This paper analyzes the domestic and external inflation determinants for eight non-eurozone new EU member states (NMS). The empirical literature has been rather silent on the comparison of the relative importance of domestic vs. foreign inflation determinants. This paper aims to fill this gap and add to the literature by several methodological and empirical contributions. Empirical analysis is based on the structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model. It enables the authors to decompose inflation into its domestic and foreign component via historical decomposition analysis. Results indicate that foreign shocks are a major factor in explaining inflation dynamics in the medium run, while the short run inflation dynamics is mainly influenced by domestic shocks. Moreover, the importance of the foreign inflation component has had a rising trend in the pre-crisis period in all NMS, while the start of that trend mostly coincided with their accession to the EU. The global financial crisis seems to have decreased the importance of the foreign inflation component, although the results vary across countries. Since foreign shocks proved to be a very important determinant of inflation in NMS, the main policy implication of this study is the need to augment the classical Taylor rule with foreign factors in case of small open economies.

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This paper investigates the relationship between European football league competitive balance and the performance of that league’s participants in UEFA competitions. The evidence suggests that competitive balance measured using performance points fits the performance coefficients of countries participating in the Champions League and Europa League and that a reciprocal model fits the data best. The evidence suggests that marginal improvements in competitive balance can lead to increase of one-third a win for a league’s participants in the Champions League. The increased rewards for UEFA success suggest policies that promote competitive balance have both public and private benefits for clubs.

The general theory of twin deficits hypothesis does not consider specific characteristics of domestic tax systems, i.e. whether the revenue side of the budget is dominated by indirect or by direct taxes. The main hypothesis of the paper is that in countries with fiscal systems dominated by indirect taxes, the deterioration of the current account balance would imply higher fiscal revenues due to larger imports and consumption. The hypothesis is based on the characteristics of domestic tax systems of Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland and Romania in which indirect tax revenues account for the majority of total budget tax revenues. Results suggest that the co-movements of the current account and the fiscal balance cannot be explained by the twin deficit theory in countries with indirect tax-oriented systems. These results imply that only the structural economic transformation and export orientation of the economy may reverse the causality direction between two deficits.

This article studies the transfer market for international football players. Analyzing a sample of 5,760 player transfers over 14 years, we provide evidence that clubs in English football pay larger transfer fee premiums compared to clubs in the top leagues of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. While the popular press often mentions the English premiums, we empirically demonstrate both their existence and their causal source. Using annual data, we show that the dramatic increase in English premiums is causally linked to the 2012 television contracts the EPL signed with domestic and international broadcasters. These findings have policy implications for the clubs, players, and governing bodies of European football, as well as indirect consequences for export‐oriented football clubs.