nep-tra New Economics Papers
on Transition Economics
Issue of 2025–08–11
ten papers chosen by
Maksym Obrizan, Kyiv School of Economics


  1. European capitalisms in sustainability transition: the case of green bonds By Smolenska, Agnieszka
  2. Assessing Secondary Benefits of Urban Flood Protection Projects : The Case of Wroclaw, Poland By Yu, Winston; Goldblatt, Ran; Doeffinger, Tesss; Eisenberg, Ross Marc; Rubinyi, Steven Louis
  3. Details Matter: Loan Pricing and Transmission of Monetary Policy in the Euro Area By Karlis Vilerts; Sofia Anyfantaki; Konstantins Benkovskis; Sebastian Bredl; Massimo Giovannini; Florian Matthias Horky; Vanessa Kunzmann; Tibor Lalinsky; Athanasios Lampousis; Elizaveta Lukmanova; Filippos Petroulakis; Klavs Zutis
  4. Accounting for Intergenerational Educational Immobility in Low- and Middle-Income Countries By Fabian Koenings; Jakob Schwab
  5. Why Totalitarian Regimes Fall: A Unified Model of Power, Conformity, Dissent, and Entropy By Heng-fu Zou
  6. Shifting Ground: The Changing Landscape of Farm Numbers, Area, and Average Size Worldwide, 1971-2020 By Greyling, Jan C.; Pardey, Philip G.
  7. Engineering Ukraine’s Wirtschaftswunder By Akcigit, Ufuk; Kilic, Furkan; Lall, Somik; Shpak, Solomiya
  8. Impact of Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) practices in Bulgarian SMEs access to finance By Manolov, Mladen; Berrones-Flemmig, Claudia Nelly
  9. Intergenerational educational mobility during the twentieth century By Hossain, Mobarak; Beretta, Martina
  10. Nowcasting Transaction-Based House Price Indices Using Web-Scraped Listings and MIDAS Regression By Radoslaw Trojanek; Luke Hartigan; Norbert Pfeifer; Miriam Steurer

  1. By: Smolenska, Agnieszka
    Abstract: The EU’s sustainable finance agenda aims to accelerate the sustainability transition through the ‘greening’ of finance. How such greening may trigger institutional transformation in Member States is not well understood. However, the political economy literature has elevated the importance of non-market coordination and institutional complementarity in sustainability transitions. The article investigates sustainable finance uptake in four distinct Member States (the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden). Green bond legal documentation is analysed for three dimensions of firm-finance coordination: exchange of information, monitoring and sanctioning. The micro-level analysis identifies local adaptations that relate to how actors incorporate sustainability commitments and the EU sustainable finance rules into financial transactions and whether they conceive these as a source of risk (the Netherlands and Sweden) or a guarantee of profit (Poland and Spain). One jurisdiction (Poland) is further differentiated by a strong legal sanctioning mechanism resulting from legal factors and the presence of international financial institutions. Notwithstanding local adaptations, several micro – and meso-level transformations are identified, such as the consistent emergence of new forums for both market and non-market coordination. The political economy impacts and micro-level tensions identified in the article highlight how comparative legal analysis can anticipate the sites of broader political struggles.
    Keywords: EU Green Deal; green bonds; comparative political economy; institutional complementarity; sustainable finance
    JEL: F3 G3
    Date: 2025–07–17
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:128943
  2. By: Yu, Winston; Goldblatt, Ran; Doeffinger, Tesss; Eisenberg, Ross Marc; Rubinyi, Steven Louis
    Abstract: With global climate change impacting cities around the world, local and national governments need to plan for and invest in solutions that mitigate the climate and disaster risks their populations and economies face. Urban flooding poses an acute threat to sustainable and equitable urban growth and wellbeing. While the primary benefit of investments in urban flood protection is the avoidance of future damages and losses, such investments can also provide secondary benefits that can help unlock localized economic potential and contribute toward green growth. Although secondary benefits of investments in urban flood protection can be difficult to assess and quantify, the growing availability of locally sourced and remotely sensed data opens new possibilities. This study presents a spatially focused methodology that employs proxies to provide further evidence of secondary benefits linked to large-scale investments in urban flood protection in Wroclaw, Poland. Within newly protected areas, the study finds increases in land and residential real estate values, and an increase in economic development in parallel to on an increase in nighttime light intensity and built-up area. The study also finds that the relative rate of change for land and residential real estate values, nighttime light intensity, and built-up area within areas newly protected from flooding outstripped that of other areas of the city.
    Date: 2025–07–22
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11178
  3. By: Karlis Vilerts (Latvijas Banka); Sofia Anyfantaki (European Central Bank); Konstantins Benkovskis (Latvijas Banka); Sebastian Bredl (Deutsche Bundesbank); Massimo Giovannini (Bank of Malta); Florian Matthias Horky (Narodna banka Slovenska); Vanessa Kunzmann (Deutsche Bundesbank); Tibor Lalinsky (Narodna banka Slovenska); Athanasios Lampousis (Bank of Greece); Elizaveta Lukmanova (Central Bank of Ireland); Filippos Petroulakis (Bank of Greece); Klavs Zutis (Latvijas Banka)
    Abstract: Does the maturity of the relevant risk-free rate influence the strength of monetary policy pass-through to interest rates on new loans? To address this question, we present novel empirical evidence on lending practices across all euro area countries, using AnaCredit data covering nearly seven million new loans issued to non-financial corporations in 2022-2023. We document substantial variation in (a) the prevalence of fixed- vs floating-rate loans, (b) rate fixation periods, and (c) reference rates. This variation results in lending rates being exposed to different segments of the risk-free rate yield curve which, in turn, influence their sensitivity to monetary policy changes. We show that loans linked to shorter-maturity risk-free rates experience more pronounced monetary pass-through. Importantly, this effect is not purely mechanical, as part of the effect is offset by adjustments in the premium, revealing previously less-explored heterogeneity in the pass-through to lending rates.
    Keywords: Lending Rates, Interest Rate Pass-Through, Fixed-Rate Loans, Floating-Rate Loans
    JEL: E52 E43 G21 E58
    Date: 2025–07–25
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ltv:wpaper:202504
  4. By: Fabian Koenings (Friedrich Schiller University Jena); Jakob Schwab (German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS))
    Abstract: This study investigates intergenerational educational immobility and its transmission channels in four developing countries: Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. From data elicited throughout children’s childhood, we extract latent factors of children’s attributes and their environments. We decompose educational immobility by analyzing the extent to which these factors mediate intergenerational persistence. The findings show that relevant channels in developed countries are also important in these developing countries. Additionally, developing-country specific factors, such as starting a family while underage and performing child labor, play a role. The factors’ importance differs moderately between the countries. Other factors – most notably non-cognitive skills – play no role.
    Keywords: Intergenerational social mobility, transmission channels, low- and middle-income countries, decomposition, mediation analysis, factor analysis
    JEL: I24 J62 O15
    Date: 2025–08–07
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2025-0009
  5. By: Heng-fu Zou
    Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive mathematical framework for analyzing the internal dynamics, fragility, and inevitable collapse of totalitarian regimes. Drawing upon foundational criteria established by Friedrich and Brzezinski, we construct a system of seven coupled nonlinear differential equations that capture the interdependent evolution of ideol ogy, political power, coercive force, citizen conformity, dissent, economic extraction, and systemic entropy. The model integrates principles from dynamical systems theory, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and neural systems analysis to show that totalitarian regimes are structurally unstable. Simulations reveal three distinct phases in a regime's trajectory -- consolidation, metastable stagnation, and nonlinear collapse driven by endogenous entropy accumulation and the regime's inherent inability to process dissent or adapt to disorder. A thermodynamic reinterpretation frames these regimes as dissipative structures that become energetically unsustainable, while a cognitive-neural analog demonstrates their eventual failure as signal-processing systems. Historical episodes-from Stalinist repression and Nazi collapse to the final decades of the Soviet Union -- are shown to conform to this general law of structural breakdown. We conclude by stating a unified law of totalitarian collapse: any regime that overcentralizes signal and suppresses feedback will generate entropy faster than it can dissipate it, leading inevitably to systemic failure.
    Keywords: Totalitarianism, system collapse, entropy, nonlinear dynamics, thermodynamics, Wilson–Cowan model, cognitive regimes, ideology, political power, dissent, neural instability, adaptive failure
    Date: 2025–06–04
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cuf:wpaper:767
  6. By: Greyling, Jan C.; Pardey, Philip G.
    Abstract: The tide is turning on the trajectory of farm structures throughout the world. Drawing on a new, balanced-panel dataset for 168 countries covering 1971–2020, we estimate that farm numbers rose from 426 million to 668 million, while measured farmland has contracted since about 1980, and average farm size has shrunk. Yet recent movements signal a historic pivot. As agri-food economies mature—with higher incomes, ageing and slowing populations, and rapid urbanization—the long-standing pattern of ever-more farms and ever-smaller holdings is no longer universal. The global weighted mean area per farm fell from 7.6 ha to 4.5 ha over the past half-century, but the rate of decline moderated to 0.74% per year in the past decade, down from 0.85% pr year previously. Seven countries—China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia—contain 70% (469 million) of all farms; their dominance distorts geographically divergent trajectories worldwide. For at least several decades, the median farm worldwide has crept up in size to 5.3 ha in 2020, while the unweighted mean has climbed to 58.0 ha. The roster of countries with stable or rising average farm sizes increased from 88 (62.0%) in the 1970s to 108 (66.2%) in the 2010s, with consolidation now evident in China, Thailand, and Vietnam as well as in high-income economies. Consolidation usually entails fewer farms and, in many cases, shrinking farmland area as well as increasing average farm sizes. A statistical decomposition confirms that, globally, shifts in farm numbers—rather than changes in total farmland—principally (though not everywhere, all the time) drive movements in mean farm size, underscoring the demographic and structural forces reshaping agriculture worldwide.
    Keywords: Land Economics/Use
    Date: 2025–08–01
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:umiswp:364278
  7. By: Akcigit, Ufuk; Kilic, Furkan; Lall, Somik; Shpak, Solomiya
    Abstract: As Ukraine emerges from the devastation of war, it faces a historic opportunity to engineer its own Wirtschaftswunder—a productivity-driven economic transformation akin to post-war West Germany. While investment-led growth may offer quick wins, it is efficiency, innovation, and institutional reform that will determine Ukraine’s long-term economic trajectory. Drawing on rich micro-level firm data spanning 25 years, this paper uncovers deep structural distortions that have suppressed creative destruction and productivity in Ukraine. It finds that business dynamism is on the decline, alongside rising market concentration among incumbent businesses, including low productivity state owned enterprises. To inform priorities for reviving business dynamism, this study develops a model of creative destruction drawing on Acemoglu et al. (2018) and Akcigit et al. (2021). The quantitative assessment highlights that policies that discipline entrenched incumbents are the bedrock for reviving business dynamism and engineer Ukraine’s Wirtschaftswunder. Policies targeting specific types of firms have limited efficacy when incumbents run wild.
    Date: 2025–07–28
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11174
  8. By: Manolov, Mladen; Berrones-Flemmig, Claudia Nelly
    Abstract: Given the European Union's commitments of achieving net zero by 2050 and advocating Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) targets, ESG is having an increasingly larger impact on businesses (Alamillos & De Mariz, 2022). Various studies have concluded that if a company has a high ESG score, it typically borrows at a cheaper rate, receives more favorable credit terms and conditions, has higher valuation, achieves better financial performance, as well as other benefits relating to its access to finance (Jang et al., 2020; Srivastava et al., 2022; Albuquerque et al., 2019; Friede et al. 2015). The same studies focus, however, predominantly on large companies in developed economies. On the other hand, the issue of the financing gap in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) is experienced globally and especially in developing economies (World Bank, 2019; PwC, 2021). Given the positive impact of ESG on companies access to finance as found in existing literature and the presence of the SME finance gap in developing economies, this research investigates the impact of ESG practices on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises access to finance in the context of Bulgaria. An overview of current and planned ESG-related European Union regulations impacting SMEs is provided. With a focus on Bulgarian SMEs, a total of 27 experts in the fields of banking, venture capital, angel investing, SME ownership or management, and ESG consulting were interviewed. This study adds to the limited body of research pertaining to the impact of ESG on SMEs financing in a developing economy setting. The research concluded that Bulgarian SMEs engaged in ESG have better debt and equity financing terms, more opportunities and dedicated channels for receiving financing, as well as benefits adding to their competitiveness, such as better access to international supply chains, reduced firm risk, tax exemptions, ability to attract and retain top talent, and higher potential for top line growth, among others.
    Keywords: ESG, SME access to finance, sustainable finance, SME financing gap, ESG in developing economies
    JEL: M Q
    Date: 2025
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:iubhbm:323240
  9. By: Hossain, Mobarak; Beretta, Martina
    Abstract: Intergenerational educational mobility, capturing the extent to which children’s education is associated with their parents’ education, has become a major global policy discussion. Studying its long-term patterns across countries remains difficult, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), due to limited early twentieth-century data. Analyzing about 53.7 million observations from 92 countries, using mainly IPUMS census data, we find that recent cohorts exhibit increasing educational mobility across various world regions, with post-Soviet countries as exceptions. This increase is more prominent for daughters, resulting in a narrowed gender-based mobility gap in many LMICs, while reversing this pattern in high-income countries (HICs), with daughters being more mobile in recent decades. Nevertheless, mobility remains higher in HICs than in LMICs. Moreover, we identify a significant association between the expansion of schooling and intergenerational mobility. This expansion is associated with a more substantial rise in intergenerational mobility for daughters, especially in relation to their mothers’ education compared to that of their fathers. Our results demonstrate strong external and internal validity through a series of robustness checks, including data triangulation and comparing estimates from different sources.
    Keywords: intergenerational mobility; education; inequality; twentieth century; global comparison; LMICs
    JEL: N0
    Date: 2025–08–04
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:128832
  10. By: Radoslaw Trojanek (Poznan University of Economics and Business, Poland); Luke Hartigan (The University of Sydney, Australia); Norbert Pfeifer (University of Graz, Austria); Miriam Steurer (University of Graz, Austria)
    Abstract: Timely transaction-based residential property price indices are crucial for effective monetary and macroprudential policy, yet transaction-based data often suffer from significant reporting delays. Online property platforms, by contrast, provide list prices of properties in real-time. This paper examines whether immediately available online list prices can improve timely nowcasts of transaction price movements. Using 16 years of micro-level data from Warsaw and Poznan, we construct quality-adjusted monthly list-price and quarterly transaction-price indices using the hedonic rolling-time-dummy method. We find that list-price indices consistently lead transaction-price indices by one to two months, with the strongest relationship in Warsaw's larger, more liquid market. Building on this lead-lag relationship, we develop a Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) regression framework to nowcast quarterly transaction-price growth using monthly list-price data. Our preferred MIDAS specifications reduce one-quarter-ahead root mean square error by approximately 16-23 percent for Warsaw and 5-15 percent for Poznan relative to standard autoregressive benchmarks. The predictive advantage is greatest when incorporating list-price data from the first or second month of the quarter, as third-month data introduces forward-looking noise. Our results show that properly constructed list-price indices can play an important role to provide early housing market signals, potentially enhancing the timeliness of policy responses.
    Keywords: MIDAS regression, Nowcasting, House price index, Hedonic price index, Macroprudential supervision, Online price data, Rolling Time Dummy
    JEL: C43 E01 E31 R31
    Date: 2025–07
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grz:wpaper:2025-13

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