CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Vujic, Vukan Jadranka |
|---|---|
| Title | Essays on Applied Economics |
| Summary | In my dissertation I exploit original datasets to answer relevant and interesting economic questions. Although questions are vaguely related: transmission of financial shocks, effects of labour supply shock, and drivers of corporate charitable giving; all three chapters share similar methodological approach: applying microeconometric methods to test hypothesis derived from economic theory. The contribution of the thesis consists of providing new empirical evidence to existing questions, first and second chapter, or tackling questions that have not been yet analysed in the literature: the third chapter. The main contribution of the first chapter lies in a better measurement of a variable of interest, for which previous studies did not have available data, and had to use approximation. Second chapter follows identification strategy that is well-known in literature, but in a setting of developing country and specific episode. Extending the methodology to different settings contributes to the literature by providing evidence for the external validity of the hypothesis: that the results found in one setting hold in other settings too. Last but not least, the third chapter compares donation behaviour of foreign and domestic firms, topic that has not been studied yet, using quantitative approach on a big sample of firms. Previous studies were by business or sociology scholars, conducted on a small sample of firms, and descriptive in nature. The first chapter aims to answer the question if foreign banks deleveraged from Central and Eastern Europe (CESEE) during the European Sovereign debt crisis. High interest rates and relatively low indebtedness of households led foreign banks to form subsidiaries and enter CESEE markets. The subsidiaries relied to a great extent on a funding from the parent bank. Parent banks could borrow cheaply in their home markets and then transfer funds in form of loans or equity to their CESEE subsidiaries. However, the Eurozone crisis put an end to this business model. The crisis inflicted losses on parent banks and led to deterioration of capital position. Due to unfavourable market conditions, banks were unable to raise new equity and had to reduce the assets in order to satisfy regulatory capital requirements. Analysts and financial press raised concerns that bank will withdraw funds from CESEE and provoke credit crunch in the region. To examine if this really happened I collect data on related party transactions from the annual financial statements of subsidiaries. The data on related party transactions is not part of any commercial database, so related literature could provide only indirect evidence for the transmission of financial shock from Eurozone to CESEE. The second chapter examines the effects of refugee influx during Yugoslav wars on the municipal labor markets. Arrival of refugees represents “natural experiment”, allowing for clean identification of the effects of labor supply shock. Arrival of refugees was motivated by political and not economic factors which eases endogeneity concerns. Moreover, arrival occurred in a short period of time, and was substantial in size, which decreases the likelihood that the effects are driven confounding factors, and not by refugee arrival. The third chapter analyses charitable donations spending of domestic and foreign firms in Serbia. The question if foreign firms donate more than domestic firms has not been posed so far in the economics literature, and this chapter provides valuable insights by analysing unique dataset of Serbian firms. Uniqueness of the dataset stems from the fact that firms registered in Serbia had to report donations expenses in their annual financial statements, which is not the case in other countries. Hence, previous studies of corporate charitable donations had to rely on a survey or industry-level aggregated data from the tax authorities. |
| Supervisor | Lychagin, Sergey; Halpern, László |
| Department | Economics PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/vujic_vukan.pdf |
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