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The Effects of the New Deal on the social status of Afro-Americans in selected sectors of the US economy
Schwammenhöfer, Tomáš ; Tajovský, Ladislav (advisor) ; Johnson, Zdenka (referee)
This bachelor thesis deals with the effects of the New Deal legislation on Afro-Americans in the 1930s. Specifically, the thesis analytically focuses on the influence of various politician of this program on their social environment within the US economy. For the ease of understanding of whole issue is needed to know the situation of Afro-Americans in the previous decade as well as in the Great Depression. That is the content of the first two chapters. Subsequently there is the outline of the situation leading to the election of F. D. Roosevelt, US President. The last and as well the most important chapter of the whole thesis is devoted to analysis of individual programs and their impact on Afro-Americans. It concludes that the New Deal had both positive and negative influence on this minority, depending on the economic sector and the relevant administration. New Deal generally meant a huge progress in their economic and political affairs.
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The development of government debt in the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2015
Zeman, Mikuláš ; Klement, Josef (advisor) ; Vebrová, Ludmila (referee)
The aim of this bachelor thesis is to analyse the development of government debt in the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2015 with respect to the development of revenues and expenses of national budget as well as the development of macroeconomic indicators. The thesis is focused on evaluation of the economic policy of respective governments during the period and assessment of the effect of political reasons on the development of government debt. It also comprises a comparison of the situation in the Czech Republic with the situation in certain post - communist states. The theoretical part describes main notions the thesis deals with. Eventually it presents thoughts of selected economists on the economic policy. The practical part carries out analysis of the development of government debt in respective periods focusing on revenues and expenses, and the development of selected macroeconomic indicators. Evaluation of the economic policy of respective governments is also included. In its conclusion the thesis assesses an effect of political reasons on the amount of the government debt in view of relevant theories and hypotheses. The analysis showed that under the studied circumstances only one of the hypotheses became evident, namely that a weak position of the government leads to remarkable budgetary deficits.
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Makroekonomický dopad mateřské (a rodičovské) dovolené ve srovnání České Republiky s Brazílií
Kalkusová, Marie ; De Castro, Tereza (advisor) ; Neumann, Pavel (referee)
This thesis aims to estimate the macroeconomic impact of maternity and parental/paternal leave in the Czech Republic and Brazil. In addition, the thesis stresses out the costs of Czech model application to Brazil and vice-versa. The first chapter brings a theoretical framework. It compares the analyzed policies in both countries and introduces the relevant terms. The second chapter estimates the costs of maternity and parental/paternal leave related to public expenditure and GDP for the years 2005-2014 and brings own simulation model for Czech model application to Brazil and vice-versa. The third chapter analyses the inefficiencies and suggest possible mitigation. The results show the costs of 0.71% of GDP and 1.66% of public expenditure in the Czech Republic and 0.50% GDP and 2.27% of public expenditure in Brazil in 2014. The Czech model applied in Brazil would be very costly and the opposite scenario would lead to the decrease of macroeconomic burden in the Czech Republic. The thesis also analyzes the influence of maternal and parental leave in other areas, such as labor market, where the current structure may penalize Czech women in long term. By this analysis, the thesis contributes to the current debate about the impact, the length and costs of maternity and parental leave.
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Innovation activities in Germany in the context of smart specialisation
Vlčková, Markéta ; Vlčková, Jana (advisor) ; Vošta, Milan (referee)
Economic growth is slowing in many countries. It leads to a discussion on what sources of growth should countries focus. For this purpose, EU created the concept of smart specialization, which puts an emphasis on the most efficient use of public financial resources dedicated to research and development. The aim of this thesis is to find out on what industry Germany as a leader of EU innovation and its individual regions specializes and to identify potential areas for targeting resources to innovation, research and development. This will be determined by using the patent network. The secondary objective is to interconnect findings of patenting and analysis of innovation activities in various regions of Germany with international trade and to determine whether there is a correlation between innovation activity in a particular sector and export of the sector's products abroad.
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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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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.
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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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Strategy of Corporate Social Responsibility in Hilton Worlwide company and its application in local conditions
Švábová, Kateřina ; Mokrejšová, Veronika (advisor) ; Filipová, Alena (referee)
This bachelor thesis focuses on strategy of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in company Hilton Worldwide. The bachelor thesis is divided into two parts. The theoretical part deals with concept of corporate social responsibility, with the philosophy of CSR, its history and the present. This part also defines key words related to corporate social responsibility like CSR, stakeholders, corporate philanthropy, sustainable development, business ethics and corporate citizenship. It also focuses on the important role of communication in general and also in CSR. The practical part introduces the concept and strategy of CSR in the company Hilton Worldwide. This part also presents hotels Hilton Prague and Hilton Prague Old Town and their activities within the CSR. SWOT analysis as strategy tool was used to evaluate the concept and communication of CSR in both hotels. The final results of analyses showed problems in internal and external communication. Based on results of SWOT analysis are suggested solutions and recommendations that should improve understanding and perception of CSR concept in both hotels, improve internal communication for employees, and use all modern communication tools and channels for communicating information about CSR activities. These measures will lead to increased loyalty and strengthening the company's competitiveness.
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