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The American Foreign Policy with the Middle East : from the earliest days to the Obama’s mandate
Petraud, Jean-Félix ; Eichler, Jan (advisor) ; Dubský, Zbyněk (referee)
The following dissertation is an attempt of analysis and understanding of the foreign policy of the United States in the Middle East region and its evolution through time. Considering the fact that the Middle East region is or at least used to be a vital region for the United States national interests, the dissertation presents an exhaustive list of major events that have been major shifts in the US foreign policy in the region. The more or less chronological timeline allows the reader to have a better understanding of the evolution of the US foreign policy. The result of the dissertation is the identification of different patterns of foreign policy and to put the spot on the reasons of the changes of these patterns. Nevertheless, the history of the Middle East region and the incredible number of major events through the 2Oth century and the early 21st century make impossible to deal with all of them. Moreover, analysis and comments are based on academic research, but the dissertation remains subjective and may lead to discussions and debates.
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Employer branding in Building Industry
Hralová, Lenka ; Bušina, Filip (advisor) ; Havlíček, Karel (referee)
The Master's Thesis is focused on a modern trend in human resource management, employer branding, analysed as a general image of a company as employer, its working conditions and a preference of this company as a stable employer. The main goal is to review the range and relevance of employer branding within Czech building industry based on existing company and comparison with its competition. The first part describes theoretical definitions of employer branding and its instruments. The second part presents the empirical research done in Metrostav a.s., comparison with its competition and a questionnaire between civil engineering students and construction apprentices that was focused on their expectations of future employment in the building industry. In the end of the thesis the research is evaluated and the improvements that would lead to empowerment of employer brand are suggested.
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Clustering and regression analysis of micro panel data
Sobíšek, Lukáš ; Pecáková, Iva (advisor) ; Komárek, Arnošt (referee) ; Brabec, Marek (referee)
The main purpose of panel studies is to analyze changes in values of studied variables over time. In micro panel research, a large number of elements are periodically observed within the relatively short time period of just a few years. Moreover, the number of repeated measurements is small. This dissertation deals with contemporary approaches to the regression and the clustering analysis of micro panel data. One of the approaches to the micro panel analysis is to use multivariate statistical models originally designed for crosssectional data and modify them in order to take into account the within-subject correlation. The thesis summarizes available tools for the regression analysis of micro panel data. The known and currently used linear mixed effects models for a normally distributed dependent variable are recapitulated. Besides that, new approaches for analysis of a response variable with other than normal distribution are presented. These approaches include the generalized marginal linear model, the generalized linear mixed effects model and the Bayesian modelling approach. In addition to describing the aforementioned models, the paper also includes a brief overview of their implementation in the R software. The difficulty with the regression models adjusted for micro panel data is the ambiguity of their parameters estimation. This thesis proposes a way to improve the estimations through the cluster analysis. For this reason, the thesis also contains a description of methods of the cluster analysis of micro panel data. Because supply of the methods is limited, the main goal of this paper is to devise its own two-step approach for clustering micro panel data. In the first step, the panel data are transformed into a static form using a set of proposed characteristics of dynamics. These characteristics represent different features of time course of the observed variables. In the second step, the elements are clustered by conventional spatial clustering techniques (agglomerative clustering and the C-means partitioning). The clustering is based on a dissimilarity matrix of the values of clustering variables calculated in the first step. Another goal of this paper is to find out whether the suggested procedure leads to an improvement in quality of the regression models for this type of data. By means of a simulation study, the procedure drafted herein is compared to the procedure applied in the kml package of the R software, as well as to the clustering characteristics proposed by Urso (2004). The simulation study demonstrated better results of the proposed combination of clustering variables as compared to the other combinations currently used. A corresponding script written in the R-language represents another benefit of this paper. It is available on the attached CD and it can be used for analyses of readers own micro panel data.
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Míry podobnosti pro nominální data v hierarchickém shlukování
Šulc, Zdeněk ; Řezanková, Hana (advisor) ; Šimůnek, Milan (referee) ; Žambochová, Marta (referee)
This dissertation thesis deals with similarity measures for nominal data in hierarchical clustering, which can cope with variables with more than two categories, and which aspire to replace the simple matching approach standardly used in this area. These similarity measures take into account additional characteristics of a dataset, such as frequency distribution of categories or number of categories of a given variable. The thesis recognizes three main aims. The first one is an examination and clustering performance evaluation of selected similarity measures for nominal data in hierarchical clustering of objects and variables. To achieve this goal, four experiments dealing both with the object and variable clustering were performed. They examine the clustering quality of the examined similarity measures for nominal data in comparison with the commonly used similarity measures using a binary transformation, and moreover, with several alternative methods for nominal data clustering. The comparison and evaluation are performed on real and generated datasets. Outputs of these experiments lead to knowledge, which similarity measures can generally be used, which ones perform well in a particular situation, and which ones are not recommended to use for an object or variable clustering. The second aim is to propose a theory-based similarity measure, evaluate its properties, and compare it with the other examined similarity measures. Based on this aim, two novel similarity measures, Variable Entropy and Variable Mutability are proposed; especially, the former one performs very well in datasets with a lower number of variables. The third aim of this thesis is to provide a convenient software implementation based on the examined similarity measures for nominal data, which covers the whole clustering process from a computation of a proximity matrix to evaluation of resulting clusters. This goal was also achieved by creating the nomclust package for the software R, which covers this issue, and which is freely available.
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Use of Interest Rate Models for Interest Rate Risk Management in the Czech Financial Market Environment
Cíchová Králová, Dana ; Arlt, Josef (advisor) ; Cipra, Tomáš (referee) ; Witzany, Jiří (referee)
The main goal of this thesis is to suggest an appropriate approach to interest rate risk modeling in the Czech financial market environment in various situations. Three distinct periods are analyzed. These periods, which are the period before the global financial crisis, period during the financial crisis and in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and calming subsequent debt crisis in the eurozone, are characterized by different evaluation of liquidity and credit risk, different relationship between financial variables and market participants and different degree of market regulations. Within this goal, an application of the BGM model in the Czech financial market environment is crucial. Use of the BGM model for the purpose of predicting a dynamics of a yield curve is not very common. This is firstly due to the fact that primary use of this model is a valuation of interest rate derivatives while ensuring the absence of arbitrage and secondly its application is relatively difficult. Nevertheless, I apply the BGM model to obtain predictions of the probability distributions of interest rates in the Czech and eurozone market environment, because its complexity, direct modeling of a yield curve based on market rates and especially a possibility of parameter estimation based on current swaptions volatilities quotations may lead to a significant improvement of predictions. This improvement was also confirmed in this thesis. Use of swaptions volatilities market quotations is especially useful in the period of unprecedented mone- tary easing and increased number of central banks and other regulators interventions into financial markets that occur after the financial crisis, because it reflects current market expectations which also include future interventions. As a consequence of underdevelopment of the Czech financial market there are no market quotations of Czech koruna denominated swaptions volatilities. I suggest their approximations based on quotations of euro denominated swaptions volatilities and also using volatilities of koruna and euro forward rates. Use of this approach ensures that predictions of the Czech yield curve dynamics contain current market expectations. To my knowledge, any other author has not presented similar application of the BGM model in the Czech financial market environment. In this thesis I further predict a Czech and Euro area money market yield curve dynamics using the CIR and the GP models as representatives of various types of interest rates models to compare these predictions with BGM predictions. I suggest a comprehensive system of three criteria, based on comparison of predicti- ons with reality, to describe a predictive power of selected models and an appropria- teness of their use in the Czech market environment during different situations in the market. This analysis shows that predictions of the Czech money market yield curve dynamics based on the BGM model demonstrate high predictive power and the best 8 quality in comparison with other models. GP model also produces relatively good qua- lity predictions. Conversely, predictions based on the CIR model as a representative of short rate model family completely failed when describing reality. In a situation when the economy allows negative rates and there is simultaneously a significant likelihood of their implementation, I recommend to obtain predictions of Czech money market yield curve dynamics using GP model which allows existence of negative interest rates. This analysis also contains a statistical test for validating the predictive power of each model and information on other tests. Berkowitz test rejects a hypothesis of accurate predictions for each model. However, this fact is common in real data testing even when using relatively good model. This fact is especially caused by difficult fulfilment of test conditions in real world. To my knowledge, such an analysis of the predictive power of selected interest rate models moreover in the Czech financial market environment has not been published yet. The last goal of this thesis is to suggest an appropriate approach to obtaining pre- dictions of Czech government bonds risk premium dynamics. I define this risk premium as a difference between government bond yields and fixed rate of CZK IRS with the same length. I apply the GP model to describe the dynamics of this indicator of the Czech Republic credit risk. In order to obtain a time series of the risk premium which are necessary for estimation of GP model parameters I firstly estimate yield curves of Czech government bonds using Svensson model for each trading day since 2005. Resulting si- mulations of risk premium show that the GP model predicts the real development of risk premiums of all maturities relatively well. Hence, the proposed approach is suitable for modeling of Czech Republic credit risk based on the use of information extracted from financial markets. I have not registered proposed approach to risk premium modeling moreover in the Czech financial market environment in other publications.
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Analysis of Financing Research and Development in the Czech Republic
Vacek, Jan ; Hnilica, Jiří (advisor) ; Sieber, Patrik (referee)
The topic of this bachelor Thesis is an Analysis of Financing Research and Development in the Czech Republic. Research and Development (R&D) plays an important role in improving the competitive ability of the Czech Republic, for it constitutes a source for increasing productivity, economic growth and employment. The results of R&D lead to creation of new products and services, which in return increases the quality of life of the Czech citizens. This bachelor thesis focuses on analysis of financing R&D in the Czech Republic. The objective is to find out who finances R&D in the Czech Republic, where do these funds go to, and what they are used on. This thesis also focuses on R&D employees and R&D departments in which they work. The bachelor thesis is concluded by comparison between the R&D data for Czech Republic and other countries form the Europian Union.
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Improving logistics operations in the warehouse of Stroj Servis Plus
Feklistov, Maxim ; Vinš, Marek (advisor) ; Mervart, Michal (referee)
This bachelor thesis is focusing on the logistic operations in the warehouse of a particular organization. The objective of the thesis is to analyze logistics operations in the warehouse of Stroj Servis Plus and propose certain measures, based on selected methods, which might lead to improvement in the efficiency of the current logistics operations. This bachelor thesis is divided into two parts. In first part, theoretical part, is describing the basic theoretical concepts and principles, connected with the main field of the interest. The second part, practical part, begins with the introduction of the company Stroj Servis Plus and analyzing of the logistics operations in the warehouse. Based on the facts, discovered in the intercompany documents, own practice in the firm and theoretical knowledge propose solutions that would eliminate any disadvantages and improve logistics operations in warehouse of the selected company.
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Výběr a implementace open source nástroje pro řízení portfolia projektů
Marek, Jan ; Chlapek, Dušan (advisor) ; Kučera, Jan (referee)
Methods and ways of implementation of changes and innovations in companies through project management are in today's society very well established. There exists methodologies, techniques and tools for the management of individual projects. However in a role of project manager, I very often faced the fact that companies are performing the project portfolio management in very intuitive way. This in itself leads to failed and prematurely terminated projects, initiation of the wrong projects or realisation of correct projects, but at the wrong time. Very often I have also recognized, that there is lack of awareness of fact, that there are also Open Source applications that can help with the organization's portfolio. This thesis deals with the definition of requirements, search and selection of proper OSS application and subsequent implementation. In the first part of this thesis I prepare a theoretical framework about PPM, and on that basis then identify and verify a set of requirements for selection of right OSS PPM application. The next section of thesis describes searching for suitable applications from a variety of sources, assessment against the requirements and the final selection. In the last part the implementation project is drafted, which aims to serve other colleagues in project management as one of the possible implementation paths. The outputs are then continuously confronted with experts in matter of projects and project management in the field of IT in order to maximize symbiosis between theory and real life experiences. Virtually every project management methodology defines the collection of already-proven techniques, best practices or lessons learned from the previous similar implementations. The main contribution of this thesis I see in fact that it contains not only the design of the project implementation, but also describes a logical path, what leads to the result. Therefore this thesis could be used as a base or discussed best practice, when a project of implementation of PPM application in place.
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Association of Idependent Theatres of the Czech Republic – Analysis and Description of the Current State
Bodoríková, Markéta ; KAŠPAR, David (advisor) ; PROKOP, Petr (referee)
The thesis is focused on newly established Association of Independent Theaters of the Czech Republic, officially using the abbreviation AND ČR. The aim of the thesis is to describe formation of the association, its current state, future plans and its functioning. The first part examines the term “independent professional theater” and briefly characterizes selected organizations from the Czech Republic and Europe with the potential to meet with the AND ČR in the cultural area in future. In the following parts were researched needs of independent professional scene in Prague and was described the needs analysis for the field of “independent” theater from the year 2013. The thesis describes the development of AND ČR, its activities up to current stage, organizational structure and future short-term plans. In the final part of the thesis, there is defined the management system of the association and established its possible improvements so the AND ČR would become the leading organization representing independent professional theaters in the Czech Republic.
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Interpretive principles in Verdi's operas
Beneš, Andrej ; HAJÓSSYOVÁ, Magdaléna (advisor) ; VOTAVOVÁ, Yvona (referee)
The master’s thesis deals with the theme creation of the opera production of Giuseppe Verdi with the focus on his opera Falstaff and deals with significant important interpretations of this opera. This dissertation is supposed to bring a complete picture of Verdi’s opera production pointing out some details which are not commonly known nor from the public nor in the professional music world. What appears in this work is Verdi’s correspondence (letters). I consider these letters an authentic source to understand Verdi’s creative and artistic intentions. Hereafter I portray an idea of how to perceive opera Falstaff not only from my point of view but I used the lead from the Italian reviews and musicology.
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