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The paper notices troublesome aspects of compiling industry statistics for the purpose of inter-enterprise comparison in corporate financial analysis. Whilst making a caveat that this issue is unbeknownst to practitioners and underrated by theorists, the goal of the paper is two-fold. For one thing, the paper demonstrates that financial ratios are inclined to frequency distributions characteristic of power-law (fat) tails and their typical shape precludes a simple treatment. For the other, the paper explores different approaches to compiling industry statistics by considering trimming and winsorizing cleansing protocols, and by confronting trimmed, winsorized as well as quantile measures of central tendency. The issues are empirically illustrated on data for a great number of Slovak construction enterprises for two years, 2009 and 2018. The empirical distribution of eight financial ratios is studied for troublesome features such as asymmetry and power-law (fat) tails that hamper usefulness of traditional descriptive measures of location without considering different possibilities of handling atypical values (such as infinite and outlying values). The confrontation of diverse approaches suggests a plausible route to compiling industry statistics that consists in reporting a 25% trimmed mean alongside 25% and 75% quantiles, all applied to trimmed data (i.e. data after discarding infinite values). The paper also highlights the sorely unnoticed fact that the key ratio of financial analysis, return on equity, may easily attain non-sense values and these should be removed prior to compiling financial analysis; otherwise, industry statistics is biased upward regardless of what measure of central tendency is made use of.

In the contemporary economic reality, which is based on relations, the role of trust both in the intra- and inter-organisational context is growing in importance. Impersonal trust is characterized by considerable durability and forms a solid framework for developing interpersonal trust. In consequence, many researchers’ attention is drawn towards practices aimed at the development of such trust. The goal of the paper is to analyse potential relations between the degree of impersonal trust and innovative culture and, in particular, to operationalise the variables, i.e. determine the dimensions of impersonal trust and innovative culture, estimate the impact of the individual dimensions of the former onto those of the latter. The survey was conducted in Poland among 630 employees of large and mediumsized enterprises. Verification of the theoretical model was performed based on structural equation modeling. The research led to the identification of dependencies between the particular dimensions of impersonal trust and innovative culture, confirming the importance of impersonal trust in the process of shaping organisational culture. Impersonal trust was recognized as a separate construct which determines the nature of innovative culture. Feeling of security has special significance at workplace because guarantees stability, durability and openness in relations, enhances creativity of staff and gives them freedom to try non-conventional solutions to problems. Organisational assurance, i.e. a conviction about the clarity of rules and principles, open communication and making staff feel they are included in organisational processes, has a weaker impact on the dimensions of innovative culture when compared to feeling of security.

The main aim of this article is to research the relationship between youth unemployment and self-employment in the EU and categorise particular EU countries as the countries with youth self-employment driven by push factors or pull factors. It has been revealed that statistically significant relationships between unemployment and self-employment among young people from the 28 EU countries, in only 7 countries have been identified. Of these, Greece, Italy and Cyprus, the unemployment rate among young people would decrease if national governments were to reduce unemployment through self-employment support measures. In other countries such as Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Malta, it would be inappropriate to reduce unemployment through support for self-employment. In other EU countries, fighting youth unemployment requires addressing other labor market issues, such as the reluctance of businesses to employ unqualified or low-skilled young people, reducing the chances of reducing the tax burden when hiring young people, making flexible use of education opportunities with employment. The fact was confirmed that is inappropriate for all countries (in this case EU countries) to apply universal strategies to combat unemployment, because by means of theories and pilot studies on the establishment of statistically significant relationships, it is possible to avoid mistakes by directing support to the needs of target groups.

The paper studies a new point of view and the approach to profit as an inherent part of business finance as well as a symbol of every healthy economy. The fundamental function of the profit is a stimulus; it means initial motivator of the business activity. The profit provides core resources for survival at the business start and after the stabilization, it is the synonym for progress. The aim of this paper is to detect significant change-points in times series of EBITDA during the analysed period in every country of the Visegrad Group to recognize the progress years in the monotonic development. We use a method of homogeneity test of time series that delivers significant robust results. We observe the variable EBITDA to eliminate different tax, interest and depreciation policies of these emerging countries. The original research of this article is based on empirical results of business profits of the sample of 3,853 enterprises covered by the broad theoretical review. Firstly, we identify missing values; and detect the outliers by Z-score and Grubbs test. EBITDA of 1,058 Slovak enterprises, 688 Czech enterprises, 1,376 Polish enterprises and 731 Hungarian enterprises is analysed during the period from 2010 to 2018. We eliminate the inconsistent observations and construct average values of EBITDA. Secondly, we prove normality by Jarque-Bera test, and support it by Shapiro-Wilk test, Anderson-Darling test, Lilliefors test to deliver reliable results. Thirdly, we find an independency of distribution that confirm randomness by the Box-Pierce test. And finally, we identify the years that affect heterogeneity of EBITDA in the countries of the Visegrad Four. We uncover some really surprising results. For all countries in the Visegrad Four, the year 2013 is detected as a change-point at a significance level of 0.05. This significant year shifts EBITDA between two homogeneous series with corresponding central lines and recognizes the similar annual development within the groups. In addition, we discuss the results to the areas and factors affecting the business risk. The adjustable area represented by the business dynamism has no significant impact on the development of EBITDA. The uncontrollable macroeconomic factors such as a GDP, unemployment rate, inflation rate, average monthly gross wage, and Ease of doing business index demonstrate the same development of Slovak, Czech, Polish and Hungarian enterprises. We connect our gained results to the undisputed influence of these factors and its derived components on monotonic development of EBITDA. Despite the fact, that the countries are not economically interconnected as they used to be in the past, in has to be underlined that their mutual relations are still very narrow and close and that might be the reason, why identical results are achieved in the countries with divergent development.

The paper focuses on a relatively new and prospective application of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) in the employee performance assessment. In the paper, a novel DEA approach is proposed for evaluating the performance of call centre agents, based on their relative efficiency. Since call centres handle a majority of customer-company interactions, performance of call centre agents largely influences the future success or failure of a company. To ensure the quality of customer service, permanent evaluation of call centre agents’ performance is essential. The proposed DEA model consisting of two input variables (wage and working time) and five output variables (quick-answer calls proportion, customer satisfaction, net first contact resolution, call quality and inbound contact handle time) has been tested on 55 call centre agents working at the call centre of one of the largest telecommunications operators in the Slovak Republic. After measuring the performance of each agent, based on the DEA models, the call centre agents’ performance was evaluated in the DEA matrix format. As a result, the call centre agents were divided into four groups: Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks and Poor Dogs. Finally, based on the proposed approach, recommendations for call centre managers on how to improve or maintain the performance of each of these groups were drawn. The proposed approach provides a practical framework for call centre managers to assess the performance of the agents, and to plan and také steps to improve the quality of call centre services.