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Reading climate within family of origin and educational results
Gorčíková, Magdaléna ; Šafr, Jiří
This study examines the extent to which reading socialization (pro-reading climate in family) and reading in childhood account for performance differences between low-status and high-status children to educational results. We employ data from the survey “Distinction and Values” (2008) which surveyed cohorts ages 30–34 along with their parents. The findings of our analysis have shown that reading climate in family – especially if the child reads himself – plays a significant role in promoting elementary school success, graduation at the university and intergenerational educational mobility. In sum, parental reading socialization increases the likelihood of shaping children’s education attainment and even expands advantage in parent-child relations.
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Time management
Hanus, Filip ; Franková, Emilie (advisor) ; Motlová, Veronika (referee)
It is of great necessity to know how to manage time. The theoretical part of this thesis is concerned with the definition of time management, its origin and evolution. It covers the basic rules of efficient time management and the principles of efficient work organization. It describes the usage of goals and their setting, circadian rhythms and their influence on our productivity and the most common factors that steal our time. Based on the analysis of time frames and half-structured interviews, the empirical part follows the lives of six university students for two weeks. Our goal is to find out how the respondents use their time, what is their knowledge of time management and also to cover the difference between students living in a room alone and students sharing a room with one or multiple roommates.
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Tax and legal issues of real-estate business in Austria
Banctel, Kristýna ; Filipová, Vladimíra (advisor) ; Drozen, František (referee)
The purpose of this study is to compare tax and civil-law issues concerning property business in Austria and in Czech Republic in 2016 and to investigate the efficiency of the current legislation against the real estate bubble. The theoretical part of this study contains selected demographic and price statistics concerning real estate in both countries and focuses on the description of the existing law currently in effect in both compared countries. The practical part analyses tax and transactions costs that concern property trading and a comparison of possibilities of amortisations and rentability of a rented flat in both countries.
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Analysis of the bitter spirits category and the perception of the brand Becherovka Original in the czech market
Michelík, Martin ; Machek, Martin (advisor) ; Kolouchová, Daniela (referee)
The aim of the thesis is to analyse the bitter alcohol drinks market and to evaluate the brand image of the Becherovka Original on the Czech market and to suggest appropriate recommendations for improvements in perception of the brand amongst the younger generation of customers. The theoretical basis is defined to understand the terms as customer behavior, consumers buying process, brand elements, brand equity, brand value and brand image. In order to achieve the main objective the primary research was carried out. The research was provided by online customer survey. Based on the collected data the whole Czech alcohol market was analysed, with emphasis on the spirits market, especially on the bitter spirits category. Also, the brands marketing strategy was analysed. At last, the perception of the brand Becherovka Original on the Czech market was analysed. The data for the analysis were obtained by the theoretical basis and by the research. The conclusion contains suggested recommendations for the future prosperity of the brand.
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Implementation of the Smart Metering Systems in Energetics in Slovakia
Petreová, Adela ; Machek, Ondřej (advisor) ; Tyll, Ladislav (referee)
The goal of the Master´s thesis is to map the actual situation of transformation of power energy sector to smart grid, find answers to some of the major questions concerning the implementation of smart metering systems, evaluate societal and economic costs and benefits, evaluate trends in legislation, compare the situation in Slovakia with other peer countries from the European Union, and create a follow-up recommendations for Slovakia based on this assessment. The thesis includes detailed critical analysis of the CBA, originally created for Slovakia, using benchmarking with countries with a different calculation approach. The used methodology in this work is a research of available resources, qualitative research of case studies, break-down of the CBA, and expert research through interviewing. The outcome is evaluation of economic and societal contributions of smart metering systems and mapping the process and state of the implementation.
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Marketing communication of commercial insurance companies on social media
Havránek, Jiří ; Gála, Libor (advisor) ; Molnár, Zdeněk (referee)
The diploma thesis deals with marketing communication of commercial insurance companies on social media. The aim of the thesis is to analyze the current state of the communication activities of commercial insurance companies on selected social media. Based on the identified state and detected interest in these communication activities by customers, recommendations are suggested for improvement of communication online commercial insurance companies to support the sales of insurance products. The first section defines the areas of insurance, marketing communication and social media. After that there is identification of activities that companies can perform on social media to increase brand awareness. These activities can be monitored, evaluated and after that optimized. In the second section there is identified the current state of commercial insurance activities on social media and detected interest in these activities from customers by using qualitative research. Based on these findings, draft recommendations are formulated on possible improvements to the current situation. The benefit of this thesis is the identification of the current state of commercial insurance activities on social media.
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Decision making of Prague moviegoers
Macháček, Ivan ; Hanzlík, Jan (advisor) ; Zelený, Martin (referee)
The aim of this work is to analyze attitudes of Prague film viewers towards watching films at the cinema and at home and to find out on what factors do they base their decision to watch a particular film. The means to achieve this goal are research of existing literature related to this subject and my own research through a questionnaire survey on a sample population of Prague with a corresponding demographic composition. The most crucial conclusions from this investigation are related to the frequency of watching movies in the cinema and at home, attitudes towards the origin and localization of movies, attitudes towards various genres, factors influencing the choice of a film and comparing the results of various demographic groups (by gender, age and education) within these topics.
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The American Foreign Policy with the Middle East : from the earliest days to the Obama’s mandate
Petraud, Jean-Félix ; Eichler, Jan (advisor) ; Dubský, Zbyněk (referee)
The following dissertation is an attempt of analysis and understanding of the foreign policy of the United States in the Middle East region and its evolution through time. Considering the fact that the Middle East region is or at least used to be a vital region for the United States national interests, the dissertation presents an exhaustive list of major events that have been major shifts in the US foreign policy in the region. The more or less chronological timeline allows the reader to have a better understanding of the evolution of the US foreign policy. The result of the dissertation is the identification of different patterns of foreign policy and to put the spot on the reasons of the changes of these patterns. Nevertheless, the history of the Middle East region and the incredible number of major events through the 2Oth century and the early 21st century make impossible to deal with all of them. Moreover, analysis and comments are based on academic research, but the dissertation remains subjective and may lead to discussions and debates.
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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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