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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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Adolescents substance use : identifying factors influencing alcohol consumption among high school students in the Czech Republic
Mandelíková, Martina ; Strecker, Ondřej (referee) ; Pertold, Filip (advisor)
This bachelor thesis focuses on indicating the factors, which influence the participation in adolescent substance use. Possibly important factors are identified based on the previous researches dealing with the same topic. The effect of these factors is then tested with the empirical model. This thesis deals with a dataset from the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs done at the Czech high schools among freshmen and juniors. Since the results in dependence on sex and class year are expected to be different, the regression is run separately. The most significant factors are for all cases: the smoking experience, the age of the first intoxication, and the share of friends who already consume alcohol.
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Children left behind: self-confidence of pupils in competitive environments
Federičová, Miroslava ; Pertold, Filip ; Smith, Michael
Early-tracking systems naturally divide many classes of 11 years old students into two groups:\nstudents preparing for exams to enter better schools and everyone else, who decide not to compete for selective schools. Utilizing TIMSS data and a follow-up study in the Czech Republic, which has an early-tracking system similar to other European states following the German model, we show that this environment has a detrimental effect on the self-confidence of pupils in mathematics who do not apply for selective schools but have peers in their classroom who do apply. In particular, we show that girls who do not apply for selective schools experience a 11% drop in confidence in mathematics if they have four applicants among classmates and this effect is even larger if the applicants are successful in the admission process. We focus on self-confidence in mathematics as an outcome variable because the literature suggests it is directly linked to pupils' motivation to study STEM fields as well as subsequent educational achievement. Our results suggest that the decrease in selfconfidence among girls is long lasting and implies that gender gaps in self-confidence can be a result of the competitive environment of the educational system.
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Divorces and women's income: initial findings for the Czech Republic based on individual data
Janský, Petr ; Pertold, Filip ; Šatava, Jiří
In most cases, divorce leads to a radical change in life situation with many consequences for both divorcees. Nowadays nearly half of all marriages in the Czech Republic end in divorce and so this has been and will continue to be part of life for a significant proportion of the country's population. The consequences of divorce are highly influenced by the division of labour within the couple prior to their separation. There is a high level of division in most Czech families. Women spend much more time caring for children, relatives and the home, while men are largely focused on paid employment. We estimate that married women aged 20 to 70 who are neither studying nor in receipt of an old-age pension would see their net incomes fall by 20 % if they ceased to share income within their household (e.g. as a result of divorce and separation). Households led by divorced women report some of the lowest incomes per household member. The average income in a female-led divorced household is one fifth lower than in married households and a quarter lower than in households led by divorced men. Divorced women are, however, more economically active than married women; this is probably a reaction to their loss of income following divorce. Nevertheless this difference could also suggest that women who are economically active are less attractive as partners (Bertrand, 2016).
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Self-confidence of a class and competition of the classmates for eight-year gymnasium
Federičová, Miroslava ; Pertold, Filip ; Smith, Michael
The Czech Republic belongs to a small group of European countries with an educational system that leads to a very early differentiation of pupils in schools according to their academic performance and socio-economic background. In the Czech Republic, 18% of pupils in the 5th grade apply for 8-year grammar schools (gymnasia in Czech) and go through the challenging process of preparing for entrance exams. Thus, on average 3 pupils in each classroom apply to these gymnasia, of which almost 2 pupils are admitted. Our analysis on data from a unique survey of schools shows that a presence of an extra classmate who is applying for gymnasia affects one’s self-confidence. The biggest negative impact we noted was in case of self-confidence of girls in mathematics. Decline in confidence (from the level in the fourth grade, that is before preparing for entrance exams) is about 7% of the student with at least two classmates who applied. As a control group, we use the class where no one has applied.
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What does (a lack of) transparency in public procurement lead to?
Palguta, Ján ; Pertold, Filip
In 2006 a simplified regime for awarding public contracts was introduced, by means of a special procedure for "below threshold" contracts. Its aim was to enable smaller contracts to be awarded in a simpler and more flexible way. However, this change began to reduce competition and transparency, and gave contract awarders freedoms they could easily abuse. For this reason, the original maximum threshold for contracts that could be awarded via the simplified procedure (20 million CZK) was reduced to half that amount in 2012. Introducing these thresholds led, among other things, to contracts' estimated values being manipulated, and to prices being artificially "inflated" towards the threshold. These behaviours were most frequently observed in the building sector. As the number of public tenders rises and their estimated values cluster more and more closely to the legal threshold for the simplified procedure, inefficiency increases, i.e. the difference between the estimated and actual price of the tenders increases. This difference is up to 15 percentage points greater than in open competitions.
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