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Effects of poverty on impatience: preferences or inattention?
Bartoš, V. ; Bauer, Michal ; Chytilová, Julie ; Levely, I.
We study two psychological channels how poverty may increase impatient behavior – an effect\non time preference and reduced attention. We measured discount rates among Ugandan farmers\nwho made decisions about when to enjoy entertainment instead of working. We find that\nexperimentally induced thoughts about poverty-related problems increase the preference to\nconsume entertainment early and delay work. The effect is equivalent to a 27 p.p. increase in\nthe intertemporal rate of substitution. Using monitoring tools similar to eye tracking, a novel\nfeature for this subject pool, we show this effect is not due to a lower ability to sustain attention.
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Hormones and Competitive Behavior
Sýkora, Zdeněk ; Cingl, Lubomír (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
The thesis aims to contribute to the literature on the biological underpinnings of important economic behaviors. Financial markets can become dangerously unstable from many reasons such as the hormones contained in our bodies. We primarily focus on the effect of basal testosterone and cortisol on willingness to compete and risk taking. We also investigate their interaction called the dual-hormone hypothesis, because it has not been sufficiently analyzed and replicated so far. We run a controlled laboratory experiment with 96 university students and have gender-balanced dataset, thus we can also examine gender differences. We find no support that higher testosterone increase willingness to compete in men as opposed to most of the recent literature. Moreover, higher levels of testosterone decrease competitiveness but only for women. We further find positive effect of the 2D:4D ratio for women and negative effect of trait anxiety for men on competitiveness. There are also substantial gender differences in competitive and risk taking behavior. We cannot confirm the dual-hormone hypothesis for willingness to compete. But we find significant support for the dual-hormone hypothesis for risk taking for women and with negative effect of testosterone on risk taking. The effects stay robust even after...
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Price Determinants of Art Photography at Auctions
Habalová, Veronika ; Šopov, Boril (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
In the recent years, prices of art have repeatedly broken records, and the interest in investing in fine art photography has been growing. Although there is plenty of research dedicated to studying prices of paintings, fine art photography has been largely overlooked. This thesis aims to shed light on identifying price determinants for this particular medium. A new data set is collected from sold lot archives of Sotheby's and Phillips auction houses, which also provide images of some of the sold items. These images are then used to create new variables describing visual attributes of the artworks. In order to inspect the effect of color-related predictors on price, four different methods are discussed. Color is found to be significant in OLS model, but the effect diminishes when model averaging is applied. Machine learning al- gorithms - regression trees and random forests - suggest that the importance of color is relatively low. The thesis also shows that expert estimates can improved by incorporating available information and using random forests for prediction. The fact that the expert estimates are not very accurate sug- gest that they either do not use all the available information or they do not process it efficiently. 1
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Indian premier league- The value of a player
Denduluri, Arun ; Kočenda, Evžen (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
The paper tries to examine and tries to estimate the importance of various characteristics based on the real international statistics of the game of cricket that go into defining and explaining specific monetary values for the cricketers. The auction process employed in the Indian premier league (IPL) enables one to associate players with such specific monetary values. The paper tries to evaluate the above using the data from the IPL auction till 2015 by incorporating the concepts of panel estimation and understanding the previous works in this field. In addition, the paper tests the hypothesis revolving around the significance of the nationality of the given player. JEL Classification C13, C33, C38, C57, Z29 Keywords IPL, Panel estimation, Mixed effects, Auction pricing Author's e-mail 43995848@fsv.cuni.cz Supervisor's e-mail evzen.kocenda@fsv.cuni.,cz
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Microfinance: Fighting poverty vs. sustainable banking
Tesař, Martin ; Streblov, Pavel (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
The thesis deals with microfinance institutions and their ability to serve very poor clients even without a continuous inflow of subsidies from donors. After disclosing the specificities that distinguish the clientele of these organizations from the clients of commercial banks in the developer world, the analysis of selected institutions from South Asia, includng the famous Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, is performed. Using the data gathered from their annual reports of these microfinance institutions, the individual dependence on subsides during one decade is evaluated. The final part of the thesis utilizes the similarities that appear in the individual axamination and the econometric analysis of the data for the extraction of the key factors and strategies that can help to decrease the dependence of this sector on donor financial support. The analysis finds that higher depth of outreach of an organization to the very poor does not inevitably lead to lower level of self- sustainability. The way to profitability may reside in appropriate interest rate policy and mobilization of savings.
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The effect of material prosperity on happiness: Evidence from Europe
Rečková, Dominika ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
Easterlin paradox referring to relatively stable levels of happiness and increasing in come over time, although these two seem to be correlated at one point in time has became a hot topic among economist researches in recent decades. The thesis ex tends the usual income analysis to reveal the nature of correlations between material prosperity and happiness. Series of 15 OLS, ordered probit and ordered logit models together with 35 quantile regressions provide a complex analysis of possible happi ness drivers. Results find significant correlations between material prosperity and happiness, and between happiness and social life. The relationship between income and happiness might be non-linear and influenced by various factors. Happiness is found to be dependent on relative income and socio-politic living environment which explains the Easterlin paradox. JEL codes D6, 124, 131 , J31 K ey words Happiness, Well-being, Life satisfaction, Public pol icy, Material prosperity, Reference point, Inequality
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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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