Smaranda Pantea a Ayaz Zeynalov získali projekty Grantové agentury České republiky (GA ČR)

Digitalization of the public sector: effects on growth and innovation of domestic IT sectors

• Smaranda Pantea, Ph.D. (VSE)
• Nadzeya Laurentsyeva (LMU), Ph.D.
• Cristina Prochazková Ilinitchi (VSE), Ph.D.
• Ayaz Zeynalov, Ph.D. (VSE)

The aims of the study are to provide insights into how demand shapes firm growth and innovation in high-tech sectors and on the effectiveness of public procurement as an industrial policy for supporting the development of the IT sectors in the EU, with a focus on CEE countries.

This project proposes three related studies on the effects of digitalization of public
administration on the development of the domestic IT sectors in the EU, with a focus on the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The first study estimates the effect of the demand from public sector on the development of national IT sectors in the EU, using sector level data on the size and innovation of IT sectors from Eurostat and aggregate indicators on public procurement for software and IT services from Tender Electronics Daily (TED) and two-way fixed effects methods. The second study estimates firm level effects of winning IT-related tenders on firm growth in the Czech Republic using tender level data from TED dataset and national sources, firm level data from Amadeus and regression discontinuity design methods. The third study estimates the effects of winning public tenders on firm growth and innovation in 10 CEE countries using propensity score matching and difference-in-difference methods and firm level data from TED and Amadeus, complemented with project level data from GitHub.

• Project number: 23-06213S
• 3 years

Weathering Corporate Bankruptcy: The Role of Discipline Effect

• Ayaz Zeynalov, Ph.D., Department of International Economic Relations
• Prof. Mehmet Ugur from the University of Greenwich

This research project aims to address this oversight by drawing on agency theory, which demonstrates that the causal effects of leverage and competition on corporate bankruptcy are due to the extent to which they mitigate or exacerbate agency conflicts.

Does leverage or product-market competition increase or decrease corporate bankruptcy? We extend literature assessing that the effects on corporate bankruptcy hazard are non-monotonic in a cross-section of firms with different leverage levels and product-market competition. The causal mechanism is due to the balance between discipline vs. agency-cost effects. We demonstrate that corporate bankruptcy is essentially a managerial effort problem that can be mitigated by choosing the optimal level of debt given the level of product-market competition.

We aim to show that the optimal level of leverage that minimizes the firm’s bankruptcy risk is higher (lower) in less (more) competitive industries. We will extend our research on the impacts of current non-financial external shock on corporate bankruptcy, considering pandemics lockdown and the current war. We will match and compare samples of surviving and nonsurviving firms to discover patterns of difference between these two groups.

• Project number: 23-05769S
• 3 years