Suchergebnisse

Land value capture can be defined as a policy approach that allows communities to restore and reinvest land value increases that result from public investment and other government actions. For that reason, public action should generate public benefit. The recurrent property tax, one of many tools for land value capture, is the foundation of a stable, enduring revenue source that supports the provision of essential housing and amenities services. This empirical paper aims to examine the influence of recurrent property tax income, and general government spending on housing and community amenities on house prices. To assess the hypothesized direction of the effects, yearly data structured in a balanced panel on a sample of 26 European Union economies from 2010 to 2019 was used. Fixed effects regression model with Driscoll and Kraay standard errors was employed and the results confirmed a negative but statistically insignificant effect of increased property tax revenue on house prices, while increased expenditure on housing and amenities confirmed a positive and statistically significant effect on house prices dynamics in European Union countries.

Cryptocurrencies are a sweltering topic in modern times of investment strategies. Since the cryptocurrency market is classified as an emerging market, in this paper a portfolio of emerging markets is compiled from the indices of four European Union (EU) countries and one cryptocurrency. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the incorporation of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency into the portfolio affects the performance of the portfolios of these countries. Moreover, by drawing an efficient frontier, the paper identifies where Bitcoin stands relative to other indices in the portfolio. The countries whose indices were used in the analysis are: Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Poland during the period from July 13, 2018 to June 07, 2019. The method used for an efficient frontier formation is Markowitz's Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). By applying this theory, the minimum variance portfolio at the efficient frontier was created for the portfolio with and without the cryptocurrency. The empirical analysis indicates that Bitcoin improves the effectiveness of the portfolio in emerging markets of the selected EU countries, where the expected risks of a portfolio that includes the cryptocurrency are smaller and with higher returns than those of portfolios without Bitcoin. From the Markowitz's theory point of view, the results of the empirical analysis also indicate that Bitcoin is on the efficient frontier. Since all instruments on the efficient frontier according to the modern portfolio theory are efficient, it can be concluded that investments in such instruments depend on investor's risk aversion.

The OECD urges governments to improve tax systems by studying taxpayers' behavior to prevent tax non-compliance. This study focuses on individual Slovene taxpayers aiming to investigate the impact of trust in Tax Administration and gender on tax compliance. In the empirical part of the study, trust and tax compliance were the subject of descriptive statistical analysis, exploratory factor analysis and Spearman correlation coefficients. A Mann-Whitney U test and independent samples median test were performed to evaluate compliance gender differences in tax compliance. The findings unveil that trust in tax administration exhibits a statistically significant and positive correlation with tax compliance intentions in Slovenia while the differences in tax compliance between genders were not confirmed. Taxpayers' fairness perception to gain higher trust should be increased through sufficient information about tax laws and regulations.

This paper investigates the impacts of economic indicators and the Internet penetration rate, as well as people's ICT skills based on the Percentage of Individuals who booked travel and holiday accommodation over the Internet as the main variable under study. Recent data on member states in the European Union (EU28) are analyzed, including data on the three official EU candidate countries: Turkey, the FYR of Macedonia and Serbia. The research focuses on the position of the above mentioned EU candidates, considered part of South East Europe (SEE) and the Western Balkans (WB). The main variable under study and four variables making a statistically significant impact on the main variable are explored. High positive correlations between pairs of the variables for 30 countries were found. Multiple linear regression modelling using the OLS estimators resulted in several acceptable models. Most hierarchical and non-hierarchical clustering methods resulted in clear grouping of the SEE countries (Turkey, the FYR of Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania) into the same clusters. Other more developed SEE countries in terms of the analyzed variables and utilizing specific clustering techniques joined other EU countries in different combination setups.