Ekonomický časopis - Obsahy ročníkov

This paper examines how market concentration and firm size interact with labor productivity, wages, and labor share in four European economies – France, Germany, Italy, and Spain – through the lens of the superstar firms hypothesis. Using aggregated firm-level data from CompNet and digitalization indicators derived from EU-KLEMS, the analysis reveals that labor share exhibits a robust negative and non-linear relationship with total fac-tor productivity, consistent with the idea that high-productivity superstar firms allocate a smaller share of value added to labor. At the industry level, a clear positive association emerges between market concentration and both labor productivity and wages, while concentration correlates negatively with labor share. Within industries, firm size is also positively linked to labor productivity and wages but negatively linked to labor share. Although digital capital investments substantially increase productivity and wages among firms in the top size quintiles, these digitalization indicators show no significant moderating or accelerating effect on labor share declines. The findings suggest that the benefits of digitalization tend to accrue disproportionately to larger, frontier firms, while labor share continues to erode alongside rising productivity and concentration.

This research objective is to examine momentum strategies in the less developed and less liquid Croatian bond market. Both “pure” kuna (domestic currency) and euro-denominated (currency clause embedded) government bond issues are considered for a period of more than 16 years. Starting with daily data on government bond prices and using monthly return observations, this research tries to identify the presence and strength of the momentum as the systematic risk factor on developing bond market. Sub-samples were also tested to examine how different conditions, such as high and low interest rate levels, affect the performance of momentum strategies. The results support the possibility of creating profitable investment strategies based on the momentum for the sample of Croatian government bonds (assuming the possibility of short sale and ignoring transaction costs). Namely, statistically significant risk premiums are achieved for the most of analyzed holding periods.

The paper investigates the fiscal and public health implications of adopting an expedited excise tax calendar for conventional tobacco cigarettes in Slovakia. Through a comparative simulation, the study evaluates the out-comes of the current bi-annual tax system versus a proposed annual increase schedule from 2024 to 2028. The findings indicate that the proposed tax calendar would substantially increase government revenues while significantly lowering smoking prevalence, particularly among vulnerable populations such as youth and low-income groups. By raising tobacco prices more frequently, the proposed system is projected to achieve greater public health benefits, including the prevention of numerous premature deaths and lower smoking initiation. These findings underscore the benefits of excise taxation as both a fiscal and public health tool, offering a framework that could be replicated by other Central and Eastern European countries struggling with tobacco affordability progress.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics has confirmed the importance of institutional quality in driving economic performance and framing ongoing trends. We demonstrate the importance of institutional quality and assess institutional quality of CEE countries with additional focus on the V4 countries via composite indicator under benefit-of-the-doubt aggregation weighting scheme. We investigate benchmarks in six dimensions of institutional quality World Governance Indicators as a result of employing two nonparametric performance-frontier estimation techniques. Without specify-ing preferences or adjustment costs, both the conventional approach and the “closest target” procedure offer decision makers a choice from a Pareto-efficient set of targets. In setting policy goals, major trade-offs should be considered between ambitions for accountability and regulatory quality, on one hand, and government efficiency and corruption control, on the other.