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The impact of higher wages of politicians on municipal elections
Palguta, Ján ; Pertold, Filip
This study investigates whether raising local representatives’ pay has the potential to motivate\ncitizens to stand for election and thus improve the selection of elected councillors. We look\nat the influence pay has on the number of political subjects that enter the election (i.e. on the political competition), and at the selection of representatives in terms of their education, previous profession, gender and age. To identify the causal effects of salaries, we use the existence of sharp increases in the salaries paid to mayors based on municipality size.\n
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Obesity in the Czech Republic: an international comparison using data from the SHARE project
Pertold, Filip ; Šatava, Jiří
The World Health Organization considers obesity to be one of the greatest challenges for\npublic health in the 21st century. On the basis of data from SHARE, we show that Czechs aged\n50-70 years have a high rate of obesity (BMI > 29,99) in comparison with other countries.\nIn 2015 around 35 % of older men in the Czech Republic suffered from obesity, that is almost\ntwice as high as the rate in Italy or Switzerland and more than 50 % higher than the rate\nin Western European countries (c. 23 %).
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IDEA for the 2017 elections. Pensions and pensioners in election manifestos
Pertold, Filip ; Šatava, Jiří
In 16 of the past 20 years the pensions system’s expenditures have exceeded its revenues. Since 2010 the pensions deficit has reached 260 billion crowns. That is more than twice the total government expenditures on salaries in 2016. Nevertheless, in their election manifestos the parties do not declare any estimate the costs of their proposed measures, nor suggest what resources would be used to fund them. This suggests that the state budget will continue to fund a growing pensions deficit, to the detriment of other public spending.
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IDEA for the 2017 elections. Seniors' income: work, retirement pensions and their valorisation
Šatava, Jiří ; Pertold, Filip
Pension valorization settings are crucial in determining how the value of the old age pension will develop in the coming years. At present, the system is set to maintain individuals' real purchasing power throughout their retirement at the level they enjoyed during their working life, but in reality it usually lags behind natural growth in real salaries. The higher the initial old age pension, the more it will lag behind in this way. The way in which the pensions system is currently set up relatively effectively protects Czech pensioners from falling below the poverty line. The seven percent share of the population aged over 65 years who fall below the line is the fourth smallest in the EU. Nevertheless, in most cases the pensions system does not protect pensioners from a substantial reduction in quality of life.\n
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Comparative analysis of factors influencing children's smoking
Tesař, Tomáš ; Pertold, Filip (advisor) ; Princ, Michael (referee)
Smoking of children definitely is a huge social problem, which many governments around the world try to solve. Some of them are successful, other less. This paper focuses on the USA with the very good situation and, on the other hand, on the Czech Republic, where the situation is not so satisfactory. There are many factors that influence if a child smokes or not. And the main aim of this paper is to find the important factors in the both countries. Other aim is to compare significance of the factors' influence in the USA with the ones in the Czech Republic. Statistical description of datasets from NYTS survey in the USA in 2009 and from GYTS surveys in the Czech Republic in 2002 and 2007 show that there are less than 10% of child smokers in the age of 14 in the USA and the situation in the Czech Republic is getting better, although the amount of children who smoke is still three times higher. The influences of the factors are estimated by LPM methods, probit and logit models. American children are more affected by school class explaining danger and by other people who smoke in their presence, while the Czech children are mostly influenced by smokers among their closest friends and their parents.
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Do Information Cascades Arise Easier under Time Pressure? Experimantal Approach.
Cingl, Lubomír ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Pertold, Filip (referee)
Information cascades as a form of rational herding help to explain real-life phenomena such as fads, fashion, creation of 'bubbles' in financial markets or conformity in general. In this paper I attempt to model propensity to herd and infer its relationship to time-pressure by conducting a laboratory experiment. I let subjects perform a simple cognitive task under different treatment conditions and levels of time pressure with the possibility to herd. The order of decision-making is endogenous and the task is not probabilistic. Rather, I impose uncertainty of private signal by different levels of time pressure. This is expected to make participants prone to imitate the behavior of others. Apart from that I examine the effect of reputation (also called endorsement effect) as an addition to the public pool of information, which is expected to increase the probability to herd. The main findings are that propensity to herd was not significantly influenced by different levels of time pressure. Information cascades arose, but never in a perfect form. Personality traits measured by the Big Five protocol contribute considerably to the explanation of the model, but their relationship is not straightforward. Heart-rate increased during performance of a task, but was not correlated to subjectively stated...
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Do information cascades arise easier under time pressure? : experimental approach
Cingl, Lubomír ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Pertold, Filip (referee)
Information cascades as a form of rational herding help to explain real-life phenomena such as fads, fashion, creation of 'bubbles' in financial markets or conformity in general. In this thesis I model both the propensity to herd as well as the propensity to view public information that may lead to herding. I carry out a laboratory experiment where I let subjects perform a simple task under different treatment conditions with the possibility to herd. Researchers normally imposed the uncertainty about the private signal by providing a task probabilistic in its nature such as drawing balls of different color from an urn and the decision-making was sequential. I conduct an experiment where the order of decision-making is endogenous and a task that is not probabilistic, but I impose uncertainty of private signal by increasing time pressure. This is expected to make participants prone to imitate the behavior of others, even though the others will be exposed to the same conditions. The time-pressure is also expected to induce stress reaction, which I measure as a physiological proxy variable - the heart rate frequency. Participants after each task state the subjective level of stress they felt to be in. I compare these two indices of stress if they bring same results. I also account for personality differences by...
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Poor health and early exit from labour force: an analysis using data from Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe
Hausenblas, Václav ; Pertold, Filip (advisor) ; Maďarová, Henrieta (referee)
Poor health and early exit from labour force: an analysis using data from Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe Václav Hausenblas May 12, 2011 Abstract Health is considered to be one the main determinants of retirement decision. A majority of empirical studies implements health using self- perceived health status measures. According to the justification hypoth- esis such a method may introduce a bias into estimation, and moreover, this bias may vary from country to country. The aim of this thesis is to make use of a dataset rich in objective measures of health from the second wave of Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe and to put side by side the estimates based on subjective measures as well as IV estimates using more objective variables and thereby to assess the mag- nitude of possible endogeneity and measurement error. It applies these identification methods on the model of early exit from labour force and discusses gender differences and specifics of given EU countries. 1
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Essays on Social Interactions and Policy Evaluation
Pertold, Filip ; Jurajda, Štěpán (advisor) ; Buonanno, Paolo (referee) ; Martins, Pedro S. (referee)
In the first part, I explore the start of daily smoking, which is often after the re-sorting of students between elementary and secondary education. I employ a novel identification strategy based on this re-sorting, in order to estimate peer effects in youth smoking. The reflection problem is addressed by peers' pre-secondary-school smoking, which is not influenced by the current interaction. The self-selection is minimized by one's own presecondary school behavior and the pre-existing smoking prevalence among older schoolmates. The empirical findings from the Czech Republic, where the prevalence of youth smoking has recently reached high levels, suggest that male youth smoking is affected by classmates, while female smoking is not. In the second part, I estimate the effect of opposite-gender peer drinking on individual risky sexual behavior among Czech youth. The identification strategy relies on two main controls for individual and group-specific unobservables. First, younger schoolmates' sexual behavior is a control for school-specific attitudes toward sexual behavior. Second, predetermined individual pre-secondary-school alcohol consumption is used to control for selfselection into schools of individuals with specific attitudes toward alcohol. As opposed to Waddell (2010), I find that female drinking...
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