0000000000175261
AUTHOR
Lucian Belascu
The Influence of Oil Price on Renewable Energy Stock Prices: An Analysis for Entrepreneurs
Abstract This study investigates the relationship between oil price fluctuations and renewable energy stock returns using daily data on Brent crude oil prices and global renewable energy stock market indices between 29 November 2010 and 18 February 2020. The investigation is based on the existing evidence on positive correlations between stock prices and oil prices, but it also considers the shift from non-renewable to renewable sources of energy. A two-stage GARCH(1,1) model and a Granger causality test were applied. Our results show that volatility clustering is present in the renewable energy companies‘ stock prices, but, oil price volatility does not seem to induce any significant effec…
Integration of Capital Markets from Central and Eastern Europe: Implications for EU Investors
Our paper investigates the extent of capital market co-movements between three emerging markets– Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland – and three developed markets from the European Union - Austria, France and Germany. We test whether an increase in correlations between the six markets took place in recent years, as revealing higher integration of capital markets in the region. We find a statistically significant positive trend in cross-market correlations between 1999 and 2008, before the emergence of the global financial crisis. Movements in national stock markets are not fully synchronized, but increases in market volatilities lead to increases in cross-country correlations. There is a lon…
L’intégration Monétaire de la Roumanie entre Couts et Bénéfices
Il n’y a pas dans notre pays de stratégie qui concerne bien techniquement l’adoption de l’euro. Il s’imposerait d’essayer, quoiqu’il soit trèstéméraire, d’identifier le moment opportun pour l’introduction de l’euro. Ce n’est pas facile mais il faut s’y mettre puisqu’il s’agit de faire suivrel’évolution et l’identification des tendances d’intégration de la Roumanie dans la zone euro, de faire également attention aux modèles d’intégrationmonétaires développés en Europe et bien entendu de mettre en place des scénarios alternatives pour la Roumanie. Et tout cela tout en évaluant deprès les coûts et les bénéfices de l’adoption de l’euro car l’intégration monétaire de la Roumanie est bien importa…
Mapping Economic Activity in the European Union: Do Ownership, Industry and Location Matter?
The paper proposes a new method for analysing the structure and dynamics of economic activity undertaken by locally owned and foreign-owned companies within the European Union. We employ an unsupervised learning algorithm that generates a neural network depicted on Kohonen maps and offering a clustering of companies with a different ownership (local and foreign) from various industries and countries of the European Union during 2009–2016. The research methodology, based on a self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm, belongs to a class of neural networks trained to organize data so that unknown patterns may be discovered, thus leading to results that cannot be attained by more traditional cluster…
Project Management Competencies for Master Students: Curriculum Development in Two Romanian Universities
The Bologna Process has as one of its main pillars the link between academic curricula and labour market requirements. This process has built a space for dialogue and cooperation which reaches far beyondEurope, where the basic values of the European society – freedom of expression and research, free movements of academics and students, students active participation to learning and tolerance – have been put at the forefront of education. Since 1999, Romanian universities have tried to adjust their curricula and academic offers for study programs to the requirements of the labour market, sometimes with some reluctance from the various partners involved in this process. As the field of Project…
Corruption and Organised Crime Signalling Indicators for Foreign Investors as Applied to Eastern European Countries
The former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe and, implicitly, their economies, went through specific and sometimes asymmetric developments since the fall of the “iron curtain” at the end of the 1980s. During those years, they faced many challenges to create a secure and predictable economic environment for individuals and businesses, local or foreign. We propose a framework that considers legal, social, and economic indicators which can be used by foreign investors to make wise and efficient business decisions. Our main purpose is to expand the traditional economic analysis framework and enrich it with new institutional and societal indicators from the social, quality of lif…
Leveraging tangible and intangible assets by using a possible firm competitiveness index
More and more, in order to achieve global competitiveness, firms need to develop and apply unique and dynamic competitiveness models. With this paper, we propose an index that measures firm competitiveness by taking into consideration some tangible and intangible assets. This index demonstrates the fact that a firm is highly competitive as long as its managers are able to mix the tangible and intangible assets in the most effective and efficient manner; therefore, a firm can get the same score of competitiveness by using different combinations of assets and by giving different importance coefficients to the tangible and intangible assets.
Nonrenewable Energy Prices and Stock Prices of EU Financial Companies: A Short Versus Long-Term Analysis
This paper investigates the relationship between financial companies’ stock prices and nonrenewable energy sources prices (crude oil and coal price) using a sample of major financial companies headquartered in the EU. The link between stock prices and nonrenewable energy sources prices risk is modeled using a set of macroeconomic variables, such as Brent crude oil price, coal price, local stock market indices, the EUR/USD exchange rate, long-term interest rates and a global volatility measure (VIX). We apply panel data as the base econometric model and an ARDL extension that sheds light on the long versus short-run exposure of EU financial companies to nonrenewable energy prices volatility.…
Real-World Data Analysis of Pregnancy-Associated Breast Cancer at a Tertiary-Level Hospital in Romania
Background and objectives: Breast cancer is among the most common cancer types encountered during pregnancy. Here, we aimed to describe the characteristics, management, and outcomes of women with pregnancy-associated breast cancer at a tertiary-level hospital in Romania. Material and Methods: We retrospectively and prospectively collected demographic, oncological, and obstetrical data for women diagnosed with cancer during pregnancy, and who elected to continue their pregnancy, between June 2012 and June 2020. Complete data were obtained regarding family and personal medical history and risks factors, cancer diagnosis and staging, clinical and pathological features (including histology and …
Exposure to Exchange Rate Risk and Competitiveness: An Application to South-Eastern Europe
Our chapter investigates the economic exposure to currency risk of stock markets from nine countries in South-Eastern Europe using bilateral exchange rates of the domestic currencies against their main trading partners’ currencies between 1999 and 2015. The relevance and magnitude of exposures are investigated through changes in exchange rates in linear and non-linear specifications. Our results indicate that these economies show contemporaneous exposure to currency risk, but they are different in size and sign from one country to another and from one currency to another, a result that can be explained by the dissimilar economic structures in the region. There is smaller evidence for asymme…
Searching for new paradigms in a globalized world: Business ethics as a management strategy
The process of globalization is an undeniable reality of today's world. Yet, paradoxically, the cornerstone of this phenomenon, economic performance, varies widely across the world whatever indicator (for example, GDP/habitant, competitiveness) we choose to use to compare countries. Increasingly, studies tend to explain this apparently paradoxical situation with reference to the issue of corruption and ethics. In essence, corruption is perceived to be an important impediment to the economic development of a country (or area). Many studies of corruption are focused at the national level. The aim of this conceptual paper is to explore the role of the firm (as opposed to national states or int…
Drivers of Competitiveness in European High-Tech Industries
Our paper builds on the importance of high-tech manufacturing and knowledge-intensive services as significant competitiveness and economic growth drivers in the European Union and offers a fresh approach of the study on the competitiveness of secondary and tertiary high-tech industries across EU member states. Our analysis covers the 2008–2015 period and includes twelve old and new EU members. We opt for a balanced panel data approach in OLS and ARIMA frameworks to investigate the competitiveness of high-technology industries in the EU with the aim of uncovering the nature of the main explanatory factors behind their performance. Our results show that the number of persons employed and the …
Romanian Equity Investments and Currency Risk: A Euro-Based Perspective
Abstract This paper assesses the benefits and risks of international investments made on the Romanian stock market, from the perspective of euro-based investors. We investigate the contribution of exchange rate volatility to the total risk of these investments over a period of nine years, between January 2011 and December 2019, by using monthly values for the exchange rate between the Romanian leu and Euro and monthly values of the Romanian stock index. Our findings indicate that, on average, Romanian leu depreciated against euro, causing currency losses for the euro-based investor, counterbalanced by the Romanian index mean return, higher than euro countries index mean return during the pe…
Europe’s War against COVID-19: A Map of Countries’ Disease Vulnerability Using Mortality Indicators
Specific and older age-associated comorbidities increase mortality risk in severe forms of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). We matched COVID-19 comorbidities with causes of death in 28 EU countries for the total population and for the population above 65 years and applied a machine-learning-based tree clustering algorithm on shares of death for COVID-19 comorbidities and for influenza and on their growth rates between 2011 and 2016. We distributed EU countries in clusters and drew a map of the EU populations&rsquo
Exchange Rate Volatility in the Balkans and Eastern Europe: Implications for International Investments
Our paper’s objective is to study the volatility of exchange rates from the region that have not yet adopted the Euro and are not members of the Exchange Rate Mechanism II by considering the exchange rate regime and the implications of currency volatility for foreign capital flows. We model exchange rate volatility by using standard deviations of daily logarithmic changes in the exchange rates, rolling standard deviations, Hodrick-Prescott filters to detect the trends in volatility and ARIMA models. We find that currency volatility remains a strong issue for these countries and that central banks have attempted to manage it, particularly after the global financial crisis. Spikes in monthly …
The dynamics of the financial capital – intellectual capital binomial relationship regarding the value creation process of a firm in the knowledge-based society
The idea that the value of the firm is given by its financial capital and its intellectual capital is generally accepted. But, what is changing nowadays is the importance/weight that each one of these two components claims to have regarding the value of the firm – based on the dynamics of the changes and the intensity of the competition within an industry, on one hand, and on the measure of connection/networking to the knowledge-based economy of the given industry, on the other hand. So, we are the witnesses of: (1) a repositioning into the dynamics of the financial capital – intellectual capital binomial relationship regarding the value creation process of a firm and (2) the need to reform…
Foreign Direct Investments and Economic Growth in Central and Eastern Europe: A Panel-Based Analysis
One of the most discussed issues related to foreign direct investments (FDI) refers to the impact they have on the economic and social welfare of a country. Moreover, if these effects are positive, the question is to what extent and by what instruments they can be enhanced by host country governments. In recent decades, the general political opinion on FDI changed, as they are rather understood as generating competitiveness and growth for host countries and less in terms of their negative effects on the economy. Our paper investigates the relationship between FDI flows and economic growth in countries from Central and Eastern Europe that are also EU members using the panel methodology and i…
On the Location Attractiveness of Emerging Countries for Foreign Direct Investments
Our paper investigates the FDI attracting potential of emerging markets by in terms of their location attributes. We use Statistical cluster analysis to study the dynamic evolution of emerging markets’ clusters, based on country attributes that are relevant for the MNEs location decision. We find that countries tend to be grouped at a geographical level or depending on the various resources they possess, except for China that clusters independently. Also, there are numerous countries’ transitions from one cluster to another over the years, which indicate a natural process of changing location attributes and market development for many emerging economies.
Performance Dissimilarities in European Union Manufacturing: The Effect of Ownership and Technological Intensity
Our paper addresses the relevance of a set of continuous and categorical variables that describe industry characteristics to differences in performance between foreign versus locally owned companies in industries with dissimilar levels of technological intensity. Including data on manufacturing sector performance from 20 European Union member countries and covering the 2009–2016 period, we used the random forests methodology to identify the best predictors of EU manufacturing industries’ a priori classification based on two main attributes: ownership (foreign versus local) and technological intensity. We found that EU foreign-owned businesses dominate locally owned ones in terms of size, wh…
An Exploratory Study of Financial Performance in CEE Countries
Our research investigates the performance of companies from Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in the period after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 with the aim of identifying the driving factors behind accounting- and market-based performance. We include in the analysis companies from various industries in CEE countries that are European Union members and we study their performance between 2008-2016 over the following areas of performance: liquidity, solvency and indebtedness, operational profitability, global performance (through Return on assets and Return on equity), returns available to shareholders and market-based performance (through price/book value and Tobin Q …