Journal of Economics - Obsahy ročníkov

Due to the processing of unique data concerning the vehicle fleet of the Czech Republic and the national emission inventory, this paper examines the relevance of the benefits available for newer vehicles by means of the Czech road tax against the principle of internalization of road transport externalities. A serious finding is that the highest tax benefits are available for vehicles that generate the largest amount of CO2 and NOX emissions. The findings should serve as support for the adjustment of road tax reductions in the Czech Republic. Based on the similarities between the Czech and Slovak fleets and relevant legislation, the preferential treatment of taxation of newer vehicles applied in Slovakia can be assessed through a similar method. On a general level, the examination proved that the input data are suitable for the application of a fiscal instrument that accounts for emissions in road transport.

In this study, the impacts of migration on labor costs are examined within the framework of structural approach by using nonlinear components of migration and labor cost 22 European Union member countries for the period 2000 – 2017. While labor cost is determined as dependent variable, the ratio of immigration to country population is determined as regime dependent regressor and threshold variable and panel threshold method is used in the study. The findings indicate that there is a single threshold level for the established model. In the first regime below the threshold value, it is determined that an increase in immigration reduces labor costs, and if the immigration exceeds the threshold value, it is concluded that the immigration has no effect on the labor costs.

The central goal of this paper is to analyse factors that determine the growth of shadow banking in 11 new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe, using annual data for the period 1999 – 2019. As the levels of economic and financial development vary considerably across these countries, we split them into three more homogenous groups: the Balkan, Baltic, and Višegrad countries. We then applied dynamic and fully modified ordinary least squares to estimate the relationship between the variables. The results of our study indicate that the insurance and banking sectors as well as economic growth have a positive effect on the shadow banking sector across all groups. We also found that the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007 – 2008 had a diverse impact on the selected groups of countries.

This paper investigates the effect of distribution in terms of tertiary education graduates by fields on economic growth over the 1998 – 2012 periods for 27 OECD countries by using a two-step System GMM method proposed by Arellano and Bover (1995) and Blundell and Bond (1998). We calculate distribution of graduates from education, humanities and arts, social sciences, sciences, engineering, agriculture, and health and welfare through standard deviation methods. Our results reveal that for all fields, except education and agriculture, the distribution of graduates among the sub-fields of the mentioned fields has a positive and significant effect on economic growth. The results obtained from this study may help universities, governments and enterprises plan their investments on human capital. In addition, governments can consider our results to determine the allocation of resources for tertiary education and to develop effective employment policies.

We examine publication/citation (P/C) patterns of 88,653 global most productive researchers (MPRs). We analyze the link between publication and citation activity and provide evidence regarding the extent to which top researchers scientific results are better than scientific results of others. Our second aim is to analyze the kinds of patterns that are occurring in P/C activities of top researchers. Major findings are that both quality and quantity parameters represent important feature of MPRs. The best among top researchers have substantially better parameters than those at the bottom level of ranking. We also find that many MPRs publish excellent publications and receive high number of citations. The best-cited publications have researchers exhibiting low number of total publications. Among factors contributing to success of MPRs are team, cooperation, specialization, Ph.D. supervising, international project participation, multiple-use products and some other factors. Finally, looking at the patterns characterizing 22 research fields reveals differences. The clinical medicine field, e.g., is the area of research with the largest number of published WoS documents and citations. Multidisciplinary sciences show significantly lower values. The only similarity is an average number of citations per paper.