|
|
Consequences of liberalization of electricity market
Kalabiška, Roman ; Polák, Petr (advisor) ; Valíčková, Petra (referee)
This thesis examines the impacts of liberalization of electricity market. The first part of this work provides theoretical overview of the liberalization process and electricity market design in Czech Republic. To understand how the european wholesale markets are integrated, I have performed correlation analysis of daily spot prices on selected power exchanges. On the basic of this analysis I confirmed that selected power exchanges are on different levels of integration and have higher dependency on regional level. The second part of the empirical part is focused on the impact of competition on czech retail market. The objective was to show that liberalization and following increase of competition in electricity market result into decrease of retailers' gross profit margins in the segment of housholds with ordinary consumption. The last part of this work is focused on the measurement of market power using the most famous methods of measuring market power, such as Lerner index and Herfindahl-Hirschman index. My calculations indicate that while market concentration has decreased in the long run, since 2012 it is slightly increasing. I have also learned that selected retailers are on similar level of market power. This work fills the gap in literature focusing on the issue of measuring market power...
|
|
|
Willingness to pay for mobile internet in the Czech Republic
Doskočilová, Kateřina ; Polák, Petr (advisor) ; Luňáčková, Petra (referee)
Willingness to pay for mobile internet in the Czech Republic Abstract The main focus of this thesis is to examine consumers' willingness to pay for mobile internet in the Czech Republic. The data for the estimation were collected via a self-developed online questionnaire. Using the logit model, the factors, which significantly influences the WTP, were identified. These include: the ownership of a smartphone, perceived importance of availability of the internet connection, having a monthly mobile tariff and the way of using mobile applications. Additionally, the price, that the consumers' would be willing to pay for their ideal tariff, is examined and it is shown, that the level of education has a significant negative effect on this price.
|
|
|
Analysis of meat demand in the Czech Republic
Dlasková, Karolína ; Ščasný, Milan (advisor) ; Polák, Petr (referee)
Meat and meat products form the highest share of Czech household expenditures for food. This thesis offers a complex view on the Czech meat market and studies in detail the determinants of meat demand. A review of the most frequently used demand models is included, from which the least squares log-log model is used for empirical analysis. The core of this thesis is the estimation of price and income elasticities of demand for various types of meat based on statistical data of household accounts from the years 2000 - 2012. The estimates are, with the exception of the price elasticity for beef, which equals 0.13, consistent with previous studies. Within the examined period, households manifest unitary income elasticity and own price elasticity of demand for meat equal to -1.2. The temporal evolution of elasticities varies for different types of meat. Important socio-demographical aspects influencing the demand for meat, such as age, education, whether the household is led by a female, and others, are also analysed.
|
|
|
Unemployment in the Czech Republic and Job Search on the Internet
Zacha, Ondřej ; Polák, Petr (advisor) ; Macek, Petr (referee)
This thesis examines the relationship between Czech unemployment rate and job search related behavior of Internet users. The study uses a simple autoregressive model and augments it with search query data from two most popular Czech search engines, Google and Seznam as well as data on numbers of job vacancies and reactions to them from job search portal Jobs.cz. Our results show that data on number of job vacancies can moderately improve short-term forecasts ("nowcasts") of Czech unemployment rate in terms of RMSE and MAE, whereas search query data from Google and Seznam failed to improve predictive ability of the baseline model. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
|
|
|
Willingness to pay for online content in the Czech Republic
Vala, Michal ; Polák, Petr (advisor) ; Kvaček, Jan (referee)
This thesis studies consumers' willingness to pay for online content in the Czech Republic. The study focuses on the newspaper industry in the online environ- ment. Data analysed in the study come from a self-conducted online survey. Using the logit estimation method, following variables were identified to signifi- cantly affect the probability of having paying intentions-Gender, Occupation, Internet usage, News usage, Past online payment, and Past newspaper pay- ment. Moreover, under no free newspapers scenario, a monthly subscription of printed newspapers was assigned with an average value of CZK 96.7, which is almost double when compared to the average of CZK 50.7 that would con- sumers pay for a monthly access to the digital edition of newspapers. JEL Classification D10, D12, L86 Keywords WTP, online content, newspapers, Czech Re- public Author's e-mail mic.vala@gmail.com Supervisor's e-mail polakpet@gmail.com
|
|
|
Forecasting Term Structure of Crude Oil Markets Using Neural Networks
Malinská, Barbora ; Baruník, Jozef (advisor) ; Polák, Petr (referee)
This thesis enhances rare literature focusing on modeling and forecasting of term structure of crude oil markets. Using dynamic Nelson-Siegel model, crude oil term structure is decomposed to three latent factors, which are further forecasted using both parametric and dynamic neural network approaches. In-sample fit using Nelson-Siegel model brings encouraging results and proves its applicability on crude oil futures prices. Forecasts obtained by focused time-delay neural network are in general more accurate than other benchmark models. Moreover, forecast error is decreasing with increasing time to maturity.
|
|
|
Bitcoin: Pyramid-scheme Wildfire, New Online Payment Medium, or Future Alternative Currency?
Vozak, Hugo ; Dědek, Oldřich (advisor) ; Polák, Petr (referee)
This thesis explores the price determinants of Bitcoin using a macroeconomic model based on the economic equation of exchange presented by Joseph Wang (2014). The thesis provides a concise and structured introduction to Bitcoin and a comprehensive literature review on Bitcoin. The analysis begins with the application of the functions of money to Bitcoin, arguing that while Bitcoin does fulfill the three classical functions of money to a certain extent, its use remains mainly as a speculative instrument. Wang's model is criticized and amended to reflect the realities of empirically analyzing the Bitcoin market. Using the daily number of transactions and Bitcoin days destroyed as proxies for economic activity and inactivity - to measure Bitcoin's velocity on the block chain - vector autoregression modelling is used to determine if there is Granger causality between the price of bitcoin and the two proxies. The results demonstrate that there is a bidirectional Granger-causal relationship between Bitcoin days destroyed and the price of bitcoin and that there is none between the daily number of transactions and the price of bitcoin; proving Wang's two main assumptions. Impulse- response functions are provided to illustrate and discuss this bidirectional relationship. The results are in line with the...
|
|
|
Virtual currencies in real economy: Bitcoin
Šafka, Jiří ; Vacek, Pavel (advisor) ; Polák, Petr (referee)
This paper examines the relationship between virtual currency, the Bitcoin, and the real economy. In the first part the description of the term virtual currency is provided with special focus on Bitcoin. Also the legal and taxation issues are discussed. In the main part the volatility of Bitcoin is inspected using various models from Autoregressive heteroskedasticity models family. We found that the volatility of Bitcoin differs significantly through time and that this relation is captured best by T-GARCH (1,1) model. Finally the relationship between Bitcoin and real economy indicators is observed to be inconsistent and mostly insignificant in time. Thus we conclude that the independency of Bitcoin cannot be rejected. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
Transaction costs of public procurement related to software solutions
Májková, Tereza ; Soudek, Jan (advisor) ; Polák, Petr (referee)
Even though public procurement processes are strictly controlled and they have to follow the legal framework, there are still many decisions the contracting authority has to make. It has to choose the method of preparation (whether to use the external help or not), the type of procurement procedure, the method of evaluation of the bids and the evaluation criteria. Those partial decisions have a big impact on the transaction costs of the procurement process. The transaction costs also depend on the complexity and the time and labor consumption of the procurement process. In this thesis we chose companies inquiring software solutions from the public sector and we compared their preferences, transaction costs and time-consumption of their procurement. We divided the respondents in three different groups to ministries, cities and indirectly controlled institutions (including universities and medical units). According to our analysis the most difficult and the most time-consuming procurement processes take place at ministries, the least time-consuming ones at cities. Also the analysis suggests that the institutions are waiving the external administration and they use the help of the external consultants and the legal advisory more. We find that the price most frequently used evaluation criterion in the...
|
guest ::
RSS feed.