Does a Soft Macroeconomic Environment Induce Restructuring on the Microeconomic Level during the Transition Period? Evidence from Investment Behavior of Czech Enterprises

The paper analyzes investment behavior of industrial enterprises in the period immediately following price and foreign trade liberalization in the Czech Republic. It also focuses on the effect of Asoft@ macroeconomic environment on the microeconomic decisions. A dynamic investment function with symmetric adjustment cost function based on the Euler equation has been estimated. The derived and estimated investment function accounts for export sales in order to determine whether firms evaluate production for domestic and foreign markets differently, i.e, use the advantage of an undervalued currency. The estimation was conducted on two-year firm-level panel data from 1992 and 1993. The first major result of the empirical analysis suggests that there is no evidence that firms treat domestic sales and exports differently in the context of the adjustment cost function. The second remarkable finding contradicts the common view that firms in the transitional environment have short-term horizons. Both these findings could be interpreted as strong evidence against the idea of economic policy helping firms within a temporary soft macroeconomic environment. No evidence was found against the applicability of the constant returns to scale assumption on the Cobb-Douglas production function within the analyzed framework.

Regional aerosol deposition in the human airways: the SimInhale benchmark case and a critical assessment of in silico methods

Regional deposition effects are important in the pulmonary delivery of drugs intended for the topical treatment of respiratory ailments. They also play a critical role in the systemic delivery of drugs with limited lung bioavailability. In recent years, significant improvements in the quality of pulmonary imaging have taken place, however the resolution of current imaging modalities remains inadequate for quantifying regional deposition. Computational Fluid-Particle Dynamics (CFPD) can fill this gap by providing detailed information about regional deposition in the extrathoracic and conducting airways. It is therefore not surprising that the last 15 years have seen an exponential growth in the application of CFPD methods in this area. Survey of the recent literature however, reveals a wide variability in the range of modelling approaches used and in the assumptions made about important physical processes taking place during aerosol inhalation. The purpose of this work is to provide a concise critical review of the computational approaches used to date, and to present a benchmark case for validation of future studies in the upper airways. In the spirit of providing the wider community with a reference for quality assurance of CFPD studies, in vitro deposition measurements have been conducted in a human-based model of the upper airways, and several groups within MP1404 SimInhale have computed the same case using a variety of simulation and discretization approaches. Here, we report the results of this collaborative effort and provide a critical discussion of the performance of the various simulation methods. The benchmark case, in vitro deposition data and in silico results will be published online and made available to the wider community. Particle image velocimetry measurements of the flow, as well as additional numerical results from the community, will be appended to the online database as they become available in the future

Enterprise investment during the transition Evidence from the Czech panel data

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:3597.9512(1835) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Enterprise breakups and performance during the transition

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:3597.9512(1757) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Does a Soft Macroeconomic Environment Induce Restructuring on the Microeconomic Level During the Transition Period? Evidence from Investment Behavior of Czech Enterprises

The paper analyzes investment behavior of industrial enterprises in the period immediately following price and foreign trade liberalization in the Czech Republic. It also focuses on the effect of "soft" macroeconomic environment on the microeconomic decisions. A dynamic investment function with symmetric adjustment cost function based on the Euler equation has been estimated. The derived and estimated investment function accounts for export sales in order to determine whether firms evaluate production for domestic and foreign markets differently, i.e, use the advantage of an undervalued currency. The estimation was conducted on two-year firm-level panel data from 1992 and 1993. The first major result of the empirical analysis suggests that there is no evidence that firms treat domestic sales and exports differently in the context of the adjustment cost function. The second remarkable finding contradicts the common view that firms in the transitional environment have short-term horizons. Both these findings could be interpreted as strong evidence against the idea of economic policy helping firms within a temporary soft macroeconomic environment. No evidence was found against the applicability of the constant returns to scale assumption on the Cobb-Douglas production function within the analyzed framework.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39621/3/wp235.pd

Employment and wage behaviour of industrial enterprises in transition economies: The cases of Poland and Czechoslovakia

In this paper we use two very large panel datasets from Poland, 1988-90 and Czechoslovakia, 1990-1992 to explore the dynamics of employment and wage determination at the enterprise level in the early years of transition. The study is intended to assist in building a coherent picture of microeconomic adjustment in transition, a field which was not sufficiently explored in the early years of reform. We find that Polish firms were already to some extent responsive to market conditions pre-reform, notably to demand in determining employment. Czechoslovak firms, however, were largely unresponsive to such pressures in 1989-90. The elasticities rose significantly in both countries in the early years of reform, especially in Czechoslovakia which quickly attained initial Polish patterns of adjustment. Firms became much more responsive to sales and cost pressures in adjusting employment and to their own productivity in setting pay. Ownership effects in these early years were, however, much more modest, with state-owned firms adjusting employment more than their private counterparts, perhaps because over-manning was more serious in that sector