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Empirical Essays in Institutional Microeconomics
Schwarz, Jiří ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Benáček, Vladimír (referee) ; Bjørnskov, Christian (referee) ; Berggren, Niclas (referee)
The dissertation consists of three empirical papers in institutional microeconomics. The first paper examines the role of institutional quality in international trade, the second paper focuses on unintended consequences of intellectual property rights for social welfare, and the last one addresses the impact of banking on corporate financing and investment. An introductory chapter puts these three papers into perspective. In the first paper I analyze the role of institutions in price dispersion among cities in the European region in the 1996-2009 period. Using a number of institutional quality measures I find that the better the institutions, the lower the predicted dispersion. The result is robust to different specifications of the regression model and is consistent with a hypothesis that arbitrage, as an entrepreneurial activity and the main power behind the law of one price, is influenced by institutional quality. In the second paper I use a large data set of U.S. patents applied for between 1980 and 2007 by 22 large technology companies to study development of strategic patenting over time and across industries. Using two complementary methods I reveal strong evidence against the hypothesis of more strategic patenting after 1995. Contrary to the expectations, aerospace patents appear to be on average...
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Essays on Discrimination and Endogenous Preferences
Cahlíková, Jana ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Cappelen, Alexander W. (referee) ; Ryvkine, Dmitri (referee)
In the first chapter of this work, I focus on the effects of international mobility on discrimination. Every year, millions of people relocate to a foreign country for school or work. I provide evidence of how international experience shifts preferences and stereotypes related to other nationalities. I use participation in the Erasmus study abroad program to identify the effect of international experience: students who are ready to participate in the Erasmus program are chosen as a control group for students who have returned from studies abroad. Individuals make decisions in a Trust Game and in a Triple Dictator Game. Results show that while students do not differentiate between partners from Northern and Southern Europe in the Trust Game prior to an Erasmus study abroad, students who have returned from Erasmus exhibit less trust towards partners from the South. Behavior towards other nationalities in the Triple Dictator Game is not affected by the Erasmus study experience. Overall, the results suggest that participants learn about cross-country variation in cooperative behavior while abroad and therefore statistical discrimination increases with international experience. The second chapter concentrates on inter-ethnic interactions. Ethnic hostilities often spread rapidly, making it essential to...
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Essays on Decision Making under Stress
Cingl, Lubomír ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Skořepa, Michal (referee) ; Levínský, René (referee) ; Servátka, Maroš (referee)
Název / Title Eseje o rozhodování pod stresem / Essays on Decision Making under Stress Student PhDr. Lubomír Cingl Studijní program / Study program Ekonomické teorie Školitel / Advisor PhDr. Michal Bauer, Ph.D. Abstract This dissertation comprises three thematically connected experimental studies of human behavior under non- standard conditions: time-pressure and stress. In the Introduction section I present the argument for why it is important for economists to recognize stress research as a valid part of the research in economics and how it can contribute to the growing knowledge of human behavior in general, including several examples from the literature. The first paper presented in Chapter 2 examines the effect of time pressure on the individual propensity to herd, while the remaining two papers examine the effect of acute stress on risk-preferences and herding behavior, respectively. Herding behavior is a very important phenomenon in human decision making since social influence is very frequent in our lives and economic decisions: consider traders in financial markets, wait-and-see investors, but also purchase behavior due to fads, fashion and top-ten lists. Risk preferences are another essential factor which determines many important economic outcomes, and the assumption of their stability is a...
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Essays on Incentives and Information in Schools
Celik Katreniak, Dagmara ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Basu, Karna (referee) ; Epstein, Gil S. (referee)
ix Abstract The question posed in this dissertation is whether the quality of education can be improved in a developing country by means of incentives for students to learn. This complex topic has been subject to a plethora of research studies in economics, psychology, and sociology using data from developed countries, but comparatively few studies have been conducted in the developing world. I discuss evidence from an extensive randomized control trial (RCT) employing a variety of incentive mechanisms, which I designed and implemented in primary and secondary schools in Southern Uganda. This study involved more than 5,000 students aged 11 through 25 who were repeatedly interviewed and tested between 2011 and 2013. I collected data and analyzed the effects of different incentive schemes on students' performance on Math and English tests, and also on their well-being, measured by perceived happiness and stress. The latter is a unique contribution to this field of study. The Preface provides contextual informaton on the Ugandan education system and the experimental design, critical to understanding the choices made at every level of this study. In Chapter 1, "The Dark Side of Incentives in Schools," I discuss the effects of feedback, as well as monetary and non-monetary incentives on students' performance and...
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Essays in Behavioral and Development Economics
Bartoš, Vojtěch ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Martinsson, Peter (referee) ; Morduch, Jonathan (referee)
In the first chapter, I examine the effect of scarcity on sharing norms and preferences. Sharing provides one of few sources of insurance in poor communities. It gains prominence during adverse shocks, often largely aggregate, when it is also costliest for individuals to share. Yet it is little understood how scarcity affects individual willingness to share and willingness to enforce sharing from others, an important ingredient in sustaining prosocial behavior. This is what this paper examines. I conduct repeated within-subject lab-in-the-field experiments among Afghan subsistence farmers during a lean and a post-harvest season of relative plenty. These farmers experience seasonal scarcities annually. Using dictator and third party punishment games I separate individual sharing behavior from the enforcement of sharing norms. While sharing exhibits a high degree of temporal stability at both the aggregate, and, to a large extent, the individual level, the enforcement of sharing norms is substantially weaker during the lean season. The findings suggest that farmers are capable of sustaining mutual sharing through transitory periods of scarcity. It remains an open question whether exposure to unexpected shocks or prolonged periods of scarcity might result in the breakdown of prosociality due to...
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Time Preferences of Ghanaian Cocoa Farmers
Sobková, Eva ; Janský, Petr (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
Agricultural technology adoption in developing countries is an interesting topic for two reasons: there is often a gap between the realized and potential hectare yields, and agriculture is an important source of livelihood for a signi_cant part of the third world population. This thesis is attempting to analyze the relationships between time preferences of the Ghanaian cocoa farmers and their willingness to use fertilizers provided on a microcredit basis. It is using mainly basic statistical tests, contingent tables analysis and the logistic regression to find out whether the farmers who are patient and time consistent have different approach to technology adoption than the impatient and time inconsistent farmers. We also test for differences in time preferences between farmers with different gender, age and education, and we find that the younger farmers tend to be more impatient. The main conclusion of this work is that impatient and hyperbolic farmers are more likely to enter a microcredit program. We cannot present any significant inference about the link between the farmers' time preferences and their decision to leave a microcredit program. JEL Classification C12, C14, D9, G2, O13, Q14 Keywords Technology adoption, time preferences, mirco- credit, developing economics, cocoa cultivation...
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Three Essays on Post-Conflict Reintegration
Levely, Ian Vandemark ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Filer, Randall (referee) ; Van Koten, Silvester (referee) ; Kovařík, Jaromír (referee)
Three Essays on Post-Conflict Reintegration Abstract This dissertation consists of three essays which explore the effects of conflict and the post- conflict reintegration process, each using a different methodology to study a different facet of these issues, including an analysis of survey data, an artefactual economic experiment conducted in the field, and an laboratory experiment. The research presented here demonstrates how these methods complement one another in contributing to our understanding of how conflict affects individuals' well-being and behavior. In the first essay, I analyze an existing data set from a survey of ex-combatants in Liberia to estimate the effect of a reintegration program for former soldiers on participants' income and employment status, using propensity score matching to account for self-selection bias. The second chapter also deals with the reintegration of ex-soldiers, but focuses on social capital, using a set of experiments, including trust and dictator games, to study the effects of forced military service for a rebel group on social capital in northern Uganda. In the third chapter, we study cooperation within and between groups in the laboratory, by modeling conflict with an inter- group Tullock rent-seeking contest, and manipulating groups' conflict history to measure...
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Measuring systemic risk in time-frequency domain
Muzikářová, Ivana ; Baruník, Jozef (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
This thesis provides an analysis of systemic risk in the US banking sector. We use conditional value at risk (∆CoVaR), marginal expected shortfall (MES) and cross-quantilogram (CQ) to statistically measure tail-dependence in return series of individual institutions and the system as a whole. Wavelet multireso- lution analysis is used to study systemic risk in the time-frequency domain. De- composition of returns on different scales allows us to isolate cycles of 2-8 days, 8-32 days and 32-64 days and analyze co-movement patterns which would oth- erwise stay hidden. Empirical results demonstrate that filtering out short-term noise from the return series improves the forecast power of ∆CoVaR. Eventu- ally, we investigate the connection between statistical measures of systemic risk and fundamental characteristics of institutions (size, leverage, market to book ratio) and conclude that size is the most robust determinant of systemic risk.
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Is Maternal Death more important for Girls and Paternal Death for Boys? An Analysis from Developing Countries
Klepetko, Tomáš ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Želinský, Tomáš (referee)
Parental death has the potential to deteriorate various outcomes of children in the developing world. One of such outcomes is education: when a parent dies, resources are reduced, psychological distress increased, so is the necessity to replace the parent in some of their duties. Literature commonly distinguishes impacts of maternal and paternal death on education of children. Nevertheless, no papers focus directly on the interaction between gender of the deceased parent and of the orphaned child. This thesis tests empirically the hypothesis that maternal death is more important for girls and paternal death for boys. The reasoning is that mothers typically spend more time caring about little children and about household generally, so after maternal death it is necessary to find a substitute for this role and it is more likely to find one among the daughters than among the sons. Subsequently, the daughter is at a higher risk of dropping out of school due to higher responsibilities at home. Fathers, on the contrary, are primarily income-earners, so after paternal death it becomes more likely that one of the sons replaces the deceased father on labour market than one of the daughters. The son then becomes more likely to stop attending school than any of the daughters. Using cross-sectional data from...
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Cheating Behavior in Football
Selep, Ján ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Turnovec, František (referee)
In this thesis I provide statistical evidence documenting rigging of football matches in German long-term championship Bundesliga. For the purpose I use 8326 matches played in top three German long-term competitions through years 1995 -- 2012. The championship is based on a point collection in a standings table divided by strict success margins, e.g. title or relegation. The margins lead to a non-linear incentive structure in which one point is worth more for teams close to the margin. Uncertainty about the final outcome, however, postpones the equilibrating effect to the last rounds of a season. I find evidence of increased point earnings as a reaction on relegation margin closeness at the end of a season. Increased effort of the marginal teams cannot explain the findings as players exert no better performance in the incentive situation. In the same time, their opponents with long margin distance decrease their performance. In addition to that I provide evidence on cheating cooperation proxied by variance of players' performance. The variance does not react on the incentive situation suggesting that teammates behave unitedly. Performance of referees seems to exert stable performance with no reaction on teams' incentives. Overall, the results show strong evidence of systemic point trading in German Bundesliga.
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