|
|
Political Connections and Distortions on Public Procurement Markets: Evidence from the Czech Republic
Navrátilová, Alice ; Palanský, Miroslav (advisor) ; Janský, Petr (referee)
Corporate political connections have been shown to induce preferential treatment towards connected firms. This thesis evaluates whether the effect of connections is reflected in the composition of public procurement suppliers in Czechia, using municipal procurement awarded between 2006 and 2020. In particular, we hypothesise that changes in municipal mayors affected the rate of new procurement suppliers following the elections in 2014 and 2018. The findings show that the rate of new suppliers increased significantly in municipalities that elected a new mayor in the 2014 elections; however, the effects appeared to be negative in 2018. We further hypothesise that these results can be driven by the major success of new political parties in 2014, with a large share of new politicians being elected to office. We specifically examine the case of ANO, the political movement that dominated both elections. We do not find robust evidence of a surge in new suppliers in municipalities where ANO was notably successful, suggesting that the effect was not driven only by this party and pointing to alternative explanations.
|
|
|
Does donating to political parties pay off? Evidence from the Czech Republic
Navrátilová, Alice ; Palanský, Miroslav (advisor) ; Semerák, Vilém (referee)
According to the existing literature, political connections can lead to favouritism towards the connected companies. This thesis approximates connections through donations to political parties and analyses their effect on the value of public procurement administered by Czech Ministries between 2007 and 2017. Donations from legal entities are used along with contributions from natural persons who are matched with companies' officials to account for the possibility of masking the real identity of donors. We analyse the impact of donations on procurement from three perspectives. Firstly, we focus on donations made to parties with the largest representation in government, but do not find that firms connected to these parties win more favourable procurement contracts. We then extend the analysis to include other political parties present in the Chamber of Deputies during the examined period and each election term is assessed separately. The results suggest that donating firms received contracts of higher value than non-donating firms during two of the three election periods. Finally, we develop a novel panel-based approach with the aim to determine whether there exists a causal relationship between political connections and public procurement. The results show that connections to political parties...
|
|
|
Future of Inflation Targeting in the Russian Federation
Navrátilová, Alice ; Fungáčová, Zuzana (advisor) ; Raková, Marie (referee)
Hereby presented Master Thesis deals with an analysis of preparedness of the Russian monetary policy for adoption of inflation-targeting regime. We define the impact of different factors on the level of inflation and consequently their importance in the process of predicting inflation in the period from January 2006 to September 2012 in the Russian Federation. The selection of the factors is based on theory and on the examination of the Russian monetary policy environment, taking into account the credibility, transparency and accountability of the monetary institutions and the financial sector and real economy specifications. The analysis of interconnections among the factors is based on a vector autoregressive regression model VAR(4) as well as on Granger causality test and impulse-response analysis. Our results indicate that the major role in inflation formation among the chosen variables, the exchange rate prevailed in the observed period and the interest rate gained in importance to certain extent. Thus the Russian Central Bank has proceeded to prepare the monetary policy rule for the adoption of inflation-targeting regime. Nevertheless, building more sound monetary and financial institutions, successful implementation of flexible exchange rate and abandoning exchange rate targeting, as...
|
guest ::
RSS feed.