Suchergebnisse

Building upon two political opinion polls, we formally test for structural breaks in the approval rates of major Croatian political parties, the Government, and the general societal direction. Departing from the mainstream studies of political sentiment, we find asymmetries between the macroeconomy and incumbent's approval rates. Namely, only major economic turmoil can alter the way citizens evaluate political parties. The found structural breaks are driven by corruption scandals involving high party officials, and by major negative economic shocks, confirming the loss aversion concept. During economic booms, political sentiment exhibits a separate trajectory, independent of the macroeconomy. We also test for threshold effects in the generating process of political sentiment, finding that it reacts significantly only to large unemployment levels. The stated conclusions are in line with the prevailing narrative that the Croatian political landscape is highly polarised, divided over ideological issues and socio-cultural norms, so voters in typical economic circumstances do not evaluate incumbents based on their economic performance, but on their successfulness in representing ideological positions.

This paper offers one of the rare applications of various types of Euler equation tests to estimate the degree of financial integration of 28 EU countries with the Eurozone. The analysis is done separately for risk-free and risky assets in three types of financial markets (bond, stock and money markets). In order to examine whether the recent crisis impacted the levels of financial integration in EU member states, all models were estimated for the entire period of known quarterly data (1995-2014), as well as for the pre-crisis period only. We construct an Euler integration index (EII) that measures the integration level of countries across financial markets and show that the old member states (OMS) recorded higher integration levels than the new member states (NMS) in the pre-crisis period, while the crisis considerably decreased the gap, resulting even with NMS surpassing the OMS in EII values.

AbstractDeparting from the mainstream literature on European monetary integration, we acknowledge the interdependence of economic sentiment synchronisation and business cycle co‐movements for 17 European countries and the euro area (EA). Building on national accounts and survey data, we find non‐negligible evidence that sentiment cycles are the driving force behind general economic cycle synchronization. We demonstrate that recent EA acquisitions have witnessed an intensification of cycle synchronization with the EA core after the introduction of a common currency, corroborating the beneficial effects of the Eurosystem. Our results show a certain degree of dependence on the business cycle. The synchronization of 17 examined countries vis‐à‐vis the EA is mostly of equal magnitude or even more intensive during recessions than in expansions. In other words, the common monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB) should be able to effectively act as a countercyclical tool when an individual economy is facing a recession.

The literature on the political business cycle (PBC) suggests that politicians systematically manipulate economic conditions in order to increase their chances of re-election. The list of variables that have been found to have a significant effect on the probability of re-election includes macroeconomic (inflation rate, unemployment rate, output growth rate) and fiscal (budget balance, level of expenditures and tax revenues) outcomes. This paper focuses on the question whether price and non-price competitiveness indicators together with consumer confidence index have a statistically significant effect. Thus, this paper addresses two empirical questions. First, in light of the globalisation process and on-going comparisons among national economies, could price and non-price indicators serve as a proxy for voters when deciding on whether to penalise or reward the incumbent? And second, based on the economic theory of voting, is consumer confidence index a better indicator of re-election probability compared to unemployment and output growth rates? Using a dataset of EU member states over the 2000-2015 period and by applying probit/logit analysis we test both questions.

This paper is a follow-up on the Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index, developed in 2011 by Baker, Bloom, and Davis. The principal idea of the EPU index is to quantify the level of uncertainty in an economic system, based on three separate pillars: news media, number of federal tax code provisions expiring in the following years, and disagreement amongst professional forecasters on future tendencies of relevant macroeconomic variables. Although the original EPU index was designed and published for the US economy, it had instantly caught the attention of numerous academics and was rapidly introduced in 15 countries worldwide. Extensive academic debate has been triggered on the importance of economic uncertainty relating to the intensity and persistence of the recent crisis. Despite the intensive (mostly politically-motivated) debate, formal scientific confirmation of causality running from the EPU index to economic activity has not followed. Moreover, empirical literature has completely failed to conduct formal econometric testing of the Granger causality between the two mentioned phenomena. This paper provides an estimation of the Toda-Yamamoto causality test between the EPU index and economic activity in the USA and several European countries. The results do not provide a general conclusion: causality seems to run in both directions only for the USA, while only in one direction for France and Germany. Having taken into account the Great Recession of 2008, the main result does not change, therefore casting doubt on the index methodology and overall media bias.