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Social networks and surviving the Holocaust
Bělín, M. ; Jelínek, T. ; Jurajda, Štěpán
Survivor testimonies link survival in deadly POW camps, Gulags, and Nazi concentration camps to the formation of close friendships with other prisoners. We provide statistical evidence consistent with these fundamentally selective testimonies. We study the survival of the 140 thousand Jews who entered the Theresienstadt ghetto, where 33 thousand died and from where over 80 thousand were sent to extermination camps. We ask whether an individual’s social status prior to deportation, and the availability of potential friends among fellow prisoners influenced the risk of death in Theresienstadt, the ability to avoid transports to the camps, and the chances of surviving Auschwitz. Pre-deportation social status protected prisoners in the self-administered society of the Theresienstadt ghetto, but it was no longer helpful in the extreme conditions of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Relying on multiple proxies of pre-existing social networks, we uncover a significant survival advantage to entering Auschwitz with a group of potential friends.
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Forced migration, staying minorities, and new societies: evidence from post-war Czechoslovakia
Grossmann, Jakub ; Jurajda, Štěpán ; Roesel, F.
Forced migration traumatizes millions displaced from their homes, but little is known about the few who manage to stay and become a minority in a new society. We study the case of German stayers in Sudetenland, a region from which Czechoslovakia expelled ethnic Germans after World War Two. The unexpected presence of the US Army in parts of 1945 Czechoslovakia resulted in more anti-fascist Germans avoiding displacement compared to regions liberated by the Red Army. We study the long-run impacts of this local variation in the presence of left-leaning stayers and find that Communist party support and local party cell frequencies, as well as far-left values and social policies are more pronounced today where anti-fascist Germans stayed in larger numbers. Our findings also suggest that political identity supplanted German ethnic identity among anti-fascist stayers. The German staying minority shaped the political identity of newly formed local societies after ethnic cleansing by providing the ‘small seed’ of political development.
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Wages, minimum wages, and price pass-through: the case of McDonald's restaurants
Ashenfelter, O. ; Jurajda, Štěpán
We use highly consistent national-coverage price and wage data to provide evidence on wage increases, labor-saving technology introduction, and price pass-through by a large low-wage employer facing minimum wage hikes. Based on 2016-2020 hourly wage rates of McDonald’s Basic Crew and prices of the Big Mac sandwich collected simultaneously from almost all US McDonald’s restaurants, we find that in about 25% of instances of minimum wage increases, restaurants display a tendency to keep constant their wage ‘premium’ above the increasing minimum wage. Higher minimum wages are not associated with faster adoption of touch-screen ordering, and there is near-full price pass-through of minimum wages, with little heterogeneity related to how binding minimum wage increases are for restaurants. Minimum wage hikes lead to increases in real wages (expressed in Big Macs an hour of Basic Crew work can buy) that are one fifth lower than the corresponding increases in nominal wages.
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Labour market restrictions and migration flows in the European Union: the case of Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine
Ducháč, Tomáš ; Strielkowski, Wadim (advisor) ; Jurajda, Štěpán (referee)
The thesis aims to estimate the future migration flows from Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova to the EU. Based on the experience of previous EU enlargements and econometric modelling using the method of Ordinary Least Squares with Fixed Effects, multiple forecasts are created. The forecasts capture the likely development of migration flows in the event of collapse of labour market restrictions as well as the case of no labour market liberalization. The results show that migration flows are expected to be moderate, posing no threats to the stability of the labour markets of EU member states. The increase of migration due to the accession to the EU is likely to be short-term, without substantial impacts in the long-run. Ukraine has the biggest migration potential and is likely to supply the highest amount of labour migration.
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Essays on International Economics
Stančík, Juraj ; Jurajda, Štěpán (advisor) ; Orlowski, Lucjan (referee) ; Peter Sabirianova, Klara (referee)
This dissertation focuses on various economic problems of central European countries in transition. Membership in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and an inflow of foreign capital belong to the biggest challenges these countries have to face. The first essay therefore focuses on exchange-rate stability in five new members of the European Union (EU). This stability is not only a criterion for joining the EMU but also a fundamental property of stable economic development. However, there are several factors that could slow or interrupt these countries' EMU-integration process. For this reason, this essay analyzes key factors contributing to euro exchange-rate volatility in the new EU members during the period 1999-2004: economic openness, the "news" factor, and the exchange-rate regime. A TARCH (threshold autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) model is employed to model the volatility of exchange rates. Although this essay focuses on each country separately, in general the results suggest that economic openness has a calming effect on exchange-rate volatility, news significantly affects volatility, and flexible regimes experience higher degrees of volatility. The extent of all these effects varies substantially across countries, however. The remaining of this dissertation is then devoted to...
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The determinants of reform: The case of transition countries
Davladze, Mariam ; Horváth, Roman (advisor) ; Jurajda, Štěpán (referee)
The thesis estimates the reform determinants for 24 transition countries using spatial econometrics by maximum likelihood estimation. In the thesis is included determinants already used by other authors, as well as, two new variables - export and foreign direct investments measures. Another distinctive characteristic is inclusion of spatial endogenous and exogenous variables as explanatory variables through the use of weights matrix - W. Obtained spatial interaction is positive and high. For spatial coefficient rho value varies in the range 0.22 to 0.71 indicating on significant spatial influence among entities. From spatial exogenous coefficients I obtained significant democracy, inflation, export and FDI coefficients. I also find that the initial effect of GDP growth, FDI and democracy are important determiners of reforming process. Keywords Reform Determinants, Spatial weights matrix, spillover effect Author's e-mail mariamdavladze@yahoo.com Supervisor's e-mail roman.horvath@gmail.com
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Impact of Institutions on Cross-Border Price Dispersion
Schwarz, Jiří ; Jurajda, Štěpán (advisor) ; Horváth, Roman (referee)
This thesis, building on existing studies on border effect, analyzes price dispersion among cities in the European region over the last twenty years (1990-2009). An extensive overview of the literature reveals that the authors completely neglect the entrepreneurial aspect of the arbitrage process, even though arbitrage is the main power behind the law of one price. Once we understand arbitrage as productive entrepreneurial activity, institutional quality should be one of determinants of arbitrage attractiveness and should, therefore, influence the price dispersion. To test this hypothesis I express the quality of institutions as one of the factors influencing total costs of arbitrage, together with population density in cities used as a proxy for competition intensity, and distance. The regression analysis proves that all three variables explain a part of observed price dispersion - the higher is the density and the better are the institutions, the lower is the predicted dispersion. This result can also be viewed as a small contribution to the emerging literature empirically testing the theory of productive and unproductive entrepreneurship.
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Gender Gap in Productivity Across Science Disciplines
Danylenko, Alona ; Jurajda, Štěpán (advisor) ; Münich, Daniel (referee)
Persistent gaps in publication productivity between men and women have been widely studied in social and economic literature since 1984, when Cole and Zuckerman referred to this discrepancy as a 'puzzle'. Existing studies on differences in publication productivity between men and women have considered different determinants of the gender gap, which partly, but not fully, explained the "gender puzzle". My study differs from the existing literature in terms of the coverage of the data used and the key questions asked: 1) what factors contribute to the gender gap in pub- lication productivity between male and female scientists? 2) what institutional factors facilitate productivity of female scientists? 3) how does the size of gender gap vary across disciplines? 4) which workplaces hire more women over time? The results of my research suggest that: 1) the size of gender gap is one-third less wide when field of specialization is controlled for; 2) women gain advantages in terms of higher productivity at larger workplaces, which cannot be explained by more stringent selection; 3) the smallest gender gap is observed in typically 'feminine' fields, such as Sociology, Medicine, and Education, while the largest gap is observed in Physics and Mathematics; 4) there is a path dependence in new female hirings, in...
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