Overview
Advances in Empirical Economic Research is a conference proceedings volume edited by Nicholas Tsounis and Aspasia Vlachvei, both of the Department of Economics at the University of Western Macedonia in Greece. Its subtitle identifies it as the proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Applied Economics (ICOAE), held in Madrid, Spain, on 7–9 July 2022. The volume belongs to Springer’s proceedings series in business and economics and runs to roughly a thousand pages, comprising sixty-three selected papers (the publisher’s table of contents lists 63 contributions across twelve introductory pages and 1,011 pages of text, illustrated with 162 figures, 140 of them in colour).
The book’s stated purpose is to present new empirical methods and applications in economics, with emphasis on empirical macroeconomics, microeconomics, financial economics, international economics, agricultural economics, and marketing. Its contributions are country-specific or firm-specific applied studies, typically using quantitative data and econometric or statistical techniques, and most close with implications for economic policy or managerial practice. The intended readership is researchers, scholars, academics, and policymakers working in quantitative economic research, whether on method or on application.
Scope and character of the contributions
The volume is not a monograph with a single argument but a collection of independent, self-contained research papers. Each contribution follows the conventions of an applied economics journal article: a research question, a review of relevant literature, a description of data and method, empirical results, and conclusions. The geographical reach is broad but weighted toward Europe — Greece, Spain, Poland, Slovakia, and the European Union as a whole recur — and the topics range from firm-level strategy and marketing to agricultural structure, public finance, energy and climate policy, regional development, digital technology, and financial markets.
Microeconomics, firm behaviour and strategy
Several papers examine firm-level performance and strategy. One studies the strategic agility and success perception of Polish small and medium-sized enterprises, proposing an alternative operationalization designed to compare business conditions before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Another reviews the relationship between firms’ research-and-development cooperation and product market competition. A study of Slovak firms measures the influence of stakeholders on business performance, while a further contribution applies the CHAID decision-tree algorithm to post-rating analysis of business-risk insurance contracts. Total factor productivity and entrepreneurship are considered through the lens of “creative self-destruction,” and one paper offers an overview of R&D cooperation among firms.
Macroeconomics, public finance and international economics
Macroeconomic modelling is represented by a paper that models and forecasts Greek GDP using a modified exponential smoothing state-space framework. Public finance and taxation appear in a study of taxes, debt, and the value of multinational enterprises, with international policy implications. Public-sector organization is addressed in an analysis of market restrictions on contracting out public services at the municipal level, and in an examination of success factors in public–private partnerships for high-speed railway infrastructure, with suggestions for improvement. A distinctive contribution applies economic reasoning to “the economics of civil orders and medals in Spain,” described as an update after ten years.
Agriculture, food and regional development
Agricultural economics is represented by a descriptive and categorical analysis of agricultural holdings in the region of Western Macedonia in Greece, and by an empirical study of food waste in Greece. Regional and spatial questions appear in a study of the spatial distribution of the population in peninsular Spain, characterized as the evolution of a permanent pattern, and in a paper contrasting two industrialization trajectories — labelled with the keyboard commands “Ctrl+Supr” and “Shift+Comp” — that treats industrialization and business services as engines of regional growth. A further paper offers a holistic evaluation of technology-transfer extension programmes.
Environment, energy and climate policy
European climate policy is assessed empirically through its impact on the convergence process of per capita CO2 emissions across European Union member states, a paper that combines climate-policy evaluation with the convergence literature.
Finance, digital technology and marketing
Financial economics is represented by a study testing for sequences and reversals in Bitcoin price series. Digitalization and logistics appear in a paper on the “last mile” and blockchain, setting out opportunities and challenges. In marketing and banking, one contribution conducts a bibliometric analysis of e-banking loyalty and its background. Consumer behaviour is examined in a study of Generation Z’s intention to comply with non-mandatory government measures for self-protection against COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 variants after restrictions were withdrawn.
Methods and approach
Across the volume the unifying thread is empirical method rather than a shared subject matter. The papers draw on the standard toolkit of applied quantitative economics: econometric estimation, time-series modelling and forecasting, state-space and exponential smoothing methods, convergence analysis, decision trees and classification algorithms, bibliometric mapping, survey-based measurement and index construction, and descriptive statistical profiling of populations and holdings. Several papers are explicitly methodological or operational in emphasis — proposing new ways of measuring a construct such as strategic agility, or evaluating a programme or policy design — while others are substantive applied studies of a particular country, region, sector, or firm population.
Concluding note
Taken as a whole, the volume functions as a snapshot of applied economic research presented at ICOAE 2022: a wide-ranging set of short empirical studies spanning micro and macro economics, finance, international and agricultural economics, and marketing, with a consistent orientation toward measurable data, quantitative technique, and policy-relevant conclusions. It is a reference and browsing resource for specialists seeking country- and sector-specific empirical work rather than a unified treatment of a single theme.
Cross-cutting contribution
The volume’s coherence is procedural rather than thematic: it treats empirical economics as a problem-driven practice in which the unit of analysis—region, holding, consumer, bank customer, price series, or programme—determines the data and method. This makes the collection useful as a demonstration of transferability, showing how similar quantitative strategies are adapted to policy evaluation, market behaviour, and organisational measurement without forcing them into one theoretical frame.
A second source of significance is the book’s contemporaneous coverage. COVID-19 appears as a question of voluntary compliance after restrictions; digitalisation appears in financial markets, logistics, and banking relationships; environmental policy appears through cross-country convergence. Agriculture and regional development are handled as empirical settings for profiling and evaluation. The result is a volume that records how applied economists framed and measured a set of live policy and business questions, rather than a retrospective survey of established fields.
Methodologically, the collection’s value lies in the juxtaposition of substantive and operational papers: measurement proposals and programme evaluations sit beside country-, sector-, and firm-specific studies. Readers can therefore use the book both as a source of discrete empirical findings and as a set of examples of research design, variable construction, and interpretation under real-world data constraints. Its significance is cumulative rather than synthetic—an assembly of applied cases that, taken together, illustrates the breadth and procedural discipline of contemporary empirical economic research.
