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Microeconomic Analysis for Evidence-Based Policy
Janský, Petr ; Bauer, Michal (advisor) ; Blundell, Richard (referee) ; Galuščák, Kamil (referee) ; Schneider, Ondřej (referee)
This dissertation thesis is focused on the microeconomic analysis of public policy in the Czech Republic. It consists of three parts, the first two parts deal with the analysis of tax policy; the third part of this thesis is focused on inflation differentials. The first chapter deals with the analysis of value added tax. The rates of value added tax (VAT) have recently changed in the Czech Republic, and I simulate the impact of these reforms. They are an example of changes in indirect taxes that change the prices of goods and services, to which households can respond by adjusting their expenditures. I first estimate the behavioural response of consumers to price changes in the Czech Republic by applying a consumer demand model of the quadratic almost ideal system (QUAIDS) on the basis of the Czech Statistical Office household expenditure and price data for the period from 2001 to 2011. I derive estimates of own- and cross-price and income elasticities for individual households. I then use these elasticities to estimate the impact of the changes in VAT rates that were proposed or implemented between 2011 and 2013, on households' quantity demanded and government revenues. One of the main findings is that the estimated increases in government revenues that take the consumer responses into account are...
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Effect of education on health: The Czech Republic case
Pažitka, Marek ; Chytilová, Julie (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
Previous research has uncovered a large, positive and causal link between education and health. This paper is devoted to examining the topic in the former Czechoslovakia. My analysis is conducted on a data set pooled from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). I utilize a continuum of ages at school entry, caused by the use of a single school cut-off, to identify the effect of education on health, which is uniquely created from the PCA method and using 30 questions of the SHARE. Therefore, I apply instrumental variable approach with a month of birth as an instrument for education. The results from the first-stage suggest that the instrument is not valid, since a correlation between the instrumental (Month of birth) and the instrumented variable (education) is very low and insignificant. The results remain insignificant even after adjusting for different measures of education, health, institutional changes or heterogeneous effects. As the most probable cause, I state the inability to control for non-compliers in my instrumental variable regressions. As a consequence, all the results regarding the link between education and health are inconclusive. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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Time Preferences of Ghanaian Cocoa Farmers
Sobková, Eva ; Janský, Petr (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
Agricultural technology adoption in developing countries is an interesting topic for two reasons: there is often a gap between the realized and potential hectare yields, and agriculture is an important source of livelihood for a signi_cant part of the third world population. This thesis is attempting to analyze the relationships between time preferences of the Ghanaian cocoa farmers and their willingness to use fertilizers provided on a microcredit basis. It is using mainly basic statistical tests, contingent tables analysis and the logistic regression to find out whether the farmers who are patient and time consistent have different approach to technology adoption than the impatient and time inconsistent farmers. We also test for differences in time preferences between farmers with different gender, age and education, and we find that the younger farmers tend to be more impatient. The main conclusion of this work is that impatient and hyperbolic farmers are more likely to enter a microcredit program. We cannot present any significant inference about the link between the farmers' time preferences and their decision to leave a microcredit program. JEL Classification C12, C14, D9, G2, O13, Q14 Keywords Technology adoption, time preferences, mirco- credit, developing economics, cocoa cultivation...
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The Effect of Military Campaigns on Political Identitity: Evidence from Sherman's March
Kosík, Martin ; Korovkin, Vasily (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
I use the military march of Union general William Sherman during the American Civil War to estimate the effects of wartime violence and destruction on post-war voting behavior and personal identity. First, I examine how the march influenced the support for the Democrats throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Second, to proxy for the strength of Southern identity, I construct several variables from both historical and contemporary sources. These variables include the share of individuals likely named after famous Confederate generals, the relative frequency of streets likely named after Confederate figures, and the presence of Confederate monuments. The results show mostly small and statistically insignificant effects of the march on Democratic vote share. For some outcomes proxying for Southern identity, I find a significant positive effect; however, these results are not robust across different model specifications. Overall, the results suggest that Sherman's march did not have a transformative impact on the politics and personal identity in the US South. vii
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Shifting punishment on minorities: experimental evidence of scapegoating
Bauer, Michal ; Cahlíková, J. ; Chytilová, Julie ; Roland, G. ; Želinský, T.
This paper provides experimental evidence showing that members of a majority group systematically shift punishment on innocent members of an ethnic minority. We develop a new incentivized task, the Punishing the Scapegoat Game, to measure how injustice affecting a member of one’s own group shapes punishment of an unrelated bystander (“a scapegoat”). We manipulate the ethnic identity of the scapegoats and study interactions between the majority group and the Roma minority in Slovakia. We find that when no harm is done, there is no evidence of discrimination against the ethnic minority. In contrast, when a member of one’s own group is harmed, the punishment ”passed” on innocent individuals more than doubles when they are from the minority, as compared to when they are from the dominant group. These results illuminate how individualized tensions can be transformed into a group conflict, dragging minorities into conflicts in a way that is completely unrelated to their behavior.
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How Parental Involvement Affects Education Outcomes of Their Children
Kantová, Klára ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
Spending time together is more than important for family's well-being, espe- cially in the fast pace of modern days. This Master's thesis presents a research of the relationship between parental involvement in children's lives and their educational outcome. Additionally, it explores the impact of limit breaking by youths on their educational attainment. The educational outcome is repre- sented by a binary variable denoting whether the respondent completed high school or not. The results mostly meet our expectations. The hypotheses of the positive effect on child's educational outcome with higher parental involvement and negative effect with presence of limit breaking are supported by the re- sults. What is surprising are the signs of the results from the regressions using the limit setting variables. The results suggest that the expected probability of completing high school decreases with higher parental limit setting. To es- timate causal treatment effects, we used a subclassification on the propensity score and a simple logistic regression. JEL Classification I21, J12, J13 Keywords education, children, family, parental involve- ment Title How Parental Involvement Affects Education Outcomes of Their Children
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Chapters of the creative literary culture
Šámal, Petr ; Holý, Jiří (advisor) ; Bílek, Petr (referee) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
The thesis does not include an abstract in English The thesis does not include an abstract in English The thesis does not include an abstract in English The thesis does not include an abstract in English The thesis does not include an abstract in English The thesis does not include an abstract in English
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Using survey questions to measure preferences: lessons from an experimental validation in Kenya
Bauer, Michal ; Chytilová, Julie ; Miguel, E.
Can a short survey instrument reliably measure a range of fundamental economic preferences across diverse settings? We focus on survey questions that systematically predict behavior in incentivized experimental tasks among German university students (Becker et al. 2016) and were implemented among representative samples across the globe (Falk et al. 2018). This paper presents results of an experimental validation conducted among low-income individuals in Nairobi, Kenya. We find that quantitative survey measures -- hypothetical versions of experimental tasks -- of time preference, attitude to risk and altruism are good predictors of choices in incentivized experiments, suggesting these measures are broadly experimentally valid. At the same time, we find that qualitative questions -- self-assessments -- do not correlate with the experimental measures of preferences in the Kenyan sample. Thus, caution is needed before treating self-assessments as proxies of preferences in new contexts.\n
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Investigation of cross-country differences in student performance in standardized tests: the role of modern and traditional teaching methods
Ptáčníková, Marie ; Pertold-Gebicka, Barbara (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
There is an ongoing debate about what teaching practices are the most effective ones in order to improve student performance. However, little is known about the impact across countries and literature is highly inconclusive. In this work, we extend the portfolio of countries and provide evidence about the role of modern and traditional teaching practices on students' test scores in 43 countries. Our analysis is performed in two steps and is a typical example of hierarchical linear modelling (HLM). In the first step, we perform student fixed effect method to account for majority of selection issues. We identify a positive, negative or no effect of modern or traditional teaching methods on student performance. These results are priceless for policy makers suggesting that there is no one-fits-all-approach towards modern or traditional teaching methods to order to improve students' test scores. As a great variation is observed, we continue further and investigate what country characteristics could explain these differences across countries. Bayesian model averaging (BMA) method supports us in a model uncertainty and a particular variable selection. Our findings indicate that cultural dimension uncertainty avoidance, which describes country's rigidity in behaviour and institutions, assists in explaining...
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