|
|
Sequential vote buying
Chen, Y. ; Zápal, Jan
To enact a policy, a leader needs votes from committee members with heterogeneous opposition intensities. She sequentially offers transfers in exchange for votes. The transfers are either promises paid only if the policy passes or paid up front. With transfer promises, a vote costs nearly zero. With up-front payments, a vote can cost significantly more than zero, but the leader is better off with up-front payments. The leader does not necessarily buy the votes of those least opposed. The opposition structure most challenging to the leader involves either a homogeneous committee or a committee with two homogenous groups. Our results provide an explanation for several empirical regularities: lobbying of strongly opposed legislators, the Tullock Paradox and expansion of the whip system in the U.S. House concurrent with ideological homogenization of parties. We also discuss several extensions including private histories and simultaneous offers.
|
|
| |
|
|
The demand and supply of favours in dynamic relationships
Forand, J. G. ; Zápal, Jan
We characterise the optimal demand and supply of favours in a dynamic principal-agent model of joint production, in which heterogenous project opportunities arrive stochastically and are publicly observed upon arrival, utility from these projects is non-transferable and commitment to future production is limited. Our results characterise the optimal dynamic contract, and we establish that the principal’s supply of favours (the production of projects that benefit the agent but not the principal) is backloaded, that the principal’s demand for favours (the production of projects that benefit the principal but not the agent) is frontloaded, and that the production of projects is ordered by their comparative advantage, that is, by their associated efficiency in extracting (for demanded projects) and providing (for supplied projects) utility to the agent. Furthermore, we\nprovide an exact construction of the optimal contract when project opportunities follow a Markov process.
|
|
|
A model of focusing in political choice
Nunnari, S. ; Zápal, Jan
This paper develops a theoretical model of voters’ and politicians’ behavior based on the notion that voters focus disproportionately on, and hence overweight, certain attributes of policies. We assume that policies have two attributes and that voters focus more on the attribute in which their options differ more. First, we consider exogenous policies and show that voters’ focusing polarizes the electorate. Second, we consider the endogenous supply of policies by office-motivated politicians\nwho take voters’ distorted focus into account. We show that focusing leads to inefficient policies, which cater excessively to a subset of voters: social groups that are larger, have more distorted focus, are more moderate, and are more sensitive to changes in a single attribute are more influential. Finally, we show that augmenting the classical models of voting and electoral competition with focusing can contribute to explain puzzling stylized facts as the inverse correlation between income inequality and redistribution or the backlash effect of extreme policies.
|
|
|
The Efficiency of Public Expenditure, Evidence from the Czech Republic
Vraná, Veronika ; Zápal, Jan (advisor) ; Schneider, Ondřej (referee)
1 Abstract Efficiency is an important concept for performance evaluation of decision- making units. This thesis studies efficiency of public spending and methods of its estimation. Firstly, a wide range of efficiency estimators are defined and compared. For the public spending efficiency analysis the most convenient es- timator is found to be the cost frontier approach of the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). The second part of the thesis contains efficiency analysis of public spending in the 14 regions of the Czech Republic in the years 2003-2014. For the analysis current expenditure of regional offices is used as the input. Based on the investigation of regional services output index is formed and employed in the analysis. The estimation is performed using the cost frontier approach of the SFA as the main method. Various other efficiency estimators are then applied to the data in order to study robustness of the results. The thesis further discusses relative ranking of the regions and time evolution of efficiency scores using different assumptions and variety of methods. Lastly, several potential effects on the estimated efficiency are considered and analysed. JEL Classification D24, H41, H72 Keywords efficiency, regions, public expenditure, Czech Republic Author's e-mail verca25.vrana@seznam.cz Supervisor's e-mail...
|
|
|
Flexibilita pracovního trhu, její měření a vliv na nezaměstnanost
Majerová, Barbora ; Zápal, Jan (advisor) ; Klimešová, Andrea (referee)
In its theoretical part, this bachelor thesis is concerned with the possible definitions and types of labour market flexibility with a subsequent aim at numerical flexibility. The first part deals with OECD and World bank indeces, which measure numerical flexibility at national level. Since these are established on the measure of strictness of Employment protection legislation, a part of this study is dedicated to the development of labour law in the Czech republic. This is followed by a look at flexible forms of employment and organisation of working time, the development of which is related to the strategies that countries employ in their bid to achieve higher employment. The main target of this work is to create indeces which will measure internal and external numerical flexibility in all regions of the Czech republic. Their structuring is established on the methodology of Vassilis Monastiriotis who created such index for regions of Great Britain. The resulting index values are used in panel data. The hypothesis that a low vaule of flexibility results in a high rate of unemployment was tested and was confirmed only with the index of external numerical flexibility. Despite this result, it was found that the indeces are useful and may help us in understanding and explaining the situation on the...
|
|
|
Pro-cyclicality of Fiscal Policy
Málek, Jan ; Zápal, Jan (advisor) ; Martišková, Monika (referee)
There is large evidence that fiscal policy in many countries tends to pro-cyclicality. This phenomenon is often observed in emerging countries but might also be present in developed ones. It is unclear why so many countries follow apparently sub-optimal fiscal policy. First part of this thesis reviews existing literature concerning pro-cyclical behavior of fiscal policy. It shows in which countries and under which circumstances pro-cyclicality has been present. Furthermore, models explaining pro-cyclicality of fiscal policy are introduced. The remainder of this thesis surveys fiscal policy making in Europe. We show that after subtraction of automatic stabilizers from government budget and considering only discretionary part of fiscal policy, pro-cyclicality of fiscal policy is also present.
|
|
|
Heavy Tails and Market Risk Measures: the Case of the Czech Stock Market
Bulva, Radek ; Zápal, Jan (advisor) ; Bubák, Vít (referee)
One of the stylized facts about the behaviour of financial returns is that they tend to exhibit more probability mass in the tails of the distribution than would be suggested by the normal distribution. This phenomenon is called heavy tails. The first part of this thesis focuses on examining the tails of a distribution of returns on Czech stock market index PX. Parametric and semi-parametric approaches to estimation of the tail index, a measure of heaviness of tails, are applied and compared. The results indicate that the tails behave in a way one would expect from an emerging market stock index. In the second part of the thesis, implications for two quantile-based market risk measures, Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall, are investigated. The main conclusion is that heavy-tailed alternatives should be preferred to the normal distribution in order to avoid serious underestimation of risks embedded in the underlying process. JEL classification: C13, C14, C16, G15; Keywords: Heavy Tails, Parametric and Semi-parametric Estimation, Statistics of Extremes, Extreme Value Theory, Market Risk, Value at Risk, Expected Shortfall.
|
|
|
The Effect of Czech 2008 Flat Rate Personal Income Tax on Tax Evasion
Hrbek, Pavel ; Zápal, Jan (advisor) ; Votápková, Jana (referee)
The main goal of this thesis is to examine the effect of Czech's 2008 at rate personal income tax reform on consumption, income and tax evasion since there is a belief that personal income tax rates are partially responsible for high levels of tax evasion. We use the gap between household expenditures and reported income as a proxy for tax evasion with the Czech microeconomic data from the 2006-2009 Household Budget Survey. Employing difference-in-difference approach, we find that the Czech at personal income tax reform has significantly decreased the gap between reported household consumption and income for households with only one economically active individual that experienced a reduction in marginal tax rates after the tax reform relative to households experiencing no change and that it takes time for households to adapt to new tax policy.
|
|
|
Life satisfaction : (empirical evidence from the Czech Republic)
Vágnerová, Markéta ; Zápal, Jan (advisor) ; Mlčoch, Lubomír (referee)
Main goal of my bachelor theis is to investigate life satisfaction in the Czech Republic and find explanatory variables influencing it, with an emphasis on economic indicators. It strives to compare Czech Republic with other states of the European Union, especially in relationship to main macroeconomic indicators. Some of the explanatory variables are discussed in detail in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5 are models on life satisfaction on two datasets. The results of the models are compared according to a type of data and on dependence on used econometric Metod. One of the key questions is, how much money "buys" happiness (resp. In our case life satisfaction).
|
guest ::
