The paper investigates firm-specific determinants of firm profitability for Romanian listed companies over the 2000-2011 period within the framework of resource based view of the firm. The results show that tangibles, leverage, size and labour intensity have negative effect on firm performance, while sales growth and value added have a positive effect. The results prove robust when introducing two-way fixed effects model and industry year effects model (in order to simultaneously account for specific industry characteristics and time effects).

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The paper investigates the impact of overall firm-specific tax-mix on firm performance for Romanian listed companies during the 2000-2011 period. By overall tax-mix, we mean all public finance-related liabilities borne by a company, thus including not only profit taxes, but also non-profit taxes (i.e., real-estate taxes) and labour-related taxes (social security charges borne by companies). Developed around the corresponding tax wedge, the variable of interest is a firmspecific effective tax rate that aggregates all public finance liabilities, based on a unique set of hand-collected data from publicly available corporate reports. Using a fixed-effect model, the results show that one percentage point increase in overall firm-specific tax rate triggers 0.15 percentage points decrease in return on assets. Moreover, tangibles, leverage and size have a negative effect on Romanian listed companies' performance, while liquidity, growth and lagged profitability have a positive effect. 'Doing Business/Paying Taxes' methodology developed by PricewaterhouseCoopers and World Bank. According to this, countries are ranked on the three indicators total tax rate, number of tax payments and time to comply. The larger these figures are, the larger the negative effects of taxation on business are.Since many indigenous surveys (C.N.I.M.P.M.M. [Consiliul National al Intreprinderilor Private Mici si Mijlocii], 2012) as well as widely acknowledged international surveys (World Economic Forum, 2011) identify taxation as one of the main barriers against business in Romania, this paper empirically investigates the effects of taxation on Romanian firms' performance. In doing so, a unique dataset which contains not only profit taxes, but also nonprofit taxes and labour-related taxes for all non-financial companies listed at the Bucharest

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Deprived of investment in education, no country can expect sustainable economic growth and development. Higher education is particularly a priceless tool in today's era of globalization that requires continuous education to keep up with new knowledge. According to UNESCO (2014), higher education is no longer a luxury; it is essential to national, social and economic development. The impact of education on economic growth is possible to observe within the so-called ‘education led growth hypothesis’. The main aim of this paper it to analyse the higher education size and structure, model and financing sources in Croatia and to test the ‘education led growth hypothesis’ on the example of Croatia. The study will apply the Granger causality test to evaluate if there is any causal relationship between investment in higher education and economic growth in Croatia.