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Essays on Financial Markets
Brushko, Iuliia ; Hanousek, Jan (advisor) ; Bredthauer, Jeffery (referee) ; Payne, Brian (referee)
English This thesis studies financial markets and the information we can obtain from observing the actions of financial market participants. In the first chapter, I study how the combination of different accounting ratios, which are considered to be the financial signals of future performance, can affect the analysts' and managers' earnings forecast releases. The findings show that analysts treat the firms differently depending on whether the firms have only strong financial indicators (high signal group), weak financial indicators (low signal group), and those with both positive and negative signals (mixed signal group). The study also provides the evidence that the managers may realize the heterogeneity in analysts' treatment, and as the result the managers' earnings forecasts will be affected both by the signal group type of the firm and the analysts' bias characteristic for the appropriate signal group. At the same time, the findings show that the analysts sometimes fail to disregard the managers' forecast biases and are misled by the managers. This provides evidence of inaccuracy on the part of analysts and potential gaming on information disclosure between analysts and managers'. In the second chapter, I examine whether trading activity responds to the industry-related earnings announcement...
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Measuring the Impact of Microfinance
Alimukhamedova, Nargiza ; Hanousek, Jan (advisor) ; Brown, Martin (referee) ; Ibragimov, Rustam (referee)
Microfinance emerged in the 1970's, aiming to help lift people out of poverty and promote economic growth by providing financial services to low-income households. Despite its global popularity, evidence supporting its net benefits is mixed; therefore, more comprehensive empirical testing is called for. This Dissertation aims to contribute to the on-going debate in microfinance in the following three dimensions: In the first chapter, the impact of microfinance on macro economies is analysed. Motivated by limited knowledge of the economy-wide effects of microfinance, we aim to measure its impact on economic growth, financial sector development and reductions in income inequality. Measuring aggregate effects including those on non- recipients of microfinance programs constitutes an important contribution. We identify the "promised" impact of microfinance on economic growth measured by real GDP per capita, financial intermediation captured by broad money per capita and income inequality measured by the Gini coefficient. We also estimate the reverse feedback of macro fundamentals on microfinance itself. To estimate the dynamic equations, we use panel vector autoregressions (VARs) based on Arellano-Bover's (1995)and Blundell-Bond's (1998) instrumental variable system estimator, which enables us to...
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Reservoirs - Brno, Zluty kopec (Yellow hill)
Vymětal, Bedřich ; Hanousek, Jan (referee) ; Palaščák, Michal (advisor)
This work is dealing with accessibility of area that is on the border of three subsystems that are blocked off by each other by topography. Unfulfilled potential caused by barrier disabling connection to the city structure. Relief of a city influencing reachability of its parts that causes its decline. Overcoming such a barrier could cause activation of the area without big intervention to the urbanity or function of given area.
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M&A activity and the capital structure of target firms
Flannery, M. J. ; Hanousek, Jan ; Shamshur, Anastasiya ; Trešl, Jiří
Using a large sample of European acquisitions, we find that acquired firms substantially close the gap between their actual and optimal leverage ratios. The bulk of this adjustment occurs quite rapidly – within a year of the acquisition. The typical over-levered firm adjusts its debtto-assets ratio from 34.4% in the year before acquisition to 20% in the year after. (The adjustment is smaller, but still quite rapid, for targets that had been under-leveraged.) These adjustments occur primarily through debt issuances or retirements. We also investigate whether target firms’ pre-merger leverage contributes to the probability of them being acquired. We find that firms further away from their optimal leverage are more likely to be acquired: for an average firm, an increase in the absolute leverage deviation from 1% to 10% of total assets increases the probability of being acquired by 4.1% to 5.6% (The larger effect applies to overleveraged firms.) Overall, our results provide support for the trade-off theory of capital structure and suggest that financial synergies have a significant role in the typical European acquisition decision.
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Corporate profitability and the global persistence of corruption
Ferris, S. P. ; Hanousek, Jan ; Trešl, Jiří
We examine the persistence of corporate corruption for a sample of privately-held firms from 12 Central and Eastern European countries over the period 2001 to 2015. Creating a proxy for corporate corruption based on a firm’s internal inefficiency, we find that corruption enhances a firm’s profitability. A channel analysis further reveals that inflating staff costs is the most common approach by which firms divert funds to finance corruption. We conclude that corruption persists because of its ability to improve a firm’s return on assets, which we refer to as the Corporate Advantage Hypothesis.
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Intra-industry transfer of information inferred from trading volume
Brushko, Iuliia ; Ferris, S. P. ; Hanousek, Jan ; Trešl, Jiří
This study examines the responsiveness of trading volume to a firm’s earnings announcements. We find that the volume and earnings surprise information generated at the first earnings announcement within an industry help to explain the stock returns of the non-announcing firm. Specifically, it explains their equity performance at the time of the first industry announcement and then again after their own earnings announcement. These results provide novel insights into how earnings announcements contain both firm specific as well as industry information that is value relevant for investors.
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Essays on Finance and Banking
Vovchak, Tamara ; Hanousek, Jan (advisor) ; Hasan, Iftekhar (referee) ; Kraft, Evan (referee)
Tamara Vovchak Abstract This dissertation contributes to the literature on financial intermediation by examining the importance of banks as liquidity providers for corporate borrowers and the role of liquidity on banks' financial performance, as well as its role in the context of joint determination with bank capital and risk. It has been accepted in the banking literature that lending relationships are special and bank loans are the important source of external financing for corporate borrowers. Although tight lending relationships have benefits for borrowers it also can pose threads when relationship banks experience liquidity problems. First chapter provides evidence about the transmission of banking sector problems to corporate borrowers, and examines the impact of bank credit supply frictions on firm performance. I exploit differences in the composition of banks' liabilities structure during the financial crisis of 2007-2009 as a source of exogenous variation in the availability of bank credit to nonfinancial firms, in order to identify the causal relationship between bank credit supply and firm performance. My results indicate that banking relationships are important for firms. Firms whose banks relied more on core deposit financing had a lower decline in bank credit during the crisis than those whose...
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Essays on Citizenship Policies and Immigrant Integration
Sargsyan, Vahan ; Hanousek, Jan (advisor) ; Guzi, Martin (referee) ; Elsner, Benjamin (referee)
Differential treatment towards minority groups in host societies and labor markets may be a result of both a governmental registration system that fosters unequal rights based on the origins of individuals and the disadvantageous attitude of local employers and the general population towards non-locals. In the first chapter, I test for differential treatment in the Chinese labor market towards rural migrants with and without urban registration, using data from the Rural to Urban Migration Survey in China. The findings indicate that despite its often-assumed large impact on the differential treatment towards rural migrants, the type of household registration (hukou) is not entirely responsible for the local-migrant differences in the total hourly earnings that are not attributable to personal characteristics. The results suggest that even the complete abolishment of the hukou system may at most eliminate only a portion of the disadvantageous treatment towards rural female migrants that is not attributable to differences in personal characteristics, and may even have no measurable impact on rural male migrants working in the paid-employment sector in Chinese urban labor markets. In the second chapter, I conduct an empirical study in order to estimate the impact of naturalization on the labor market...
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Essays on Sports Economics
Janhuba, Radek ; Hanousek, Jan (advisor) ; Humphreys, Brad (referee) ; Rees, Daniel (referee)
In the first chapter, I examine the effects of emotional shocks on subjective wellbeing and the role social context plays in how shocks are experienced. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), the study uses an ordered logit model to estimate the effects of the local college football team's wins and losses on the life satisfaction of local citizens. The analysis suggests that unexpected wins have positive effects on life satisfaction. The results are driven entirely by games played at the home stadium, indicating that the impacts of emotional shocks are larger if the experience is shared with other fans. Moreover, the effects increase with the size of the stadium relative to the local population, suggesting that social context is likely to be the underlying factor. Surprisingly, no effects are found for cases of unexpected losses. The second chapter examines the relationship between the number of on-field officials and committed fouls, a phenomenon connected to the economics of crime. Economists have found mixed evidence on what happens when the number of police increases. On one hand, more law enforcers means a higher probability of detecting a crime, which is known as the monitoring effect. On the other hand, criminals incorporate the increase into their decision-making...
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"And when will we go back again to look at the whale?" Exhibitions of the National Museum in the second half of the 20th century in the light of archival sources
Hanousek, Jan ; Woitschová, Klára (advisor) ; Běličová, Milena (referee)
This thesis presents results of a research on a topic that has not been studied yet. The first part focuses on general questions and context - contemporary views on exhibition activities, the process of realization of the exhibition (exposition), typology of archival sources and their information value, nomenclature and projection of external influences (politics, censorship) into the exhibition activities. In the other part are (in a form of analysis of a concrete material) presented expositions of National Museum, it's exhibition activities between 1953-1962, expositions and exhibitions of a Mineralogical department and exposition of a Prehistorical department. A list of exhibitions corresponding to the current state of research is connected in the attachment. Key words: Exhibitions, expositions, National Museum, archival sources.
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