Over 40% of the total energy consumed in Europe is used for the generation of heat for either domestic or industrial purposes. Meanwhile, the demand for cooling is steadily increasing in all European Member State. In this context, it is essential to identify the heating and cooling demand in the...

The first part of text resumes opinions of economists, who critised the theory of natural monopoly and optimal regulation. The second part is dedicated to the most important problem of regulation, e.g. the motivation failure. The third part shows relevancy of these critiques for regulation in...

The Czech Parliament approved a wide-ranging reform of direct taxes in 2011. Absent other legislative changes, the reform will come into force on January 1, 2015. We evaluate its impacts on the tax burdens and the average and marginal tax rates in a representative sample of Czech individuals and...

We provide evidence on the policy risk of social security in Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia by computing the changes in the social security wealth induced by the pension reforms undertaken since the 1990s. Methodologically we follow upon McHale’s (2001) study of selected reforms in G7...

Corruption and corruptibility - due to their illegal and therefore secretive nature - are difficult to be assessed either with traditional tools, such as hard data on criminal convictions or soft data elicited through opinion polls, questionnaires, or case studies. While there seems to be...

We provide evidence on the policy risk of social security in Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia by computing the changes in the social security wealth induced by the pension reforms undertaken since the 1990s. Methodologically we follow upon McHale’s (2001) study of selected reforms in G7...

The article evaluates the distributional impacts of the value added tax changes in the Czech Republic using the Household Budget Survey, a representative sample of approximately 3000 households. It evaluates the impacts on the living standards both for the VAT reform that was actually approved...

This paper identifies spillovers from law enforcement. Our approach makes use of microdata on compliance with TV license fees that allow us to distinguish between households that were subject to enforcement and those that were not. Using snowfall as an instrument for local inspections, we find a...

We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong alert effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in...