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The influence of legally owned firearms on crime in the Czech Republic.
Převrátil, David ; Stroukal, Dominik (advisor) ; Brožová, Dagmar (referee)
The work aims to analyze the influence of the number of legally owned firearms on crime in the Czech Republic. The main hypothesis is chosen on the basis of previous empirical research from the United States. The work assumes that the effect of the number of legally owned firearms held by civilians has a negative impact on the overall crime rate in the Czech Republic. The hypothesis is tested by using the metodology of regression analysis of time series for the whole country between the years 2003 - 2013 and regression analysis of panel data for 14 regions in the Czech Republic between the years 2009 - 2013. Based on the obtained data six models observing the effect of the number of firearms and the number of firearm license owners to overall crime, murder and burglary and theft. The result is the finding of a positive impact on the number of legal guns in overall crime in the country. Unfortunately, the observed variable of legally owned firearms is statistically insignificant in all models. The work opens up new possibilities for further study of the influence of firearms on crime in the Czech Republic.
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Ekonomie rodiny: Vliv znečištěného ovzduší na pohlaví dětí
Pažitka, Marek ; Stroukal, Dominik (advisor) ; Nikolovová, Pavla (referee)
The Trivers-Willard hypothesis (TWH) states that parents in good conditions will bias the sex ratio toward sons and parents in poor conditions will bias the sex ratio toward daughters. The present study contributes to literature in several ways: a large, general, country population data set (N= 1 401 851) from modern contemporary society; first study in the Czech Republic; an inclusion of air pollution into the TWH estimation; and a more detailed focus on stillbirths. With the natality microdata from the Czech Statistical Office and data concerning the level of air pollution in the Czech Republic from the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute, I analyze if the biological and socio-economics status of mothers and the characteristics of our surroundings (air pollution) affect the sex of children. The results are insignificant or not robust across specifications. I identified three hypotheses which are most likely the reason for the insignificant results: a non-inclusion of the biological and socio-economical status of a father, insufficient diversity or evolutionarily novel environment in the Czech Republic. As a conclusion, the presented evidence suggests that stillbirths are random in the Czech Republic and that the sex ratio is not affected by the socio-economics status of mothers or the characteristics of our surroundings (pollution).
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Impact of income inequality on quality of tertiary education: Should professors from Cambridge thank to Robin Hood?
Jedlička, Roman ; Stroukal, Dominik (advisor) ; Nikolovová, Pavla (referee)
Many factors influence quality of higher education. Current research mostly works with economic factors (GDP, higher education expenditures etc.). However, there are also publications that examine an impact of sociological aspects on quality of higher education. My research examined the impact of income inequality on quality of tertiary education. In the analysis of socioeconomic data of 76 countries I have proven that there is no linear relationship between income inequality and quality of tertiary education. According to my results the size of population, GDP per capita and being English speaking country are main drivers of quality of tertiary education. Modified model without outliers also shows that there is a positive effect of R&D expenditures on quality of tertiary education.
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Činí nás žárlivost druhých šťasnými?
Svatoš, Jiří ; Stroukal, Dominik (advisor) ; Špecián, Petr (referee)
The relative income is often cited as a reason why happiness of nations does not grow in time with growing GDP. The study replicates the methodology of several different researchers from basic scatterplots, standard OLS and ordered probit models to hierarchical linear multilevel models (HLM). The results provide evidence that the happiness is actually rising with the growing GDP, although slowly and with the GDP measured in logarithm. On the contrary, the relevance of relative income to happiness is ambiguous through all the proposed models. Furthermore, the individual characteristics like marital status or employment status are proved to explain the differences in happiness much better than income. Finally it is shown that income has similar effects on different measurements of subjective well-being (health, happiness and emotional well-being).
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The Impact of Information and Telecommunication Technologies on Growth in Czech republic
Vávra, Stanislav ; Stroukal, Dominik (advisor) ; Tříska, Dušan (referee)
Information and telecommunication technologies are always joint with economic growth in modern economies, because they participate on reduction of transaction costs and increase production factors productivity and competitiveness. Benefits from ICT had been obvious untill 2001, but right after the investmens and expenditure in ICT started to decrease rapidly. There are studies capturing this drop in developed economies, whereas there are not many works considering the situation in center and eastern Europe. This master thesis brings an analysis of impact of ICT capital and production factors productivity on gross value added by growth accounting methodology in Czech Republic between 1996-2007. It also provides econometric testing of the impact of investments in ICT equipment and software on gross value added in Czech Republic between 1993-2013 by fixed effects model. The output of the master thesis demonstrates the empirical evidence of significant negative impact year-by-year change investment in ICT equipment and software on a change of growth pace of gross value added.
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Problém pána a správce v teorii diskriminace
Froňková, Pavlína ; Stroukal, Dominik (advisor) ; Nikolovová, Pavla (referee)
Becker's discrimination theory predicted that the discrimination by employers on competitive markets should cease to exist. However, in past decades, it was shown that discrimination on the labour market is a prevalent phenomenon. In this thesis I analyse what is the impact of agency problem on the theory of discrimination. I show that when an agent (in the thesis called 'agent employer') is deciding whether to employ or not to employ a worker, his motivation is different compared to principal's. The outcome of the analysis is such that under certain assumptions, the agent employer with non-zero taste for discrimination will always choose to discriminate.
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The Effect of Parenthood on Wages in the Czech Republic
Žofková, Martina ; Stroukal, Dominik (advisor) ; Tříska, Dušan (referee)
Using cross-sectional and longitudinal data from EU-SILC for the Czech Republic this thesis shows that mothers suffer wage penalty, whereas fathers gain wage premium. These results are in accordance with literature abroad. This thesis also shows that parenthood has greater impact on individuals with higher education, that motherhood penalty is lower for single mothers, whereas fatherhood premium is higher for single fathers, and that there is stronger self-selection of mothers into specific jobs than in case of fathers. Model of fixed effects suggests that parenthood is connected with unobservable characteristics that have positive effect on parent's wages. Results of this thesis are in accordance with human capital theory, division of labor within the household, self-selection of mothers into more mother-friendly jobs. But results concerning lower work effort of mothers are inconclusive.
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"The Bestseller Effect": Stávají se z úspěšných knih kasovní trháky kin?
Smyčková, Renée ; Stroukal, Dominik (advisor) ; Špecián, Petr (referee)
The thesis investigates a connection between the publishing industry and the film industry. It analyses whether films based on best-selling books have higher revenues and return on investment compared to films based on unsuccessful books or original scripts. Data for years 2009 -- 2015, focusing on the U.S. entertainment industry, show that film adaptations of best-selling books reach higher revenues during their opening weekend of the theatrical release. The Bestseller Effect weakens once the information about film's quality becomes available to the audience. The success of a book plays negligible role in film's returns on investment. The results of analysis also show great positive significant impact of the production budget, the star cast, films quality and sequels on the films'financial performance.
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Influence of domestic and foreign economic events on viewership of TV news in Czech republic
Procházka, Jan ; Stroukal, Dominik (advisor) ; Tříska, Dušan (referee)
This work represents the research of television audience of news programs in Czech Republic during the years 2008 to 2013 in order to capture the possible preference for specific viewers areas of economic events, or information. For the needs of econometric time-series analysis is assembled basic model, which is individually applied to a total of five time series of news programs. Econometric estimates suggest that key events increasing viewership of Czech news programs are riots and demonstrations in the territory of Czech Republic, with a positive effect on the ratings of up to 4.1%, or home catastrophic events that increase viewership up by 4.6%. The world macroeconomic events showed the negative effect of up to 2.4% for viewership of television news.
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And the winner is... The presence of political slant in the movie production
Selep, Ján ; Stroukal, Dominik (advisor) ; Dušek, Libor (referee)
I study movie studio profit maximization based on an optimization of a political language in the dialogues. I explore the flexibility with which a rational firm slants language of its movies in order to get closer either to a Democratic or a Republican customer. Using computational linguistics I construct vectors of phrase frequency distribution based on a text of almost a decade of U.S. Congress transcripts and 457 randomly chosen movie subtitles. In order to measure distance between the phrase vectors I use chi square statistics and its Monte Carlo approximation. I find no evidence of political slant in movies neither in a movie studio comparison nor for a time-varying comparison of movies in different years. In addition I construct a slant index covering level of political language in a movie. Using the index I find no evidence of impact of political language on movie revenues.
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