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Differences and similarities on the approaches of buyers from X and Y generations regarding sustainable procurement
Lacour, Maxime ; Štěrbová, Ludmila (advisor) ; Geniaux, Isabelle (referee)
Responsible procurement has become a real challenge for companies following the current trends of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and more and more ethic-oriented customers. Differing from the concept of green procurement this concept of responsible procurement supports the willingness of companies to have ethic and sustainable supplies. The usual criteria in procurement such as price performances innovation terms and time of payment have increasingly been coupled with more ethic-oriented ones. These criteria related to ethics combine both social and environmental responsibilities of suppliers and stakeholders such as energetic savings and the possession of a particular certification. Currently many call for tenders set ecological requirements for suppliers or subcontractors even in non-strategic procurement activities. The goal of this thesis is about comparing this approach to responsible procurement between buyers from the X and Y generation: do they share the same ideas and priorities concerning responsible procurement? For both of these generations are the advantages and drawbacks of responsible procurement similar?
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Urbanization in China: Sustainability of Chinese Cities
Králíková, Petra ; Stuchlíková, Zuzana (advisor) ; Neumann, Pavel (referee)
The aim of the master thesis is to characterize development trends of Chinese urbanization since the establishment of People´s Republic of China until today, approaches to these trends and evaluate their sustainability. Thesis includes four main parts. The first part introduces main urbanization theories: Stages of Urban Development, Differential Urbanization, and Environmental Kuznets Curve. The second part characterizes the development of Chinese urbanization, defines two main determinants of the future development and tries to cover different potential future scenarios. The third part deals with Chinese urban policies, such as five-year-plans, Urbanization plan and reforms. After that, the sustainability issue is evaluated. Last part of the thesis deals with urbanization trends and policies in Chongqing municipality.
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Private equity fund greenhouse business plan focusing on the financials
Bartoš, Jan ; Krause, Josef (advisor) ; Machek, Ondřej (referee)
The thesis analyses and discusses the creation of a business plan inside a private equity fund. The business plan deals with the development and management of a fully illuminated and heated greenhouse and focuses mostly on the financial part, due to reasons explained in the thesis. In the theoretical section, the author discusses the developments in the entrepreneurship and private equity field and follows by describing the important terms concerning a business plan, its structure and the approach to its creation. The practical section deals with the circumstances in which this business opportunity is considered and covers the business plan itself, specifically the market analysis, marketing approach, operational side and financials in detail. The aim of this exercise is to validate the market expectations and economic rentability of the whole project. To this end the author utilizes several standardized criterions for investment assessment.
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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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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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Speculation on oil markets and its impact on commodity's price
Melcher, Ota ; Taušer, Josef (advisor) ; Baláž, Peter (referee) ; Müller, Štěpán (referee)
This study aims to analyse the precrisis period on the oil markets with a primary objective of assessing the role of speculation in the commodity's price development and its volatility. First it depicts the rapidly increasing speculative activity on the futures market together with the parallel oil price surge. The speculation is initially proxied by non-commercial traders' positions and subsequently quantified by Working's T-index. The paper then uses speculative traders' positions and both spot and futures prices to test for Granger causality within the framework of VAR models. For the sake of consistency it also evaluates causal links between speculation and inventories level. Further the study investigates the speculation impact on volatility of oil prices by employing various approaches in volatility quantification including GARCH models. Contrary to expectations we find that the speculatio's impact on both prices and their volatility is rather insignificant. In the last chapter we therefore seek for an explanation of the oil price developments by examining the market fundamentals. The interaction of supply and demand finally gives substantial evidence for understanding the price developments in the precrisis period.
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Proposing the financial performance prediction index for decision support of the hospital management
Hajdíková, Taťána ; Černá, Anna (advisor) ; Lieskovská, Vanda (referee) ; Lazar, Jaromír (referee)
Dissertation thesis deals with the managerial needs in the area of financial health. Managers need a tool to reveal the impending financial failure or to assess the financial quality of the organization. They link their decisions to performance, ability to pay, employee productivity, financial resources and financial risk. In the theoretical part of the thesis it is necessary to explain the non-profit sector and its connection with the hospital environment. It is also necessary to introduce models used both in the Czech Republic and abroad, which share common elements. The basic aim of this thesis is to propose a financial performance prediction index for decision support of the hospital management, the owners of hospitals and insurance companies. To achieve the basic goal, three sub-goals must be accomplished. The first goal is to divide the hospitals into healthy and unhealthy by using the multi-criteria methods. The second goal is, based on an expert approach with the support of statistical methods, the selection of indicators appropriate for the hospital environment and the third goal is to find a suitable method for the determination of weighted representation of individual indicators in the proposed index and to assemble the final form of the new financial index for the hospital environment.
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Application of Monte Carlo simulations in banking
Boruta, Matěj ; Teplý, Petr (advisor) ; Fučík, Vojtěch (referee)
Currently, banking is exposed to huge market risks. One of those risks is occurrence of negative interest rates in the EU. Nowadays, it is important to use sophisticated and modern measurement tools and approaches to measure and manage banking risks. One of those methods is Monte Carlo simulation. This bachelor thesis is aimed at analysis and prediction of 3-month maturity Prague Interest Offer Rate (PRIBOR) for 3, 6 and 12 months with using Monte Carlo simulations. It was found that this method is suitable for prediction market variables with low volatility. If anybody uses this method, it is necessity to have in mind all pitfalls and assumptions, that this method includes, as an adequate random generated number of scenarios, approximation of correct probability distribution, independence of dataset and not least, as far as possible, to focus on factors generating randomness of market variable and not the prices, that express rather consequences of randomness than its cause. Further, the Monte Carlo prediction was compared with prognosis of the Czech Nation Bank and it was found that Monte Carlo prediction is more accurate for short term predictions. 12-month prediction of Monte Carlo simulation discovered also possible occurrence of negative interest rate at 0,05% level of probability in compare to the Czech National Bank prognosis, where was no negative interest rate predicted.
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Economic diplomacy of the Czech Republic - a current situation and new challenges for the future
Polednik, Petr ; Peterková, Jana (advisor) ; Trávníčková, Zuzana (referee)
This thesis deals with economic diplomacy of the Czech Republic. The first chapter focuses on a definition, functions and tasks, players and models of management of economic diplomacy. The second chapter characterizes from a perspective of state actors approaches to economic diplomacy in selected European countries which can server as an inspiration for the Czech Republic. The third chapter is devoted to the current situation of the economic diplomacy of the Czech Republic, planned innovations and its possible development and challenges in the coming years.
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