Volume 68, Issue 3 -

From a political economy perspective, politicians often fail to implement structural reforms. In this contribution we investigate if the resistance to reform is based on the differences in the risk preferences of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. Based on three surveys among the German electorate, 175 members of the Federal German Parliament and 106 officials from German ministries, this is not the case. Since both politicians and bureaucrats have a higher risk appetite than the voters, their risk preferences cannot be seen as an explanation for the resistance to structural reform. Hence, it must be caused by other reasons. These could be interventions by veto players, wars of attrition by powerful interest groups, or reform logjams initiated. However, as during times of populist campaigns, the election process can put forth candidates with very high risk appetites, the constitutions of democracies turn out to be rather effective if hazardous actions and measures by political rookies and gamblers are inhibited by checks and balances.

Almost all countries face the problems of trade balance, although they are more inherent in developing countries and economies in transition. A majority of economists adhere to a common opinion that real depreciation may lead to an improvement of trade balance. That said, countries encountering trade balance issues use real exchange rate depreciation in order to improve trade balance. In fact, this research refers to the assessment of bilateral elasticity effect of real exchange rate depreciation and the income on export and import demand function of Serbia and its nine leading partners. 2004Q1-2015Q4 data and ARDL approach have been used in this research. The results obtained show the presence of the J-curve in cases of Germany, Austria and Croatia. On the other hand, we examined if the Marshall-Lerner condition was fulfilled in the case of bilateral trade with Austria. Finally, we found that the elasticity of income has a greater effect on the export and import demand function, in relation to the elasticity of the exchange rate.

This paper delivers an up-to-date literature review dealing with aggregation over time of economic time series, e.g. the transformation of high-frequency data to low frequency data, with a focus on its benefits (the beauty) and its costs (the ugliness). While there are some benefits associated with aggregating data over time, the negative effects are numerous. Aggregation over time is shown to have implications for inferences, public policy and forecasting.