Are Central Banks in CEE Countries Concerned about the Burden of Public Debt?

The aim of this study is to analyze the monetary policy rules in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, with public debt as an additional explanatory variable. We estimate linear rules by the GMM estimation and non-linear rules, using the Markov-switching model. Our findings suggest that in the Czech Republic and Poland the monetary authorities respond to growing public debt by lowering interest rates, while in Hungary the opposite may be observed. Moreover, we distinguish between passive and active monetary policy regimes and find that the degree of interest rate smoothing is lower and the response of the central banks to inflation and/or output gap is stronger in an active regime. In the passive regime, the output gap seems to be statistically insignificant

Determinants of Cyclicality of Fiscal Surpluses in The OECD Countries

In this paper we examine factors that make some governments revert to procyclical fiscal policies despite the standard normative prescription being to conduct fiscal policy countercyclically. In order to avoid the pitfalls of the two-step methods previous studies have typically used we used a one-step method with interaction variables. We found robust statistical evidence that procyclical fiscal policies are typically run by countries with weak institutions. There was also some empirical support for a hypothesis that countries that have accumulated a high debt-to-GDP ratio tend to run procyclical fiscal policies, possibly as a result of the financial constraints. We found no evidence that any other variable among the ones suggested in the literature explains the way in which governments react to the business cycle.procyclical fiscal policy, financial constraints, fiscal institutions

Quality in Product Reviews: What Technical Communicators Should Know

Purpose: Measuring the quality of product reviews via helpfulness votes is problematic for several reasons. I delineate the components of product review quality in order to assist technical communicators who manage their organizations\u27 user-generated content in identifying quality content and in helping reviewers produce quality content.Method/Corpus: I analyze results from secondary research on product reviews and discuss six important components of review quality. I focus most attention on five components of review quality that technical communicators can assess—informativeness, valance, credibility, conformity, and readability—and briefly describe a sixth component—user characteristics. I also exemplify these components, drawing from a corpus of 8,973 product reviews gathered in 2013 from a variety of retail and review websites.Results: Based on this analysis, I recommend strategies that technical communicators can use (1) to identify these components of review quality, (2) to develop a rich data set from which they can glean consumer wants and needs as well as trends related to their organizations\u27 products, and (3) to help reviewers write better reviews.Conclusions: As the amount of user-generated content grows, the need to learn from it and the need to improve it grow. By using their knowledge and skills in new ways, technical communicators who manage and develop product reviews can stay relevant and necessary as organizations rely more and more heavily on user-generated content

Adding Quantitative Corpus-Driven Analysis to Qualitative Discourse Analysis: Determining the Aboutness of Writing Center Talk

We discuss the benefits of using corpus linguistic analysis, a quantita- tive method for determining the aboutness of talk, in conjunction with discourse analysis in order to understand writing center talk at a micro- and macrolevel. We exemplify this mixed-method approach by examining a specialized corpus of 20 writing center conferences totaling more than 75,000 words. Our analysis also uncovered words that differentiated writing center talk from reference corpora and thus helped reveal the aboutness of the writing center talk. For example, student writers said I don\u27t know far more frequently than any other 4-gram, and tutors said You\u27re going to far more frequently than other 4-grams. We close by discussing the possibility of creating a corpus of writing center talk that researchers could use to ask and answer a broad range of research questio