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The estimation of country - level production function aimed at understanding the role of human capital
Mačorová, Simona ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Průša, Jan (referee)
Our goal is the estimation of country - level production function aimed at understanding the role of human capital. We analyze the effect of education, especially the effect of the share of college graduates in prime-age population (between 25 - 54 years) on the European Union (EU) countries' labor productivity. Here, an important issue is efficiency of tertiary education institutions. We split the ratio of human capital to observe it from different aspects. We compare an effect of lower and upper tertiary educated, by specializations and by gender. The relationship between human capital and labor productivity was found positive though not significant or significant only on 10 % confidence level. The influence of human capital on labor productivity was found very low, in some cases even negative. Assuming that one of the main reasons behind these contra-intuitive results is the problem of unobserved heterogeneity, we also run instrumental variable estimation. We found positive and significant on 5 % confidence level relationship between human capital and labor productivity. The influence of larger share of tertiary educated people on labor productivity is more evident after some period of time, in our example after two years. Keywords: human capital, labor productivity, European Union, production...
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Fertility and education: the case of Ghana
Timbilla, Rahinatu ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Chytilová, Julie (referee)
The study attempts to find the relationship between education and fertility in Ghana, as Ghana wants to reduce its fertility rates from 4.0 to 3.0 replacement levels which will help to move the country into middle income status. A country that has a stable population growth is able to plan and allocate resources to its populace more effectively. High fertility rates have consequences for food security, social & economic opportunities and overall economic wellbeing of the population. The study sets outs to investigate the linkages or factors that help in reducing fertility rates, education is one major factor that has been found be to be inversely related to fertility. Does this relationship exist in Ghana? Has education in any way contributed to the recent fertility declines in Ghana? And by how much did education contribute. Finally, are there other factors that have contributed to the recent fertility decline in Ghana? To answer the questions, the study takes advantage of an educational reform program in 1987/88 that saw mass construction of schools, training of teachers and provision of study materials to estimate the impact of education on fertility. Using difference-in-difference approach and 2SLS, the study finds that the National Education Reform program lead to reductions in early births...
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Fair bets in sports betting
Jansa, Jiří ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Havránek, Tomáš (referee)
Market efficiency and existence of profitable strategy are the most frequent analysis in the research concerning betting on sport events. This thesis covers both these topics on the dataset (20 betting offices) of Czech ice-hockey league from 2004 to 2010. The theoretical part presents development of models of individual decision-making under risk and uncertainty, models of equilibrium on the betting market and several definitions of market efficiency (Fama and Sauer as authors of these concepts) on these markets. The statistical part is testing difference in margins of betting companies for 3 possible outcomes of game, convergence in quoted odds across betting offices, arbitrage opportunity and correspondence of quoted odds to the real probabilities (linear and non- linear). Simple model of perfect market might be by all these tests rejected, since there is no constant return from betting on all outcomes, betting offices differ in margins, quoted odds do not correspond to the real probabilities and arbitrage opportunity is not disappearing. Second empirical part is devoted to the search for profitable strategy. Using 14 explanatory variables and various statistical methods (linear probability model, logit model, multinomial logit model), author is trying to beat bias in odds and find long-term profitable bet- ting...
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Position of Minorities in the U.S. Labor Market
Svoboda, Jan ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Avdulaj, Krenar (referee)
This thesis deals with the phenomenon of racial discrimination in the U.S. labor market. The first part outlines the existing theories of discrimination and history of immigrants' residence in the U.S. It also brings some statistics from the U.S. labor market and finally reviews some literature in the field of labor market discrimination. The second part of the thesis is devoted to the empirical analysis of wage discrimination in the U.S. using the American Community Survey 1980 and 2007. With the help of Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition we break down the log-wage differential between whites and other racial groups into two parts. The first, explained, part is the part of the differential that can be explained by differences in average race characteristics. The other, unexplained, part is the part of the differential that remained unexplained. That part is then assigned as a result of discrimination. We find that while in 1980 Asians earned on average 5% more than whites, by 2007 this difference reached 15%. 15% - 21% of this difference remained unexplained. The opposite situation is observed in the case of Hispanics and Blacks. While in 1980 both, Hispanics and Afro-Americans, had on average 10% lower wage than whites, by 2007 this difference reached as much as 30%. In case of Afro-Americans, 50% -...
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The Determinants of Innovation: Empirical analysis based on European country-level data
Stacho, Miroslav ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Netuka, Martin (referee)
The thesis summarizes current state of art for the most recent research capabilities of innovation activities analysis. Its main goal is to assess the factors influencing pace and volume of technological innovativeness throughout the European industry and services sectors considering time span 2002-2008 using country-level Community Innovation Surveys and R&D data. It also attempts to evaluate trends in innovation policy instruments targeted to close the gap between Europe and world innovation leaders such as USA. Complex literature overview, basic empirical and extended instruments' analyses lead to recommendations of optimal governments' policy approaches towards different groups of countries divided by level of innovative performance.
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Agent-Based Modeling of the Financial Markets
Klejchová, Martina ; Teplý, Petr (advisor) ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (referee)
The thesis deals with the Agent-based modeling of the financial markets which represent so called "bottom-up" approach in economics. In the first part of the thesis, the brief summary of the development of Agent-based approach and its application in the modeling of financial markets is provided. The main part of the thesis concerns the implementation of an existing asset pricing model of He, Hamill and Li (2008) and also the implementation of an extension to this model. The presented extension lies in the connecting of two sub-markets by a mutual correlation. The considered correlation is represented either by correlated dividends or by the common market maker who adjusts the prices on both markets. The influence of these two types of correlation on the overall performance of both sub-markets is then studied by analyzing the outcomes of performed simulations.
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Skill-Intensity of Occupations, Labor Market Polarization, and Occupational Allocation of College Graduates
Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara ; Jurajda, Štěpán (advisor) ; Cardoso, Ana Rute (referee) ; Weber, Andrea (referee)
Skill-intensity of occupations, labor market polarization, and occupational allocation of college graduates. Barbara Pertold-Gebicka Abstract The first chapter is motivated by a rapid expansion of higher education systems in Central European countries, where universities are largely state-funded and provision of higher education is a public policy decision. In this paper, I investigate an indicator of college skills usage - the fraction of college graduates employed in "college" occupations. Gottschalk and Hansen (2003) propose to identify "college" occupations based on within-occupation college wage premia; I build on their strategy to study the local-labor-market relationship between the share of college graduates in the population and the use of college skills. Empirical results based on worker-level data from Czech NUTS-4 districts suggest a positive relationship, thus supporting the presence of an endogenous influence of the number of skilled workers on the demand for them. Thus, the findings of this paper suggest that, in the long run, districts should be able to positively stimulate their labor markets by providing higher education to a larger fraction of their population. In the second chapter, I propose a model-based measure of occupational skill-intensity -- a measure allowing to consistently...
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Food vs. Fuel: The Role of Bioenergy
Filip, Ondřej ; Janda, Karel (advisor) ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (referee)
Bibliographic entry Filip, O. (2015): "Food vs. Fuel: The Role of Bioenergy." (Unpublished master's thesis). Charles University in Prague. Supervisor: prof. Ing. Karel Janda M.A., Dr., Ph. D. Length: 121,976 characters Abstract This thesis studies the relationship between the first generation biofuels and selected commodities and assets in the USA, Europe, and Brazil. It is the first attempt to combine the taxonomy and wavelet analyses in a single research application. Our unique dataset comprises 32 weekly price series covering the 2003-2015 time period. First, we employ a method of minimum spanning trees and hierarchical trees to model a biofuel-related price network. We demonstrate a development phase shift between Brazilian and the US/EU biofuel industries. We reveal a strong and stable connection between Brazilian ethanol and its main production factor, local sugarcane. We further find that US ethanol is closely linked to corn. In the contrary, European biodiesel exhibits only moderate ties to its production factors. Subsequent wavelet analysis scrutinizes the identified price connections both in time and frequency domains. Both Brazilian and US ethanols are found to be positively related to their respective feedstock commodities. In particular, feedstock proves to lead the price of the biofuel and not...
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Eseje o ekonomii sportu
Lahvička, Jiří ; Chytil, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Schwarz, Jiří (referee) ; Pertold Gebická, Barbara (referee)
This dissertation consists of five articles about economics of sports. The first three articles investigate various types of outcome uncertainty and how they relate to match attendance demand, while the remaining two articles test the efficiency of sports betting markets. The first article presents a new method of calculating match importance. Unlike the previous approaches in the literature, it does not require ex-post information and can be used for any type of season outcome. The second article shows that the additional playoff stage in the Czech ice hockey "Extraliga" lowers the probability of the strongest team becoming a champion and thus increases seasonal uncertainty. The third article demonstrates that the inconsistent findings in the literature about the link between match uncertainty and attendance could be explained by wrongly specified regressions, proposes a new approach to analyzing the effect of match uncertainty and shows that attendance demand is maximized if teams of the same quality play against each other. The fourth article examines the favorite-longshot bias in the context of betting on tennis matches. It shows that the favorite-longshot bias pattern is consistent with bookmakers protecting themselves against both better informed insiders and the general public exploiting new information. The fifth article investigates the supposedly profitable strategy of betting on soccer draws using the Fibonacci sequence. The strategy is tested both in a simulated market and on a real data set and found to lose money.
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Effects of parental background on other-regarding preferences in children
Bauer, Michal ; Chytilová, J. ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara
Other-regarding preferences are central for the ability to solve collective action problems and thus for society’s welfare. We study how the formation of other-regarding preferences during childhood is related to parental background. Using binary-choice dictator games to classify subjects into other-regarding types, we find that children of less educated parents are less altruistic and more spiteful. This link is robust to controlling for a range of child, family, and peer characteristics, and is attenuated for smarter children. The results suggest that less educated parents are either less efficient to instill social norms or their children less able to acquire them.
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