|
|
IMF Quota Formula
Habalová, Veronika ; Parízek, Michal (advisor) ; Kučerová, Irah (referee)
The IMF has been facing criticism in recent years. Its legitimacy has been undermined as some members, despite their economic performance, are still underrepresented in IMF's decision making and its activities leave mixed evidence about their success. Being a crucial condition for institution's existence, legitimacy of the Fund's governance needs to be restored. This thesis tries to find such specification of formula, which would make allocation of votes more credible and fair. Based on the assumption that perception of the Fund's legitimacy would improve if developing countries were better represented and allocation of votes could not be subject to manipulation, a new procedure of vote allocation is designed. New formulas include population as one of the variables as a solution of the emerging powers' insufficient involvement. Using principal components analysis allows automatic assignment of weights, which results in more objective mechanism of votes allocation. As there is a significant discrepancy between voting weights and actual voting power measured by Banzhaf index, also formulas incorporating power indices are investigated. Based on quantitative and qualitative criteria, these four different mechanisms are assessed. Thesis concludes that any of these formulas would be an improvement in comparison...
|
|
|
Price Determinants of Art Photography at Auctions
Habalová, Veronika ; Šopov, Boril (advisor) ; Bauer, Michal (referee)
In the recent years, prices of art have repeatedly broken records, and the interest in investing in fine art photography has been growing. Although there is plenty of research dedicated to studying prices of paintings, fine art photography has been largely overlooked. This thesis aims to shed light on identifying price determinants for this particular medium. A new data set is collected from sold lot archives of Sotheby's and Phillips auction houses, which also provide images of some of the sold items. These images are then used to create new variables describing visual attributes of the artworks. In order to inspect the effect of color-related predictors on price, four different methods are discussed. Color is found to be significant in OLS model, but the effect diminishes when model averaging is applied. Machine learning al- gorithms - regression trees and random forests - suggest that the importance of color is relatively low. The thesis also shows that expert estimates can improved by incorporating available information and using random forests for prediction. The fact that the expert estimates are not very accurate sug- gest that they either do not use all the available information or they do not process it efficiently. 1
|
|
|
IMF Quota Formula
Habalová, Veronika ; Parízek, Michal (advisor) ; Kučerová, Irah (referee)
The IMF has been facing criticism in recent years. Its legitimacy has been undermined as some members, despite their economic performance, are still underrepresented in IMF's decision making and its activities leave mixed evidence about their success. Being a crucial condition for institution's existence, legitimacy of the Fund's governance needs to be restored. This thesis tries to find such specification of formula, which would make allocation of votes more credible and fair. Based on the assumption that perception of the Fund's legitimacy would improve if developing countries were better represented and allocation of votes could not be subject to manipulation, a new procedure of vote allocation is designed. New formulas include population as one of the variables as a solution of the emerging powers' insufficient involvement. Using principal components analysis allows automatic assignment of weights, which results in more objective mechanism of votes allocation. As there is a significant discrepancy between voting weights and actual voting power measured by Banzhaf index, also formulas incorporating power indices are investigated. Based on quantitative and qualitative criteria, these four different mechanisms are assessed. Thesis concludes that any of these formulas would be an improvement in comparison...
|
guest ::
