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Six Essays on Meta-Regression Analysis
Havránková, Zuzana ; Dědek, Oldřich (advisor) ; Cahlík, Tomáš (referee) ; Babecký, Jan (referee) ; Fidrmuc, Jarko (referee)
This dissertation thesis consists of six papers on macroeconomics, international economics, and energy economics. All the papers are tied together by the use of meta-regression analysis, which is essential for the derivation of robust policy-relevant conclusions from often conflicting results presented in the empirical literature. I use meta-analysis to quantitatively synthesize the reported research results on a given topic, correct the literature for publication selection bias, and filter out the effect of various misspecifications present in some primary studies. My results can be summarized as follows: 1) The elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption, a key input to all dynamic models in finance and macroeconomics, varies significantly across countries. The differences can be explained by the level of stock market participation, when countries with higher participation exhibit larger values of the elasticity; the mean reported elasticity is 0.5. 2) The effect of borders on international trade, which most authors find to be surprisingly large, can be explained away by innovations in methodology introduced in the last decade. When these innovations are taken into account jointly, the border effect disappears for developed countries, and is relatively small for developing countries. 3) When...
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Price Elasticity of Electricity Demand: A Meta-Analysis
Horáček, Přemysl ; Havránek, Tomáš (advisor) ; Polák, Petr (referee)
During the last decades, one of the most intensively examined statistical relationships in energy economics has been the price elasticity of electricity demand. In this thesis, a quantitative survey of the estimates of price elasticity reported for various countries is provided. The method I use, called meta-regression analysis, indicates that the literature suffers from serious publication selection bias: positive or insignificant estimates of this elasticity are seldom reported, even though questionably large negative estimates are reported commonly. As a result, the average published estimates of price elasticity are greatly exaggerated (more than threefold in the case of short-run elasticity). By utilising the mixed- effects multilevel meta-regression, which is able to correct for publication selection bias, it is shown that the true average elasticity reaches only -0.06 in the short-run, -0.21 in the intermediate-run and about -0.43 in the long-run.
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Publication Bias in Measuring Anthropogenic Climate Change
Rečková, Dominika ; Havránek, Tomáš (advisor) ; Zeynalov, Ayaz (referee)
People around the world are interested in climate changes. Especially the impact of human being on climate changes plays an important role in the policy discussion about environment. One of the measures of anthropogenic climate change is climate sensitivity. The main aim of this thesis is to apply meta-analysis methodology on relationship between human activity and climate change. Until now, tens to hundreds of studies have been written on this topic, but only few report the estimate of climate sensitivity. Despite majority of the studies refer to recognizable influence of human activity on the climate change, the results of individual studies do not correspond in absolute values perfectly. Until now only one meta-analysis concerns publication bias in literature covering climate change, it uses vote- counting and detects publication selectivity efforts. But no meta-regression analysis was published on this topic yet. The thesis investigates if the results of studies reporting climate sensitivity are influenced with the effort to publish only positive and significant estimates. It applies effective statistic instrument, meta- regression analysis, that allows systematic evaluation of an inconsistent sample of estimates. This method was applied on the data set consisting of 48 estimates coming from 16 studies....
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Price Elasticity of Water Demand: A Meta-Analysis
Thoma, Richard ; Havránek, Tomáš (advisor) ; Janotík, Tomáš (referee)
Meta-analysis is a statistical method that allows us to combine results of em- pirical research. A theoretical summary helped to select appropriate model for the empirical part of this thesis - a meta-analysis focused on the price elas- ticity of residential water demand. A mixed-effects multilevel model, which corrects for selection bias, heteroskedasticity and within-study correlation, was employed. Publication bias was found only for subsample excluding data from the western part of the United States. Heckman meta-regression shows that the true price elasticity of water demand is -0,246. Finally variation in results across studies is explained. Using average price instead of margi- nal, the discrete-continuous choice model and data from the western part of the United States for water demand modelling will result in higher values of estimated elasticity. 1
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Meta-Analysis in International Economics
Havránek, Tomáš ; Horváth, Roman (advisor) ; Stanley, Tom (referee) ; Wörz, Julia (referee) ; Vacek, Pavel (referee)
The dissertation consists of three papers presenting applications of meta-analysis in international economics. The first paper examines the effect of common currency on international trade, while the remaining two papers address the relationship between foreign investment and the productivity of domestic firms. An introductory chapter puts these applications into perspective. In the first application I present a meta-analysis of the effect of currency unions on trade, focusing on the euro area. I find strong publication bias in the literature. The estimated trade- promoting effect of currency unions other than the euro reaches more than 60%. In contrast, the euro's trade-promoting effect is insignificant when I correct for publication bias. The empirical literature on this topic shows signs of the so-called economics research cycle: the relation between the reported t-statistics and publication years has an inverse U-shaped form. During the last decade more than 100 researchers have examined productivity spillovers from foreign affiliates to local firms in upstream or downstream sectors. Yet results vary broadly across methods and countries. To examine these vertical spillovers in a systematic way, in the second application I collect 3,626 estimates of spillovers and review the literature quantitatively....
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Income Elasticity of Money Demand: A Meta-Analysis
Sedlaříková, Jana ; Havránek, Tomáš (advisor) ; Šopov, Boril (referee)
The income elasticity of money demand represents an important economic variable which affects money demand function. Precise evaluation of money demand is important for central banking and for determining the transmission mechanism. Nevertheless, there is no general agreement on the exact structure of the function of money demand and income elasticity values neither in theoretical nor practical context. Many different economic theories concerning this field were developed by various economists during the 20th century. There was also a large amount of empirical research whose goal was to estimate the value of income elasticity based on real economic data. However, these studies are characterized by strong heterogeneity of the respective results. The method of meta-analysis is considered to be an effective statistical instrument that allows systematic evaluation of these inconsistent estimates. This method was applied to the dataset consisting of 985 empirical estimates from more than 70 primary studies. The publication selection bias was detected only in the case of using broad monetary aggregates. The resulting estimates adjusted for publication bias range from 0.784 for narrow monetary aggregates to 0.93 for the broadly defined money. In addition, meta- regression analysis revealed correlation...
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Income Elasticity of Gasoline Demand: A Meta-Analysis
Kokeš, Ondřej ; Havránek, Tomáš (advisor) ; Avdulaj, Krenar (referee)
In this thesis I summarize previous studies estimating income elasticity of gasoline demand, analyze the models employed, comment on the evolution of econometric tools used, and finally perform a meta-analysis. This thesis is the first survey on gasoline income elasticity that takes into account publication bias. It also distinguishes between models including car stock information in estimation. I estimate the underlying short-run elasticity to be 0.1, long-run with car stock 0.234, and long-run without car stock 0.644. These results, on average, point to less income-elastic demand for gasoline than what previous surveys found.
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The Role of Financial Development in Economic Growth: A Meta-Analysis
Valíčková, Petra ; Horváth, Roman (advisor) ; Havránek, Tomáš (referee)
This diploma thesis presents a meta-analysis of the accumulated empirical evidence on the relationship between financial development and economic growth. So far, hundreds of studies have been written on the role of financial systems in economic growth; however, their results are ambiguous. This is supported both by theory and empirical research. In order to shed some light on the underlying relationship, narrative literature surveys have been conducted. Nevertheless, the authors of these surveys select representative studies for inclusion subjectively and thus build their results on only a limited set of information. Moreover, due to the nature of their analyses, they cannot systematically assess which factors influence the heterogeneity in reported findings or whether the results are driven by the desire to produce only positive and statistically significant results. Thus, the main focus of our work lies in investigating what the role of financial development in economic growth is, adjusted for possible publication selection, and to systematically explain the heterogeneity behind reported results. For this analysis a pool of available studies investigating the underlying relationship was collected. More specifically, our analysis takes into account data from 67 empirical studies with 1334...
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Meta-Analysis in Economics: Application to Measuring the Euro's Trade Effect
Polák, Petr ; Havránek, Tomáš (advisor) ; Havránková, Zuzana (referee)
Meta-analysis is a very strong and effective tool designed for the synthesis of results of empirical research. It provides a possibility to make reliable conclusions and offers more systematic and unbiased view at empirical studies than do narrative reviews. This thesis begins with description of meta-analysis from the theoretical point of view and, therefore, is the first Czech-written methodology of modern meta-analysis suitable for economics. This part is followed by an applied meta-analysis that investigates the euro effect on common trade exchange, and the analysis is focused on publication bias and the use of the multilevel random effects model. The empirical part is based on 2580 estimates gathered from 33 studies that investigate the relationship between euro and trade volume. The meta-analysis reveals the presence of publication bias, confirms the economic research cycle hypothesis and estimates, according to the available literature, that the true Rose effect lies probably between 2 and 6 percent.
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Creation and evaluation of information resources in medicine
Janda, Aleš ; Kasal, Pavel (advisor) ; Hendl, Jan (referee) ; Mihál, Vladimír (referee) ; Sumerauer, David (referee)
A field covering generation and evaluation of the medical information is a broad one. During my doctoral studies I focused on medical information mainly using the evidence-based medicine (EBM) principles. This approach leads to the use of currently best available medical data in the treatment of patients. The EBM methodology might be classified into two basic groups: afferent and efferent one. The afferent part is focused on development of information resources whereas the efferent one promotes optimal use of these resources and a critical application of the retrieved facts. Due to practical reasons (to limit extent of the text) I concentrated in the thesis on only one field of my activity. The text deals mainly with afferent part of EBM, namely with formation of a qualitative and quantitative synthesis of knowledge through compilation of a systematic review and meta-analysis. Compilation of systematic reviews of prognostic markers is discussed in a detail. It is a field not appropriately covered in the Czech literature. The practical outcome documented in the thesis is a description of the systematic review of immunohistochemical prognostic markers in intracranial ependymomas that was created and published by our research team. Compilation of this systematic review and meta-analysis was one of the...
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