C10 - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: GeneralReturn

The Business and Consumer Survey is a commonly used and easy-to-follow tool for describing the current and near-future situation in the national economy. A lot of countries use leading indicators for economic predictions. The computations of the indicators are generally based on weighting schemes considering the importance of each survey questions groups. The European Commission harmonizes the weighting schemes for those calculations.In this article, we adjust the weighting scheme of the Economic Sentiment Indicator as the main result of the Business and Consumer Survey and design a new weighting structure of the calculation.  To find a new weighting scheme, we use a combination of a penalty method which measures L3-based-norm distance between all original weights and the proposed ones, adapting the weight system to the Czech economic data.  Applying the penalty functions is a method of respecting the original, empirically estimated weights used for the indicator's calculations on a long-term basis. The modified weighting scheme for the Economic Sentiment Indicator construction is supposed to ensure better predictions and, eventually, provide early warnings about any unexpected changes in the business cycle in the national economy.

This article aims to investigate the long-run structural cointegrated VAR model that relates to the core macroeconomic variables of the Czech economy to current and lagged values of a number of key foreign variables (6 domestic and 3 international) and 1 exogenous variable. This article aims to find cointegration equations for modeling the long-term equilibrium of economic relations in the Czech Republic in the analyzed period. Five long-run relationships are identified. The model includes purchasing power parity in relative version, money demand, a gap between domestic and foreign product, interest rate parity, Fisher inflation parity. A cointegration analysis showed that long-run structural equilibrium relationships correspond with empirical cointegration relationships, so the model used is suitable for a small open economy. Achieved empirical results are influenced by the fact that the Czech economy has undergone a currency crisis. The calculations used eViews software version 9. The structural model is estimated for the Czech economy. The data used have the character of a quarterly time series in the period from Q1/2005 to Q4/2016. The data source was the Eurostat database, FRED, Czech National Bank and the Czech Statistical Office.

In ordinal ranking problems objects, alternatives, products, services, etc. are ranked by several experts and the goal is to convert a set of (generally different) rankings into the final group consensus ranking. However, this goal depends on a degree of agreement among rankings. With random rankings one cannot expect to get meaningful consensus, but if rankings are "close" and represent agreement between experts, then the final group consensus has much more sense. The aim of this article is to present the evaluation of similarity among rankings, which is based on Kendall's τ and W, Spearman's ρ, Pearson's r and dot product of vectors. Cases without and with ties are discussed as well as a problem of similarity between incomplete rankings (top k lists). Explanations are based on examples.