefined cut-off points may be tentatively recommended for financial distress prediction showing a balanced trade-off between distress and non-distress prediction accuracy. Keywords: G-Index, CH-Index, Altman’s Z-score, Slovak agricultural enterprises, financial distress, prediction accuracy; JEL Classification: G33, Q00