Vilém Pařil

Regulatory reforms in network industries have reshaped market structures and intensified competition, including across transport modes. The liberalization of high-speed rail (HSR) markets provides a novel setting to examine how airlines respond when inter-modal competition intensifies because the competing mode itself becomes oligopolistic. Using airline–route-level data for flights within the EU-27 between 2017 and 2025 on routes up to 1,000 km where airlines were already competing with a single HSR provider, we estimate reduced-form fare models, including instrumental variables and staggered difference-in-differences, to identify whether airlines adjust prices differently in response to the exogenous entry of additional HSR operators compared with additional airline entry. We find that stronger inter-modal competition exerts competitive pressure on airlines comparable to airline entry. These effects are particularly pronounced when more than two HSR operators compete on the same corridor, more evident on longer routes and on routes involving hub airports, and disproportionately concentrated among full-service carriers. This pattern is consistent with within-HSR competition operating primarily through higher rail frequencies, thereby strengthening rail as an outside option for time-sensitive passengers.

Purpose: Our article addresses road‑cost management at the regional level—an area less studied than local roads or highways. The study aims to identify critical, long‑term urban factors that lead to higher regional road‑management costs and to propose a financially sustainable strategy for road‑network reconstruction using various reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) materials.Methodology: Using stepwise and enter regression analyses with data on road quality and maintenance costs in Czechia, the study considers factors such as elevation, slope, and changes in population and population density.Findings: The results highlight that slope and road class—both of which are linked to the disconnectedness of the road network—increase road‑maintenance costs. Thus, network renewals implemented in compact sets of roads can significantly reduce costs. By contrast, population and population density have only a minimal impact on long‑term costs.Practical Implications: We define scenarios to reduce costs through RAP materials and determine potential savings, using regional roads in Czechia as an example. The scenarios indicate potential savings of nearly €27 million per region when RAP is employed. In practice, using RAP materials can enable infrastructure managers to renew more than one‑third of roads each year compared with conventional mixes, or to increase the frequency of restoring lower‑quality road sections from every three years to every 2.25 years.Value: The article offers new insights into the factors that determine regional road‑level costs. It demonstrates that using RAP materials in regional road management can positively affect the frequency of road revitalisation.

This article focuses on a very narrowly specific segment of this issue, considering the impacts of HSR in the long term, not as transport arteries connecting the most important metropolitan areas but, on the contrary, as an internal factor of development within a metropolitan region. The paper aims to transfer the present operational European HSR commuting connection frequency experience to a generally applicable frequency estimation formula. Through a quantitative approach, the research analyses the total sample of 1,446 train connections from 10 European metropolitan regions. It answers the secondary research question of what the range of accessibility change between the metropolitan core and the intermediate city is after introducing HSR connection inside metropolitan regions in the time of 1 hour of journey. The estimation model formula calculates the optimal number of HSR connections between the metropolitan core and intermediate city in the HSR developing countries. It is derived and verified from the analysed dataset values. The potential operational change scenarios are presented and described based on the example of 34 metropolitan city pairs.

This study examines the transformation of the economic relations between the state and church in the Czech Republic, focusing on changes since 2012 when a legislative framework for the separation of state and church was accepted. Our article aims to assess the changing financial relations between the church and state by emphasizing future development financial scenarios for churches in the Czech Republic based on two decades of financial data describing transfers from the public sector to the church regarding its current economic value and structure of sources. We confront quantitative results with the qualitative reflection of church representatives for whom this situation is very challenging.