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The Macroeconomic Impacts of the Selected Oil Shocks in the United States of America
Šikulová, Markéta ; Johnson, Zdenka (advisor) ; Tajovský, Ladislav (referee)
The aim of this study is to analyze macroeconomic impacts of four selected oil shocks on the United States economy and their subsequent comparison. The first part of this study deals with the theoretical background of supply shock, its influence on the economy, and the possible responses of economic policy. Furthermore, in the first part I focus on the historical events that led to the oil crisis, specifically on the OPEC oil embargo imposed on the United States, production cuts caused by the Iranian revolution, Iran-Iraq War and Persian Gulf War and on the demand as well as the supply factors that led to the oil shock of 2007-2008. The second part of this study presents the specific impacts of four selected oil shocks on the US economy and their comparison. Based on the findings, it was possible to confirm the hypothesis saying that past oil shocks, especially those that took place in the 1970's, had more negative impacts on the United States economy in comparison with those that happened more recently. In other words, that the effects of changes in oil prices have lessened over time. There are many reasons of this moderation, but the most important ones include more effective monetary policy response, the decrease in wage rigidities, and more recently also the decline of United States dependency on imported oil.
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Specific features of nursing care provided to members of the Church of Scientology.
MATOUŠKOVÁ, Eva
The Church of Scientology was officially registered in Los Angeles in 1954. It is present in more than 150 countries of the world, and is professed by over 8 million people. The founder of the movement is the American author of science fiction and fiction, Laffayete Ron Hubbard, who conducted research in the sphere of the human spirit, summarised in his books "Dianetics". Later on, he focused his research on spiritual beings and their abilities. This gave rise to an applicable religious philosophy - Scientology. It has not been possible to register the Church of Scientology officially in the Czech Republic so far, and therefore it acts as the civil association of "Dianetické centrum" (the Dianetic Centre). The number of its members and sympathisers in this country is not very high, reaching approximately 800 persons. Still, it is important for us to know the differences of this minority, to be able to provide its members with nursing care corresponding to their specific needs. This subject is dealt with by the multi-cultural nursing care studying cultures and religions from the point of view of nursing practice. In connection with globalisation, this subject becomes even more topical. The national, cultural and ethnic structure of the population undergoes gradual changes and the number of foreigners legally residing in the territory of the Czech Republic keeps growing. For this reason, it is important even for nurses to be prepared and have at least the minimum knowledge of multi-cultural / trans-cultural nursing care that will enable them to provide adequate nursing care respecting the specifics in question. The objective of my thesis is to get to know the specific features of nursing care provided to members of the Church of Scientology and to establish the specific features of their life style. To meet the objectives, I set five research questions. Research question 1: Do members of the Church of Scientology have specific needs when they are being provided nursing care? Research question 2: What is the attitude of members of the Church of Scientology to the health care provided in the Czech Republic? Research question 3: Do members of the Church of Scientology have specific spiritual needs? Research question 4: What attitude do members of the Church of Scientology have towards their health? Research question 5: Do members of the Church of Scientology have a specific life style? To collect data for fulfilling my research objectives and obtaining answers to the research questions, I applied the method of qualitative research. To conduct the qualitative research I used the technique of a semi-structured interview with the members of the Church of Scientology attending the Dianetic Centre in Prague. The interview contained altogether 46 questions divided into four areas, and the participants were four men and four women of different ages and different lengths of being members of the Church. The qualitative examination established the main and most distinct specific feature in providing nursing care to members of the Church of Scientology, which is maintaining silence at the time when human mind is weakened. Further, the research showed that scientologists respect physicians and do not exclude them in cases of accidents or danger of life. They normally undergo preventive examinations and do not object to being vaccinated provided that they are supplied with sufficient information. The only exception is psychiatry. Being provided with assists constitutes the only spiritual need, and the Church of Scientology has no specifics in terms of diet. This thesis may be used as a study material for general nurses and students of nursing studies, to expand knowledge in the field of multi-cultural / trans-cultural nursing care, which will facilitate providing culture-specific nursing care to members of this religious minority.
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Sustainable tourism development of Vysocina Region
Veselá, Markéta ; Macháček, Jaroslav (advisor) ; Vondráková, Zuzana (referee)
The diploma thesis deals with the topic of sustainable tourism development at the regional level. This phenomenon is elaborated on the example of Vysocina Region. To evaluate sustainability of its development, the potential of this touristic destination is researched regarding various areas, including key products. These are subjected to comparisons with recommendations of significant tourism organization for the purpose of assessing the sustainability of tourism. The diploma thesis also includes a comparison with other Czech regions experience as a touristic destination. Vysocina Region has favourable initial conditions for its sustainable development, especially regarding supply of key products, which include both environmentally friendly goods and cultural attractiveness contributing to the personal development of individuals and promoting intercultural tolerance. The main issue appears to be the spatial imbalance of its development in the region, caused mainly by the concentration of tourist activities to certain areas and low local initiative in the less attractive areas. The diploma thesis proposes a number of solutions, such as utilization of geocaching and products of gastroturism, supporting the foundation of local destination management organisations, promoting cycling tourism and the foundation of highly visited tourist destinations.
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Optimization of the process of recruitment and selection of employees
Doxanská, Kateřina ; Legnerová, Kateřina (advisor) ; Němec, Otakar (referee)
The aim of the thesis is based on the comparison and evaluation of the selection process and recruitment in three selected companies find the optimum process. The paper compares these HR processes with IT developer JetBrains s.r.o., a pharmaceutical company Shire Czech s.r.o. and company providing services in the field of facility management. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is devoted to basic theoretical knowledge concerning the chosen topic. In the second chapter describes the process of recruitment and selection of employees in individual companies. The third chapter contains a comparison of selected companies, their processes and are given recommendations for individual companies, which will help improve these processes. The fourth chapter is devoted to a number of possibilities to improve individual aforementioned processes to be more efficient and lead to optimal process of recruitment and selection of employees.
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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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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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Aspects of the virtualization of higher education and its comparison in the CZ and US
Dlauhá, Dominika ; Šedivá, Zuzana (advisor) ; Pour, Jan (referee)
The topic of this thesis is the evolution of online higher education in the CZ and US, from its beginnings to its current state. Emphasis is placed on describing MOOCs and virtualization in education, ranging from technological, pedagogical and didactic aspects to legislature and finance. A survey was conducted to determine the interest in online courses at the University of Economics, Prague and experience with online learning, resulting in an outline of the future development in this area.
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Evaluation of chat bots
Hazdra, Jan ; Sigmund, Tomáš (advisor) ; Čermák, Radim (referee)
This thesis deals with the evaluation of theability of machines to imitate human behavior. Presents a brief history of the development on the field of artificial intelligence and intelligent machines, specifically chat botsand describes their evolution throughout the 20th century. It describes the most important features and building blocks of chat bots, including the most widely used programming languages for creating them.It also describes the theory of A. Turing, the test and the imitation game, on which is based methodology for evaluating chat bots. Then it also examines the criticism of the Turing's test by J. R. Searle's chinese room argument that is used for its better understanding and finding its boundaries. The work also describes H. Dreyfus's assumptions, which led to optimism in the late 90s in development in artificial intelligence and limits of artificial intelligence, on which he pointed out. The main objective is the metodology proposed in the second part, which is used for comparing selected chat bots and then used for their evaluation. Overall evaluation consists of evaluations in the sub-categories in which will be individual chat bots scored. The methodology is based on the Turing test, which slightly modifies, but also extends thanks to the ideas of other authors.
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Case Study - Divorce and its conditions
Kopecká, Veronika ; Spirit, Michal (advisor) ; Jansa, Viktor (referee)
This bachelor thesis centers around divorce issues and its circumstances, which is illustratively demostrated on a real life scenario. For meeting my aims, that is to introduce and characterise divorce as a phenomenon with huge amount of negative social-economical and social-psychological results including causes and mechanisms of divorced family and breakup of marriage, I used a literature that examines this area, followed by comparison of acquired data with a case study. In this thesis, an assumption of negative results of a divorce has been comfirmed, but so has the work of a state to effectively separate a married couple. The benefit of this thesis lies in an opportunity to get acquinted with requisities of a divorced marriage and should the reader be in similar situation when a divorce is imminent or planned for, he can take proper steps by familiarizing with circumstances and results of a divorce.
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