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Regional Convergence in the European Union: Do the Business Services Make the Difference?
Pintera, Jan ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
Despite years of deepening economic integration among the states and regions of the European Union, empirical research remains inconclusive about speed of convergence across regions, if not its existence. This thesis provides novel evidence on convergence in the EU while focusing on development at regional level after the Great Recession. It uses recently developed log t convergence test by Phillips and Sul (2007). Our findings speak against the convergence in level of income per capita among the European regions and give us five clubs of regions converging in their income growth rates instead. Investigating further the geographical distribution of the convergence clubs, we confirm high inequality within the member states and find large continuous area of high convergence clubs in the urbanized part of Western Europe. Furthermore, we investigated the determinants of convergence club membership using Logistic Regression. The main explanatory variable of interest were Business Services (BS), a dynamic sector of the economy with presumably strong positive effect on regional innovative potential. We found positive effect of BS on membership in higher convergence clubs. Yet, this effect seems to diminish for the very highest club.
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How discriminatory is the housing market in Slovakia: experimental investigation.
Sacherová, Kristína ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
Housing discrimination is a widespread, but markedly underrated issue that is associated with diverse treatment of applicants for real estate's sale or rent based on their affiliation to some minority in society. Although there have been many experiments and studies conducted to uncover and measure the presence of discrimination mostly for African Americans in the US and Arabs in several European countries, such extensive researches for the Europe's largest ethnic minority, Roma, are lacking. This thesis presents an Internet field experiment on discrimination of Roma in the Slovak housing market which uses matched-pair method and four fictitious male applicants to request for a flat or house showing based on an online advert. In total, 396 requests were sent from email addresses with specific names signalizing ethnicity of applicants and the response rate was examined. Data shows that the applicants with Roma-sounding email addresses are 8 to 9.5% less likely to get an invitation for a showing compared to the applicants with the Slovak sounding email addresses. My analysis also suggests that the highest level of discrimination is found in the districts with median Roma contribution (specifically from 3 to 11%). Considering all my findings, it can be eventually concluded that in the Slovak housing...
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Three essays on Policy Evaluation and Analysis
Kopečná, Vědunka ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Steininger, Karl (referee) ; Brůha, Jan (referee) ; Janda, Karel (referee)
Three essays on policy evaluation and analysis Author Mgr. Vědunka Kopečná Year 2021 Advisor PhDr. Jaromír Baxa, Ph.D. No. of pages 164 This thesis consists of three articles sharing the main theme - evaluation of policies related to current issues both from micro and macroeconomic perspectives. The dissertation aims at the central European region. The first article presents a novel methodology of a hybrid dynamic computable general equilibrium model used to quantify socio-economic impacts of an emission abatement driven policy focused on adoption of electric vehicles in personal transport on the example of Austria. Heterogeneous micro-founded preferences are integrated into a dynamic computational general equilibrium model which is further linked to a bottom-up technology-rich electricity model and a stock-flow vehicle accounting model. Endogenously determined emissions from vehicle use, electricity generation, and production provide an input to quantify external costs attributable to air quality and carbon emissions using the Impact Pathway Analysis. The second article estimates the elasticity of substitution between capital, labour, energy and materials in the constant elasticity of substitution production function, which is being used in a majority of general equilibrium models. We use a non-linear...
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Decent Work and Economic Growth-Analysis of the Sustainable Development Goal 8
Letovská, Vendula ; Cahlík, Tomáš (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
Sustainable Development Goals are focused on international cooperation in the field of socioeconomic, political and environmental issues. This bachelor's thesis deals with Goal 8, which promotes achievement of sustainable economic growth, decent work and full employment, and examines three indicators of the goal: annual growth of GDP per capita, domestic material consumption and the rate of unemployment. Thesis is based on the panel data analysis of 132 countries, which were obtained from the World Bank and Sustainable Development Goals databases for selected variables as observed in the time period of 2000 - 2019. According to the regression results, variables education, inflation, adjusted net savings and unemployment rate report significant effects on the annual growth of GDP per capita. Similarly, unemployment rate is strongly affected by the level of obtained education and inflation, as well as by the growth of population and GDP per capita. Inference of domestic material consumption did not uncover any statistically significant variables. Evaluation of the best-fitted forecast models does not predict a strong probability of actually fulfilling the goal or at least its sub targets by the agreed deadline. Thus the Goal 8 proves to be difficult to achieve only a few years after the introduction...
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Do fringe benefits affect job satisfaction?
Plachá, Veronika ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
Fringe benefits remain a substantial part of the compensation, but their influence on job satisfaction is ambiguous. Their presence might result in decreased job satisfaction and reduced job mobility. The aim of this thesis is to test the hypothesis that fringe benefits affect job satisfaction. The study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth conducted in 2017 and applies five regression models to determine the relationship between job satisfaction, fringe benefits, and various work aspects. The outcomes revealed that significant types of fringe benefits are a flexible work schedule, paid maternity leave, and tuition reimbursement for certain types of schooling. The availability of each of these might increase job satisfaction. However, the effect of four other types of fringe benefits appears to be negative. This thesis also examines the perception of fringe benefits for different subsamples and finds that men value the availability of a flexible work schedule more than women and medical insurance is positively correlated with job satisfaction only for single workers. Therefore, this thesis supports the hypothesis that fringe benefits affect job satisfaction. Keywords job satisfaction, fringe benefits, determinants of job satisfaction, benefits, compensation
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Municipal Waste Management and Analysis of Influencing Factors with respect to Municipal Solid Waste Generation
Kmeťková, Diana ; Cahlík, Tomáš (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
This thesis presents the topic of municipal waste management in the Czech Republic and describes the current trends within this area. We analyse the data on the generation and treatment of municipal solid waste in the Czech Republic and then we compare several waste indicators in the EU countries. The main goal of the thesis is to describe the relationship between municipal solid waste generation (MSW) and socio-economic factors. In order to identify the variables that might have a significant impact on the generation of MSW, we carry out a panel data regression using data from 28 EU countries over a time period from 1995 to 2017. We present four model specifications that were created based on the studied research articles. Our findings suggest that GDP and income have a significant positive impact on MSW generation, which is in accordance with the majority of research works. On the other hand, two other significant variables, population and density, are estimated to be negatively related to MSW production. Moreover, urbanization and unemployment rate result to be insignificant. 1
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Utilizing Online Data in Modelling Unemployment Rates in the Czech Republic
Křížová, Kristýna ; Krištoufek, Ladislav (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
Unemployment rate is a crucial macroeconomic aspect for each state, which aim to have it as low as possible. However, if it is too low, many problems could arise due to a large number of job vacancies and a small number of people needed for market. As the Internet is very useful nowadays, the main aim of the thesis is to investigate the relationship between the Czech unemployment rate and job search on the Internet by users who are interested in changing jobs or are unemployed and need to find some work. Thanks to the relationship, we can conclude whether online data could improve unemployment prediction, which is needed to make effective government decisions. This thesis should also provide easier and better prediction of movements in the unemployment rate, which is inaccurate as most data sources used in economics are commonly available only after a substantial lag. The study applies data freely available on the website of Integrated Portal of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, which provides statistics of unemployment rates, as well as data from portal Jobs.cz, where are information about job vacancies on the portal and response of candidates to occupied positions. The thesis uses a simple autoregressive model of the unemployment in the Czech Republic and extends it with extra variables...
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Does Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from the Czech Republic
Častorálová, Lucie ; Havránková, Zuzana (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
A b s tra c t The recent discussion of the European Parliam ent, member states, and citizens triggered the question whether there is s till a need for bi-annual clock shifting from the perspective of energy savings. Employing the difference-in-differences method on hourly data on electricity consumption between 2006 and 2017, the study con cludes th a t daylight saving tim e policy reduces aggregate electricity consumption by 0.35 % in the Czech Republic. Moreover, daylight saving tim e leads to 1% savings on domestic residential electricity consumption. Overall, daylight saving tim e increases electricity consumption in the morning, bu t decreases electricity consumption in the evening by greater amount. We have estimated th a t more than 65 % of to ta l electricity savings attributable to daylight saving tim e arose from effect of the daylight saving tim e on residential electricity consumption. 1
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Rational Inattention in DSGE Model
Vostřák, David ; Malovaná, Simona (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
A great amount of available information over the internet makes it impossible for anyone to process it all. In this thesis, we use the rational inattention theory to see how the perceived signals about the exogenous variables would change under different levels of information capacity. Those signals are then applied in the New Keynesian model and corresponding impulse responses are compared with the case of unlimited attention. We found that for some autoregressive processes the differences from the perfect attention case are not very profound while for others the results vary considerably.
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Pension Systems Sustainability in the European Union
Bronec, Ondřej ; Schneider, Ondřej (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
This thesis explores the future of pension systems of the European Union and Norway in the period between years 2016 and 2080. Due to demographic trends in fertility and life expectancy the number of people in working age declines and the number of people applicable for public pensions grows. This leads to increase in pressure put on public pensions and increase in pension expenditure in terms of GDP. By using EUROPOP2015 population predictions together with several economic predictions from the 2018 Ageing Report this thesis tries to capture future scenarios of pension expenditure. The results suggest significant challenges for most countries in the EU. We further analyse the results under different series of demographic assumptions identifying fertility as the most important factor and noticing different behaviour among states of Western and Eastern Europe. Finally, we try to test possible parametric solutions to compensate for increases in pension expenditure. We arrive at the conclusion that 8-10 year increase in pensionable age would stabilize the expenditure up to the year 2080 and a similar result would be achieved by nominal pension growth being equal to only 60% to 70% of nominal wage growth.
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