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on Transition Economics |
| By: | Mariusz Kapuściński (Narodowy Bank Polski) |
| Abstract: | The effects of the bank levy in Poland on the broadly defined credit market (including on loan rates and volumes) appear to be well documented, with the use of the standard difference-in-differences (DID) method. However, as, for example, Borusyak et al. (2024) note, in a setting with staggered treatment (as in the case of the bank levy in Poland), and different effects of the treatment in time and between cross-sections, the method might provide biased estimates. None of the studies to date used the heterogenous DID method that addresses this drawback. In this research note I use the heterogenous DID method to estimate the consequences of the bank levy. I also discuss other methodological choices. Among other things, I find that the bank levy has lowered deposit rates, raised rates on loans for house purchases, and changed the composition and the level of bank assets. However, I find no longer-term crowding out of credit by government bond securities (while the latter did increase, the former did not increase) or effects on bank profitability. The use of a more advised method did not lead to results in stark contrast with the earlier literature applying methods for causal inference. |
| Keywords: | bank levy, difference-in-differences, panel data, financial stability |
| JEL: | C23 E43 E51 E52 G18 H26 H39 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbp:nbpmis:388 |
| By: | Soura Vamseekar, Marti |
| Abstract: | EU Pay Transparency Directive 2023/970/EU requires mandatory gender pay gap reporting and joint pay assessments across all member states by June 2026. The Directive’s implicit premise — that structured disclosure will close gaps that competitive labour markets have failed to address — has not been empirically tested against cross-country tightness data. We test it using a 20-country, 11-sector, 6-year (2019–2024) Eurostat panel covering the EU27. We compute four composite workforce intelligence indices — Hiring Pressure Index (HPI), Labour Resilience (LR), Equity Risk Score (ERS), and Transition Readiness (TR, in development) — and find that labour market tightness and gender pay equity risk are structurally misaligned. The Pearson correlation between employment rates and gender pay gaps across the 20-country sample is weakly positive (r ≈ +0.41; p ≈ 0.07, n = 20), contradicting competitive equalisation theory. This cross-sectional correlation is treated as indicative; the panel dimension of the dataset provides the stronger basis for inference. The five tightest labour markets (Netherlands HPI=100, Germany HPI=99, Czech Republic HPI=95, Hungary HPI=88, Estonia HPI=67) record all-sector gaps of 11.4%, 16.8%, 17.5%, 16.9%, and 16.3% respectively — all above the EU27 average of 11.1%. A novel Combined Risk Quadrant, plotting HPI against ERS for all 20 countries, identifies Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Latvia as Priority intervention cases: maximum hiring pressure coexisting with near-maximum equity risk. The Finance sector (EU27 average gap 24.28%) is the highest-risk sector in virtually every country, followed by ICT (19.68%). Construction’s negative EU27 average gap (−3.49%) is a statistical artefact of extreme occupational segregation, not evidence of equality. Apparently low gaps in Italy (3.3%) and Spain (8.9%) reflect positive selection of women into employment rather than genuine pay equity. We present WorkforceGuard, an open-source analytics system that implements these indices over a DuckDB/dbt pipeline ingesting live Eurostat data, with provenance metadata on very output, evidence-bounded LLM analysis, and a SHA-256 hash-chained governance log meeting the Directive’s audit requirements. The system and all data are publicly available. |
| Keywords: | gender pay gap; pay transparency; EU Pay Transparency Directive; labour market tightness; composite indicators; hiring pressure; equity risk; Eurostat; open-source analytics JEL codes: J31, J16, J21, J71, J58, C43, K31 |
| JEL: | C43 J21 J31 J58 J71 K31 |
| Date: | 2026–05–25 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129330 |
| By: | Tomas Fencl (Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University & Czech National Bank); Jan Babecky (National Bank of Slovakia & Institute for Forecasting, Centre of Social and Psychological Sciences, Slovak Academy of Sciences); Jaromir Baxa (Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University & Institute of Information Theory and Automation, Czech Academy of Sciences); Jan Bruha (Czech National Bank) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the transmission of monetary policy in the Czech economy through the lens of household heterogeneity. Standard macroeconomic models often rely on representative agents, while real-world households differ in income, wealth, liquidity constraints and balance-sheet exposures. These differences are particularly relevant in the Czech Republic, where household wealth is highly concentrated and housing constitutes the dominant component of household portfolios. We therefore apply a HANK-type decomposition framework to a post-transition, high-home-ownership economy where wealth concentration makes the upper tail of the wealth distribution central to understanding balance-sheet channels. The framework quantifies how changes in interest rates affect household consumption through five channels: intertemporal substitution, net interest rate exposure, income, the Fisher effect, and capital gains. The results reveal substantial heterogeneity in the strength and composition of these channels across household income and wealth groups: intertemporal substitution dominates for non-hand-to-mouth households, income matters more for liquidity-constrained households, and capital gains remain non-negligible despite a conservative calibration of housing wealth effects. Overall, accounting for household heterogeneity more than doubles the simulated consumption response relative to a representative-agent benchmark and brings the model-implied response close to empirical estimates of the impact of a monetary policy shock obtained using local projections. The findings suggest that representative-agent frameworks may understate the importance of labour-income and housing-wealth channels in monetary policy transmission. |
| Keywords: | monetary policy transmission, heterogeneous agents, hand-to-mouth households, HANK, HFCS, EU-LFS, Czech Republic |
| JEL: | D14 D31 E13 E21 E52 E58 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fau:wpaper:wp2026_13 |
| By: | Paweł R. Galiński (Narodowy Bank Polski; SGH Warsaw School of Economics); Jakub Mućk (Narodowy Bank Polski; SGH Warsaw School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | This paper introduces a novel Bayesian SVAR framework to identify the short-run drivers of export fluctuations across 18 EU economies, focusing on transmission through Global Value Chains (GVCs). By applying shock identification via sign restrictions within a hierarchical block exogeneity structure (domestic, foreign, and global), we offer four key insights. First, we show that while the Great Trade Collapse was primarily driven by global demand and uncertainty, the COVID-19 crisis involved a complex confluence of non-domestic demand and supply shocks. Second, tight integration within European production networks does not shield these economies from global structural shocks, which remain the primary drivers of export variance. Third, we provide evidence that trade openness and participation in investment-specific GVCs heighten the sensitivity of domestic exports to global shocks, particularly through cost-push mechanisms in backward linkages, while shorter GVC forward linkages tend to reduce this exposure. |
| Keywords: | structural VAR, exports, sign restrictions, Global Value Chains |
| JEL: | C32 F14 F15 F43 F60 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbp:nbpmis:387 |
| By: | Mikołaj Czajkowski (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences); Wojciech Zawadzki (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences); Katarzyna Skrzypek (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences); Wiktor Budziński (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences); Milan Scasny (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences; Charles University, The Environment Center) |
| Abstract: | Coastal bathing delivers large welfare benefits but exposes recreationists to low-probability, high-salience microbial risks that are likely to become more frequent under climate change. Because these risks are largely invisible, behaviour and welfare depend on beliefs and the effectiveness of risk communication. We provide causal evidence on how pathogen-risk information affects preferences and recreation demand using a three-wave panel survey of users of the Gulf of Gdańsk and the Vistula Lagoon (Poland). A stratified national sample identified 3, 312 active coastal users in Wave 1 (spring 2024); 2, 588 respondents returned in Wave 2 (summer 2024), where they were randomly assigned to receive either minimal information or increasingly detailed pathogen-risk scripts, and then completed a repeated beach-site discrete choice experiment. Approximately one year later (spring 2025), 1, 507 users completed a policy-referendum discrete choice experiment on programs combining water-quality improvements, monitoring frequency, and household costs, alongside a repeated travel-cost module capturing multi-day trips and beach outings. Information treatments significantly increased objective and self-assessed knowledge and selectively raised willingness to travel/pay for risk-relevant attributes – especially frequent water-quality monitoring and water-quality improvements – while leaving unrelated attributes largely unchanged. Travel-cost models indicate that information affects trip-taking behaviour, yet the marginal travel-cost sensitivity remains stable, consistent with a demand shift rather than a change in the “price” slope. The results imply that welfare estimates are information-dependent and that credible risk communication can function as a scalable, low-cost complement to traditional coastal health-risk management. |
| Keywords: | Bathing water quality, Pathogens, Microbial contamination, Risk communication, Information treatments, Discrete choice experiment (DCE), Travel cost method (TCM), Recreation demand, Welfare measurement, Consumer surplus, Climate adaptation, Coastal health risks, Baltic Sea, Poland |
| JEL: | C93 C35 Q26 Q51 Q53 D91 I18 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:war:wpaper:2026-22 |
| By: | Katariina Nilsson Hakkala (Asian Development Bank) |
| Abstract: | This study examines the effects of special economic zones (SEZs) on firm growth and the regional business environment in Viet Nam, highlighting their key role as a policy tool to attract foreign investors. Using detailed panel data from Viet Nam’s 63 provinces from 2006 to 2020 and instrumental variables (IV) estimations, this study provides new insights into how SEZs impact firm growth and several dimensions of economic governance. SEZs are found to play a dual role. Provinces with broader SEZ coverage experienced increases in employment, revenues, and the number of foreign-invested enterprises. In contrast, domestic private firms faced declines in both revenues and numbers. SEZ exposure had negative effects on several aspects of provincial economic governance including land access, transparency in policy-making, and informal charges. In addition, the approval of the first SEZ was also associated with increased prevalence of informal charges and preferential treatment of foreign-invested enterprises and other big companies, which may indicate heightened inefficiencies and rent-seeking concerns. |
| Keywords: | special economic zones;foreign direct investment;business environment and development |
| JEL: | F21 F23 L53 |
| Date: | 2026–05–29 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:adbewp:022604 |
| By: | Chun-Yu Ho; Dan Li; Shut Tian; Xiaodong Zhu |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how bank behavior contributes to capital misallocation from the supply side, leveraging China’s 2008 fiscal stimulus as a quasi-experimental setting. Using proprietary loan-level data from a major state-owned bank, we document systematic credit misallocation favoring state-owned enterprises (SOEs) over private firms. Following the stimulus announcement, the bank reduced interest rates significantly more for SOEs than for comparable private enterprises—a differential reduction of 0.36 standard deviations—despite SOEs exhibiting higher default rates and unchanged credit ratings. We identify the mechanism as a loosening of risk-based pricing: interest rates became less sensitive to internal credit ratings for SOEs. This risk-based pricing misallocation largely relates to the industrial policy in supporting government-preferred industries. Notably, no such distortion appears in bankers’ acceptances, a less-regulated shadow banking activity, suggesting policy intervention—not financial frictions—drives the observed misallocation. Our findings provide direct micro-level evidence on how government directives and industrial policy induce capital misallocation through weakened credit risk management in state-owned banks. |
| Keywords: | Capital Misallocation, Stimulus Plan SOEs Shadow Banking, China |
| JEL: | G21 G28 O16 |
| Date: | 2026–06–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tor:tecipa:tecipa-823 |
| By: | Aigerim Yergabulova (Nazarbayev University, Graduate School of Business) |
| Abstract: | A high price-cost margin is commonly read as evidence of market power. We show that where production is concentrated in capital-intensive sectors, this reading conflates two distinct objects: the coverage of fixed costs and residual economic rent. Using confidential firm-level microdata from Kazakhstan over 2009-2023 and a within-margin decomposition, we find an aggregate price-cost margin of 62 percent, roughly 2.4 times a mature-economy benchmark. Fixed costs absorb about 91 percent of that gap, and the residual excess-profit share, +5.5 percent, is statistically above zero but not distinguishable from the benchmark. The high aggregate margin reflects the capital intensity of production rather than economy-wide rent. The rent that does exist is concentrated in mining and foreign-controlled extractive firms rather than spread across the economy. Where production is capital intensive, high price-cost margins need not indicate economy-wide rent extraction. |
| Keywords: | markups, price-cost margin, market power, Solow residual, fixed costs, transition economies |
| JEL: | D24 D43 L11 L40 P23 P52 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:asx:nugsbw:2026-10 |