|
The Housing Sector over Business Cycles: Empirical Analysis and DSGE Modelling
Brůha, Jan ; Polanský, Jiří
In this paper, we analyse the dynamics of the housing sector over business cycles. First, we provide an empirical analysis of the relationships between housing sector data and the main macroeconomic variables both on Czech data and on a sample of advanced economies. We document that in most countries the housing sector co-moves with the rest of the economy. In the past, the Czech housing market showed temporary episodes during which the housing sector was seemingly disconnected, but since 2005 the housing sector has become more cyclical. Second, we develop a cascade of increasingly complex DSGE models to assess the relative merits of each additional mechanism. Contrary to the popular framework with collateral constraints, we concentrate on the housing sector as an additional production sector via the standard supply and demand mechanisms. Our results confirm that these standard mechanisms are sufficient to replicate the observed comovements of housing market variables.
Fulltext:  PDF
|
|
Analysis of the EU regulations in the field of Information and Telecommunication technologies and their effect on the single market
Hart, Ludvík ; Procházka, Pavel (advisor) ; Strejček, Ivo (referee)
The bachelor thesis describes the EU regulations in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT), particularly the Digital agenda for Europe strategy. These regulations are then tested for their influence on the European single market. The major question answered here is whether the EU regulations in field of ICT have a positive impact on the EUs single market. Answer to this question helps us evaluate the ongoing Digital agenda strategy. The impact of the regulations is analysed by induction of the following indicators, international trade, ratio of population buying online, DESI index and NRI index. With this method it is possible to tackle the wide range of fields the Digital agenda covers. I conclude this work with the statement, that European ICT regulations do have a positive impact on the single market, although are problematic due to the slow legislative process and low efficiency in addressing the regulated issue.
|
|
Social housing - comparison of Concept of Social Housing in the Czech Republic 2015-2025 and Austrian social model
Hejduk, Radim ; Krebs, Vojtěch (advisor) ; Barák, Vladimír (referee)
The thesis is focused on social housing - public policy, that is applied in many countries of the EU. Czech Republic is currently trying its implementation. Due to rising household's costs of housing, rising expenses on demand-oriented housing policy in form of housing benefits and difficult to solve social exclusion, social housing appears to be one of the more accessible ways of solution. The goal of the thesis is at first to analyze and evaluate known forms of social housing and its application from the economic perspective, then to form reccomendations for the Conception of Social Housing for the Czech Republic in the period 2015-2025 using comparison to already-existing Austrian model. This text answers the main research question how does functioning model of social housing look like and what are the economic impacts of it on households.
|
| |
|
Řízení IS/ICT se zaměřením na sourcing služeb informačního systému
Šebesta, Michal ; Voříšek, Jiří (advisor) ; Havlíček, Zdeněk (referee) ; Příklenk, Oldřich (referee) ; Král, Jaroslav (referee)
Research on outsourcing has been around for several decades, while recent evolution in the information systems discipline towards ICT service commoditization significantly changes the context of decision-making. Services that are available on-demand via the Internet allow organizations implementing functions they demand in a fraction of time. This trend represents a chance for organizations seeking to use advanced ICT services without a need of major investments. Problem is the current lack of guidelines and tools for managing ICT services and their outsourcing. Given the trends on the ICT service market, it is expected that much of the IT management in the future will encompass the ICT services and utilize service-level structures. Methods currently available are either too broad or encompass only small part of the whole problem. Ad-hoc or unsound decisions in this area might cause major complications in terms of quality, usability, integration, and consequently influence total cost of organizational IT. Organizations need to either revise existing models or propose and implement completely new models to manage their IS/ICT. This thesis deals with the management of IS/ICT with focus on the ICT services outsourcing. It discusses available sourcing models in the literature and links them to the various interconnected areas. Based on these areas, it presents an integrated view on IT outsourcing strategies. Most importantly the thesis proposes an original concept for decision-making about outsourcing of ICT services named the SOURCER framework. This approach utilizes the presented outsourcing strategies, and introduces a complex methodology and decision-making criteria that will assist organizations with selection of ICT services in order to maintain and manage a most suitable ICT service portfolio. The decision-making is based on four essential viewpoints: function, costs, time, and quality. These viewpoints are discussed, individually analyzed, and serve as a basis for further research. The whole framework is developed and validated according to Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). Individual components are evaluated using a survey among a group of selected IT managers. Proof of concept is then established by a case study on framework use in a real organization. This case study covers strategy specification, business--IT alignment, specifying service architecture and its interconnections, outsourcing, and management of the ICT service portfolio.
|
|
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.
|
|
Míry podobnosti pro nominální data v hierarchickém shlukování
Šulc, Zdeněk ; Řezanková, Hana (advisor) ; Šimůnek, Milan (referee) ; Žambochová, Marta (referee)
This dissertation thesis deals with similarity measures for nominal data in hierarchical clustering, which can cope with variables with more than two categories, and which aspire to replace the simple matching approach standardly used in this area. These similarity measures take into account additional characteristics of a dataset, such as frequency distribution of categories or number of categories of a given variable. The thesis recognizes three main aims. The first one is an examination and clustering performance evaluation of selected similarity measures for nominal data in hierarchical clustering of objects and variables. To achieve this goal, four experiments dealing both with the object and variable clustering were performed. They examine the clustering quality of the examined similarity measures for nominal data in comparison with the commonly used similarity measures using a binary transformation, and moreover, with several alternative methods for nominal data clustering. The comparison and evaluation are performed on real and generated datasets. Outputs of these experiments lead to knowledge, which similarity measures can generally be used, which ones perform well in a particular situation, and which ones are not recommended to use for an object or variable clustering. The second aim is to propose a theory-based similarity measure, evaluate its properties, and compare it with the other examined similarity measures. Based on this aim, two novel similarity measures, Variable Entropy and Variable Mutability are proposed; especially, the former one performs very well in datasets with a lower number of variables. The third aim of this thesis is to provide a convenient software implementation based on the examined similarity measures for nominal data, which covers the whole clustering process from a computation of a proximity matrix to evaluation of resulting clusters. This goal was also achieved by creating the nomclust package for the software R, which covers this issue, and which is freely available.
|
|
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.
|
|
Accessability of Social Services in the Issue of Domestic Violence Against Women from the Perspective of Social Workers.
SVOBODOVÁ, Nikola
Domestic violence in Czech Republic has been for a long time and unnamed taboo. In the 1990's it came to legislative changes, none-profit organizations interested in this phenomenon were established and they started to promote this issue among the general public. Nowadays there is growing an intensive need that forces us to explore domestic violence in our country. The aim of the study was to ascertain the availability of social services for victims of domestic violence according to the opinion of social workers. There was used a qualitative research strategy. Data collection was conducted through semi-structured interviews with six social workers, who were selected by an intentional (purposeful) choice, and who all work in the field of assistance to victims of domestic violence. The theoretical part introduces the basic concepts related to domestic violence, its character, forms, reasons, the course of domestic violence, the typical profile of the offender and the victim. In the next section I focused on the legal framework, which is valid for the Czech Republic. One chapter is devoted to social services providing their assistance to victims of domestic violence. In the last chapter there are social services concretized to those, operating in České Budějovice. The practical part describes the results of qualitative research, based on individual case studies located in the appendix of work. Thanks to compiled research results there was an opportunity to look into the issue of assistance provided to victims of domestic violence in the regional capital city of České Budějovice, and find out whether this service offer meets the demand of the clients who use them. The results show what kind of various services organizations offer to its clients, in which catchment area, in what form and how many clients are they able to take. Research also showed that the offer of social services for the city of České Budějovice is sufficient, but according to respondents, there are still things to be improved. There is an option to contact a number of organizations providing assistance to victims of domestic violence. However, this situation is not as positive in the smaller towns of the South Bohemian Region. The work could, in my opinion, contribute to greater public awareness about service provided for victims of domestic violence.
|
|
A neuroprotective effect of the 3α5β-pregnanolon glutamate in the animal model of ischemic brain injury
Kletečková, Lenka ; Valeš, Karel (advisor) ; Zach, Petr (referee)
The neuroactive steroid 3α5β-pregnanolon glutamate (3α5βP-Glu) is the synthetic analogue of a naturally-occurring 3α5β-pregnanolon sulfate. Both agents inhibit preferentially tonically activated NMDA receptors by a use-dependent mechanism. The aplication of 3α5βP-Glu could reduce the excitotoxic injury of the brain during ischemic conditions, in which plays role the excessive activation of NMDA receptors. The objectives of this study are to determine the effect of systemic aplication of 3α5βP-Glu on an oxygen saturation and a regional cerebral blood flow in the brain of laboratory rat. Subsequently to establish and critically evaluate the animal model of a global ischemic brain injury. Finally to test the neuroprotective potential of 3α5βP-Glu on cognitive funtions in this model. The oxygen saturation and regional cerebral blood flow were measured in the area of dorsal hippocampus. Both observed parametres were significantly increased after the application of3α5βP-Glu. These findings confirm the assumption that 3α5βP-Glu has a neuroprotective effect. The bilateral occlusions of arteriae carotis communis following placement of the rat into a hypoxic box has been utilized as a model of global ischemic brain injury. The aplication of 3α5βP-Glu increased significantly the rats survival. However,...
|
guest ::
