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Essays on Individual Perceptions of Economic Reforms
Popova, Olga ; Lízal, Lubomír (advisor) ; Filer, Randall (referee) ; Kahanec, Martin (referee)
Happiness economics is a relatively new field that has attracted the attention of researchers from many areas. Happiness economics explores the relationships between different aspects of individual life such as socioeconomic characteristics, attitudes, beliefs and individual well-being. In this field, life satisfaction is frequently used as an indicator of the level of individual well-being. Although subjective data can provide meaningful information regarding different aspects of individual life, their usefulness for policy purposes is still undervalued. In this dissertation, several issues are addressed. First, the impact of two corruption measures, state capture and individual perceptions of corruption, on voters' behavior and on the outcomes of elections is examined. Second, the effects of economic reforms on life satisfaction of religious and non-religious people are analyzed. Third, the impact of the euro introduction on life satisfaction is evaluated. The first chapter examines to what extent voting behavior of people with different employment status and the distribution of votes are affected by regional differences in corruption. Using data from the Russian Parliamentary (State Duma) Elections of 1999 and 2003, I develop and estimate a SUR system of equations which takes into account...
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Essays in Applied Microeconomics: School Admission Mechanisms and Corporate Bankrupcy
Knot, Ondřej ; Roland, Gérard (advisor) ; Švejnar, Jan (referee) ; Filer, Randall (referee)
In my dissertation, I address two topics in applied microeconomics. First two chapters deal with the functioning of school admission mechanisms and their affects on student school choice behavior. Third chapter deals with the question of optimal bankruptcy law design. Pupil-school matching mechanisms play a critical role in the schooling system. They affect the behavior of students and-through the information they convey-also the behavior of the schools and the authorities responsible for education policy. In the first chapter (joint with Daniel Münich), using a computational simulation model, we analyze the functioning of an admission scheme used in the Czech Republic as a prototype of decentralized, ability-based admission schemes widely used in the world to assign pupils to upper-secondary schools. Our findings show large incidence of strategic misrepresentation of school preferences among applicants, large differences between revealed and trued demand, and large incidence of justified envy in the resulting matching. We point out several implication this could have for functioning of schooling systems. In the second chapter, I empirically study the behavior of students under the Czech pupil-school matching mechanism. Using district-level data on demand for public gymnasia, I find significant evidence...
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Essays on the Globalization of Production and International Trade
Kovaříková Arro, Anu ; Roland, Gérard (advisor) ; Filer, Randall (referee) ; Deardorff, Alan (referee)
This dissertation consists of three essays on the globalization of production and international trade. In the economic literature, globalization has traditionally been represented by international trade, foreign direct investment and factor mobility, although more recently it has also come to relate to the fragmentation of production. Specifically, final good firms fragment their production such that they buy the intermediate products from outside producers, giving rise to horizontally specialized supply chains at separate stages of production.
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Essays in Finance and Monetary Policy: Evidence from Visegrad Countries
Borys, Magdalena ; Zemčík, Petr (advisor) ; Gilbert, Scott (referee) ; Filer, Randall (referee)
This dissertation consists of three empirical papers on the issues of monetary policy as well as finance in the group of four Visegrad countries, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. The first paper, entitled "Testing Multi-Factor Asset Pricing Models in the Visegrad Countries", attempts to point to a suitable asset-pricing model that could be used to estimate the cost of equity capital in the Visegrad countries. The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) that is most often used for this purpose in developed markets has a poor empirical record and is likely not to hold in less developed and less liquid emerging markets. Various factor models have been proposed to overcome the shortcomings of the CAPM. This paper examines both the CAPM and the macroeconomic factor models in terms of their ability to explain the average stock returns using the data from the Visegrad countries. We find, as expected, that the CAPM is not able to do this task. However, factor models, including factors such as: excess market return, industrial production, inflation, money, exchange rate, exports, commodity index, and term structure, can in fact explain part of the variance in the Visegrad countries' stock returns. A second paper, "Size and Value Effects in Visegrad Countries", is an extension of the previous...
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Essays on the Default of California Non-rated Land Secured B
Racheva, Anna ; Filer, Randall (advisor) ; Anderson, Ron (referee) ; Ranczyk, Joseph (referee)
This dissertation focuses on a specific area of local public finance, namely the non-rated land secured market in California as comprised primarily of the Community Facilities District (CFD) bonds. That market has become of growing importance but has not been widely studied until now. In this dissertation we analyze the performance and default experience of that market, examine its specific characteristics and determine the major factors contributing to the default of the non-rated CFD bonds. The results we present provide important new information for assessing the credit quality of the California non-rated land secured municipal bond market and should be beneficial for investors for the better understanding and analysis of that market.
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Essays on Stock Market Integration and on the Curse of Natural Resources
Černý, Alexandr ; Filer, Randall (advisor) ; Gylfason, Thorvaldur (referee) ; Podpiera, Richard (referee)
The thesis contains three essays, each of which calls into question generally accepted empirical results through the use of more appropriate data or econometric techniques. In the first essay using a unique dataset covering two years of high frequency data on the indices from markets in the U.S., London, Frankfurt, Paris, Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest I perform Cointegration and Granger causality tests with data of frequencies ranging from 5 minutes to 1 day. The aim is to describe the time structure in which markets react to the information revealed in prices on other markets. The results suggest that the speed of information transmission is very fast and that the use of daily data may be misleading when analyzing the issues of stock market integration and information transmission among markets. The other two essays focus on the curse of natural resources. In the second essay I test the robustness of the curse of natural resources with respect to various measures of the quality of democracy and regime stability. I also employ smoothed least trimmed squares, a robust estimation procedure, to estimate the curse. The often stressed robustness of the curse of natural resources is confirmed. The evidence presented indicates that the intensity of the curse depends on the level of civil liberties. In the...
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Three Essays on the Effect of Alternative Ownership Structures on Investment and Financial Constraints: An Empirical Investigation
Hobdari, Bersant ; Filer, Randall (advisor) ; Maksimovic, Vojislav (referee) ; Janda, Karel (referee)
Three Essays on the Effect of Alternative Ownership Structures on Investment and Financial Constraints: An Empirical Investigation This dissertation consists of three separate papers examining the relationship between investment, financial constraints and ownership structures. In the first paper new and rich panel data for a large and representative sample of firms are used to estimate the sensitivity of access to capital to differing ownership structures. The investment behaviour of firms is examined in a dynamic setting in the presence of adjustment costs, liquidity constraints and imperfect competition. The empirical work is based on the derivation of Euler equations in the presence of symmetric and quadratic adjustment costs and both debt and equity constraints. Whereas the norm is to use ad hoc approaches to model these constraints, our alternative and more consistent approach leads to the inclusion of financial variables in the investment equation in first differences rather than in levels. The GMM estimates confirm the importance of financial factors in determining investment rates and suggest that firms owned by insiders, especially non-managerial employees, are more prone to be liquidity constrained than are others. Among the other groups, somewhat surprisingly, only domestic outsider owned firms...
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