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Despite the increasing interest in modern solutions for energy performance improvement in residential sector, a gap persists between literature development and current implementation practices on domestic heating and cooling through heat pumps technology. Homeowners are encouraged to manage their energy-related issues in a systematic manner to ensure continual improvement of energy efficiency. This paper attempts to explore the drivers and obstacles to the use of heat pumps system for domestic heating, cooling, and hot water production in the residential sector, in order to improve dwellings’ energy performance and reduce the carbon footprint. The study uses a regression model with a sample of 389 participants from Romania and shows that the availability of energy plans, voluntary association in an energy community, and mixed funding exert a positive influence, whereas bureaucracy, poor energy efficiency-related information, and fiscal incentives exert a negative influence on the intention of adopting heat pumps technology by homeowners.

The present paper aims to treat the legal aspects of the public clerk in Romania, generated by the hystorical and political context of the time. So, it speaks about a statute of the public clerk in a comunist regime and also in a democratic one, building a parallel with Eastern Germany, an ex comunist state, which brings a lot of similarities with the existing regime of our country in that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the following paper I plan to surprise aspects of the Romanian labor market through both a legislative and a religious perspective. Thus, the research intends to be interdisciplinary, starting from historical times and up to the post revolutionary Romania, a country affected by the global financial crisis that began in 2008, a crisis that produced repercussions in the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper analyses the efficiency or productivity at the level of a production unit, but also at industry level, resorting for this purpose to both parametric and non-parametric techniques. Cost function model specifications are described herein, considering that the technical inefficiency effects determine the companies to operate below the production stochastic frontier. Also, the estimations of the production frontier are rendered by means of Cobb-Douglas, C.E.S. and translog functions, evidencing that the latter is the most flexible of them. On the other hand, in many respects, C.E.S. production function is more appropriate to reality as compared to Cobb-Douglas function. At the same time, the estimation of C.E.S. function parameters is more difficult, Cobb-Douglas function being, in this respect, preferred. The last part of the paper is consecrated to the study of efficiency at industry level and to conclusions. The Input variables used within the analysis are: fixed assets, inventories, number of employees, while the Output ones are: operating revenues and net profit. As for the conclusions, the results reveal that the efficiency level for several companies is quite low. Therefore, a deeper interest should be manifested in order to increase the efficiency level in the construction industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent financial crisis triggered by the spectacular drop of the prices of financial instruments backed by subprime loans brought back into spotlight the role played by the credit rating agencies (CRAs) in the structured finance field. Their importance grew exponentially along with financial globalization and received a substantial support from the Basel Committee II whose newest regulations regarding the risks involved by certain financial assets were tied to ratings issued by specialized institutions. Throughout the time, the regulators took appropriate measures to ensure that the problems raised by the rating activity are avoided - loose competition, lack of transparency, potential conflicts of interest and rating-depending regulation. This paper tried to identify the main conflicts of interest which arise in the rating issuance activity and to outline the means that generate the potential incentives to exploit those conflicts; an important weight was put on the „reputational capital‟ theory which implies the fact that under the right circumstances, a reputation mechanism that works properly will deter low quality ratings. It tried to follow the correlation between the evolution of the legal framework and the impact on ratings quality, looking to identify remedies in order to avoid and remove conflicts of interest for this specific domain. Based on empirical evidence, the influence of conflicts on market informational flow was put under scrutiny and the long term implications on financial market environment were assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]