Societies in Western civilisation enforce their rules through formal institutions such as secularism (SES), whereas in less developed civilisations often rely on informal institutions such as religion (RES). The present paper attempts to explain the determinants of societies’ choice between...

In light of the recent financial and economic crisis the present paper analyzes the determinants of loan default. We employ a unique firm-level panel data of 700 bank loans given to small and medium sized enterprises in Slovakia between 2000 and 2005 to investigate three loan default hypothesis....

In the paper we analyze the changes in agricultural trade patterns in Slovakia influenced by the gradual trade liberalization that occurred prior to European Union enlargement in 2004. The results show a significant trade-diversion effect of the enlargement on Slovak agricultural trade. A...

The present study examines factor content of the CEE transition country agricultural trade. We examine the relative country abundance for labour, capital and land, and test the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) hypothesis. Our empirical findings suggest that the factor content of agricultural exports...

We analyze university research and education in transition countries. University system differs from industry in the nature of product that it produces. University system is engaged in production of public goods rather than private goods. The sector also suffers from measurement problem. We...

The present paper studies the land use change impacts of fuels and biofuels. We test the theoretical hypothesis, which says that changes in fuel prices cause changes in land use both directly and indirectly and, because of price inter-dependencies, biofuels reinforce the land use change impacts....

This is the first paper that estimates the global land use change impact of growth of the bioenergy sector. Applying time-series analytical mechanisms to fuel, biofuel and agricultural commodity prices and production, we estimate the long-rung relationship between energy prices, bioenergy...

This is the first paper that econometrically estimates the impact of the rising Bioenergy production on the global CO2 emissions. We apply a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) approach to time series with annual observation for the world biofuel production and global CO2 emissions from 1961...

Recently, the EU Council adopted a new labour migration policy instrument - the EU Blue Cards (BC) - for attracting the highly skilled workers to the EU. The present paper examines the potential impacts, which BC may cause on less developed sending countries (LDC). Our results suggest that the...

The present paper provides a meta-analysis of agricultural landscape valuation studies and through the estimated benefit transfer function it projects the value of EU landscape. The analyses are based on information from more than thirty European and non-European studies which use a stated...