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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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Comparison of different models for forecasting of Czech electricity market
Kunc, Vladimír ; Krištoufek, Ladislav (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
There is a demand for decision support tools that can model the electricity markets and allows to forecast the hourly electricity price. Many different ap- proach such as artificial neural network or support vector regression are used in the literature. This thesis provides comparison of several different estima- tors under one settings using available data from Czech electricity market. The resulting comparison of over 5000 different estimators led to a selection of several best performing models. The role of historical weather data (temper- ature, dew point and humidity) is also assesed within the comparison and it was found that while the inclusion of weather data might lead to overfitting, it is beneficial under the right circumstances. The best performing approach was the Lasso regression estimated using modified Lars. 1
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Endogenous Growth Model, Distance to Frontier, and Labour Market Institutions
Šoltés, Michal ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
This thesis studies the effect of generosity of unemployment insurance on economic growth. More generous unemployment insurance is argued to cause an increase in unemployment on the one hand and better job match quality on the other. Our model shows that in the developed countries, there may be some level of unemployment insurance which ensures that the productivity gain offsets the loss due to higher unemployment. On the contrary, in the developing countries, any level of unemployment insurance was revealed to harm economic growth. Moreover, we present strong evidence in favour of a positive effect of unemployment insurance on the aggregate productivity growth. Key words: Unemployment Insurance, Distance to Frontier, Endogenous Growth Model, Technology Growth, Economic Growth
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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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The Relationship between Unemployment Components and Economic Growth: the Czech Republic Case
Kopečná, Vědunka ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Chytilová, Julie (referee)
The choice of an appropriate government policy tool to promote the employment should be done with regard to the source of unemployment. This diploma the- sis investigates structural and cyclical components of unemployment. The two components are induced by different causes. Search and matching frictions in the labor market are the source of the structural component. The cyclical component is induced by a low labor productivity which induces a negative gross marginal profit of firms. Consequently, they are obliged to cancel a portion of existing job- worker matches. The main finding is that during a period of economic slowdown the overall unemployment and its cyclical component rise while the structural component declines. The dynamics of the two components is reversed during a robust economic growth. The diploma thesis proceeds with investigating the pub- lic hiring, a policy potentially suitable to diminish the unemployment during an economic slowdown. The results show that the public hiring can be successfully applied despite the private employment crowding out. A New Keynesian DSGE model calibrated for the Czech Republic is used to model the labor market dy- namics. The results are interpreted with regard to the historic development of the unemployment and the economic growth from 2000 to 2014. JEL...
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Determinants of FDI flows in Europe: The Recent Evidence
Korbelius, Vojtěch ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Kopečná, Vědunka (referee)
JEL Classification B22, C11, C23, D92, E22, O52 Keywords FDI, Financial crisis, EU, integration Author's e-mail v.korbelius@gmail.com Supervisor's e-mail jaromir.baxa@fsv.cuni.cz Our work analyses the determinants of FDI in Europe, at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. It finds out that the FDI is positively and significantly influenced by the size of the economy (GDP, growth of GDP), total size of the labor force, openness of the economy and institutional framework. The findings show the EU accession does not have an immediate effect. However, long term membership might positively affect the FDI inflow. According to our analysis the recent financial crisis has changed the main determinants of the FDI inflows. It has warned the investors it is important not to consider only immediate profits but also future prospects. Generally the investment nowadays is below its potential level and the governments should take action to change it, if the FDI is their priority.
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