0000000000246440
AUTHOR
Alexandra Horobet
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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 …