Central European Journal of Economic Modelling and Econometrics

We examine new mechanisms that introduce environmentally friendly eco-changes involving the elimination of noxious commodities and take into account the structure of demand without a detrimental effect to agents' position. In the era of the fourth industrial revolution, these mechanisms allow eliminating unnecessary services or goods that are being replaced by modern technologies. We define optimal mechanisms under the criterion of distance minimization, when a small number of detrimental commodities is excluded from production processes as well as when producers are change-averse. The results have the form of theorems with rigorous proofs.

This paper proposes a microfounded model featuring frictional labor markets that generates procyclical R&D expenditures as a result of optimizing behavior by heterogeneous monopolistically competitive firms. This allows to show that business cycle fluctuations affect the aggregate endogenous growth rate of the economy. Consequently, transitory shocks leave lasting level effects. This mechanism is responsible for economically significant hysteresis effects that significantly increase the welfare cost of business cycles relative to the exogenous growth model. I show that this has serious policy implications and creates ample space for policy intervention. I find that several static and countercyclical subsidy schemes are welfare improving. Importantly, I find that due to labor market frictions subsidizing incumbent firms generates large and positive welfare effects.

We analysed the empirical importance of the capital flows in processes of economic convergence of the CEE region. We depart from reference net measures of capital flow reflecting the level of development of the financial system and focus on gross capital flow. Our econometric model is based on Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equation (SURE) elaborated by Arnold Zellner. This environment seems an alternative to standard panel regression, because it enables cross-country heterogeneity of parameters of interest (like pace of convergence). We tested several restrictions of the unconstrained SURE model, leading to simpler specifications that would allow for regional homogeneity of the role of a particular factor (like capital flows) in growth fluctuations and β-type convergence.

The presence of a binary variable in the cointegrated VAR (CVAR) model is most often interpreted as the structural break affecting the data generating process. It is proved in the paper that to enjoy this interpretation the binary variable must appear simultaneously inside and outside the cointegration space. In order to test for the break we advocate to employ the Wald statistic, however, its critical values and the power had to be simulated separately for the possible change of the constant, the trend, and both. The experiments were designed for different sizes of the cointegrating space, number of variables, the span of the break, normally and t-distributed errors. It is shown that the power of the test depends mostly on the magnitude of the break and the sample size while other factors are of secondary importance. In order to test for the break at unknown period the supWald statistic was proposed.