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Unconvential monetary policy adopted by ECB and FED in 2008-2015
Pörner, Marek ; Šetková, Lenka (advisor) ; Ševčíková, Michaela (referee)
The main aim of this thesis is to analyse the accomplishment of the goals set, namely those of the selected unconventional monetary policies approved by the Federal Reserve System and the European Central Bank in response to the last financial crisis. With the FED the attention is focused on Quantitative Easing, whereas with the ECB it is focused on the programmes called Enhanced Credit Support, SMP, OMT and EAPP. Important parts of this thesis are also the explanation of the transmission mechanism of the unconventional monetary policy, the evaluation of macroeconomic impacts of these non-standard tools, the comparison of procedures of the two monitored central banks, but mainly the analysis of selected risks related to those tools. The principal method was an empirical analysis supported by economic studies dealing with the issues mentioned above. In the thesis it was discovered that the individual goals of the monitored programmes were achieved (with the exception of the SMP). With the programme EAPP no conlusion can be drawn because the programme has not been finished yet. Nevertheless, these non-standard tools bring certain risks such as a creation of a bubble in the markets of assets, a redistribution of wealth, a spillover effect, etc. For that reason it will be possible to evaluate the overall effect of the unconventional monetary policies only after a longer time period.
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INSTITUTIONAL CARE
PAPÁČKOVÁ, Lucie
The aim of this bachelor thesis is to acquaint the reader with institutional care in the Czech Republic, performed in facilities belonging to the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, and the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports. Institutional care is one of the most important measures in which the State may intervene in family relationships. Minors have the legal right to secure a proper education and overall development. If the parents or family are unable to fulfill this legal claim, then the State is obliged to provide the child with an alternative rearing environment, either by assigning the child to the care of individuals or a facility for children requiring immediate assistance, and in the event of a necessity, also the most important measure: imposing institutional care. Priority is always given to individual care before institutional care, either with another individual, guardian, or foster parent. The Act also defines exactly where it's possible to proceed to extreme measures and impose institutional care. Given the severity of this measure, this decision only appertains to courts. No other governmental or non-governmental institution has such authority. This paper is aimed at introducing institutional care and the protection of children in the Czech Republic, especially highlighting the fragmentation of institutional care. The fundamental part of this paper describes the process of imposing institutional care, and especially its implementation in individual institutional facilities, differentiated according to the children's age, their physical and mental abilities, and the reasons why institutional care was decided on. The priority should always be the child's interest and welfare. This work also highlights the shortcomings of institutional care, particularly the lack of cooperation between the socio-legal protection of children and institutional facilities, the limited cooperation between government departments, the lack of suitable family recovery, and the small number of social workers and judges in the field. Finally, I also mention the achievements that brought about the transformation of institutional care, particularly the conversion to small family type facilities, surrounded by a network of services for the families of allocated children, the children themselves, and also other families who find themselves in a difficult situation. Not all children can be placed in foster care, not all families can be recovered. Especially for some older children and those who have gone through a specific life experience (abuse, repeated return from foster families), an institutional facility is an environment where they feel more secure and where they can fulfill their need to belong in a group of peers. In my work, I also want to draw attention to the current system of child care for children and youth, which does not address the period following the departure of young people from institutional care, although the stage of becoming independent is the most important for their future life.
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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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Differences between men and women in the Czech labour market
Stroukal, Dominik ; Kadeřábková, Božena (advisor) ; Pavelka, Tomáš (referee) ; Němec, Otakar (referee)
This thesis consists of five articles that apply current world research on labor economics at the Czech Republic and confirms the significant differences between men and women in this market. It shows that gender has a significant influence on the preference on the labor market and, consequently, on employment and health. First, the thesis shows that preferences are relevant determinant of career and then we study the difference in preference of salary for men and women. Subsequently it shows that gender plays a significant role in explaining the relationship between homeownership, and unemployment, as well as unemployment and health. The first chapter was able to demonstrate that the preference for a career has a positive influence on the choice of career. The influence of higher education on prioritizing career proved to be positive and significant. Probability of a career choice is reduced by the presence of children, however, is not dependent on their number, which is contrary to the theory of preferences. The second chapter shows that Czech women prefer more non-monetary rewards than men. It has also been shown that people with university education are same in the preferences of non-monetary rewards regardless of the gender of the respondents, however, compared to the world's research, the Czech higher education increases this preference. It turned out that women prefer risk less than men. The third chapter demonstrates that although the housing market undermines labor mobility and employment in the Czech Republic at the regional level, therefore, that in regions with a higher rate of home ownership is higher unemployment, at the individual level, the owners of housing are unemployed are less likely. The estimates are significantly different for men and women. Men living in owner-occupied housing have a higher likelihood of employment than women. At regional level, however, this thesis shows that the high rate of home ownership increases unemployment for both men and women, in the long run only to women. The fourth chapter showed that men transition to homeownership reduces the likelihood of unemployment next year. For women, this relationship has proved to be insignificant. In addition, as insignificant showed the opposite relationship, the transition from unemployment to the newly acquired home ownership. The last chapter shows that the change in the working status to unemployment will increase in the future probability of worse health. Influence in less than two years, however, proved to be significant. An important conclusion is that men have a significantly stronger relationship between health and unemployment than women.
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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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STRAIN ENGINEERING OF THE ELECTRONIC STRUCTURE OF 2D MATERIALS
del Corro, Elena ; Peňa-Alvarez, M. ; Morales-García, A. ; Bouša, Milan ; Řáhová, Jaroslava ; Kavan, Ladislav ; Kalbáč, Martin ; Frank, Otakar
The research on graphene has attracted much attention since its first successful preparation in 2004. It possesses many unique properties, such as an extreme stiffness and strength, high electron mobility, ballistic transport even at room temperature, superior thermal conductivity and many others. The affection for graphene was followed swiftly by a keen interest in other two dimensional materials like transition metal dichalcogenides. As has been predicted and in part proven experimentally, the electronic properties of these materials can be modified by various means. The most common ones include covalent or non-covalent chemistry, electrochemical, gate or atomic doping, or quantum confinement. None of these methods has proven universal enough in terms of the devices' characteristics or scalability. However, another approach is known mechanical strain/stress, but experiments in that direction are scarce, in spite of their high promises.\nThe primary challenge consists in the understanding of the mechanical properties of 2D materials and in the ability to quantify the lattice deformation. Several techniques can be then used to apply strain to the specimens and thus to induce changes in their electronic structure. We will review their basic concepts and some of the examples so far documented experimentally and/or theoretically.
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Effect of snowpack on runoff generation during rain on snow event.
Juras, Roman ; Máca, Petr (advisor) ; Ladislav , Ladislav (referee)
During a winter season, when snow covers the watershed, the frequency of rain-on-snow (ROS) events is still raising. ROS can cause severe natural hazards like floods or wet avalanches. Prediction of ROS effects is linked to better understanding of snowpack runoff dynamics and its composition. Deploying rainfall simulation together with hydrological tracers was tested as a convenient tool for this purpose. Overall 18 sprinkling experiments were conducted on snow featuring different initial conditions in mountainous regions over middle and western Europe.
Dye tracer brilliant blue (FCF) was used for flow regime determination, because it enables to visualise preferential paths and layers interface. Snowpack runoff composition was assessed by hydrograph separation method, which provided appropriate results with acceptable uncertainty. It was not possible to use concurrently these two techniques because of technical reasons, however it would extend our gained knowledge. Snowmelt water amount in the snowpack runoff was estimated by energy balance (EB) equation, which is very efficient but quality inputs demanding. This was also the reason, why EB was deployed within only single experiment.
Timing of snowpack runoff onset decrease mainly with the rain intensity. Initial snowpack properties like bulk density or wetness are less important for time of runoff generation compared to the rain intensity. On the other het when same rain intensity was applied, non-ripe snowpack featuring less bulk density created runoff faster than the ripe snowpack featuring higher bulk density. Snowpack runoff magnitude mainly depends on the snowpack initial saturation. Ripe snowpack with higher saturation enabled to generate higher cumulative runoff where contributed by max 50 %. In contrary, rainwater travelled through the non-ripe snowpack relatively fast and contributed runoff by approx. 80 %.
Runoff prediction was tested by deploying Richards equation included in SNOWPACK model. The model was modified using a dual-domain approach to better simulate snowpack runoff under preferential flow conditions. Presented approach demonstrated an improvement in all simulated aspects compared to the more traditional method when only matrix flow is considered.
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Design of Experiment for Non-Stationary Processes of Production
Jadrná, Monika ; Macák, Tomáš (advisor)
The doctoral thesis is concerned with the services sector and the area of mass production. Particularly, the optimization of the product portfolio of the travel agency and the optimization of production rounds of ammunition.
The theoretical part deals with the current overview of discussed topic. Further, the terminology and methods of the decision-making process are defined to support decision making. The theoretical basis of research focused on the choice of appropriate input variables in the area of services, and on the choice of a particular material option in the production area and appropriate equipment for the production. The theoretical part forms the basis for the practical part of the thesis.
For the doctoral thesis was chosen an enterprise operating in the defined sector. Product portfolio for the services sector is optimised using Fuzzy logic and Fuzzy sets so that the enterprise can maintain its competitiveness in todays highly ambitious market. Product portfolio for manufacture is optimised for achieving desired properties of the product.
The main aim of the thesis is to propose a new methodological approach for the management of selected business processes in their nonstationary time course. The aim of the practical implementation is to verify the functionality of the proposed methodological approach, both in the area of services and in the field of mass production.
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Population genetic analysis of Old Kladruber horse
Vostrá Vydrová, Hana ; Majzlík, Ivan (advisor) ; Karel, Karel (referee)
The Old Kladruber horse, along with the Lipizzaner horse, Andalusian horse and Lusitano horse, is of the original Italo-Spanish type. The Old Kladruber horse is kept in two colour varieties (grey and black). Because the population is closed, there is a concern about the loss of genetic variation. The genetic diversity and population structure were analysed in the Old Kladruber horse breed based on the pedigree information of animals that were registered in the Studbook to identify factors that may have affected the genetic variability of the breed. Pedigree records collected from 1729 to 2013 contained information on 7971 animals that were used in the analyses. The pedigree depth was up to 33 generations, with an average of 15.1 complete generations. The effective number of founders and ancestors contributing to the current genetic pool was 92.69 and 17.16, respectively. The average values of the inbreeding coefficient were as follows: 13% (with a maximum value of 29%) for the reference population (individuals that can currently take part in reproduction, n=612), 11% for the grey variety (with a maximum value of 25%) and 15% for the black variety (with a maximum value of 29%). The proportion of inbred animals was high (99%). The average rate of inbreeding in the reference population was 1%: 0.8% for the grey variety and 1.1% for the black variety, and the respective estimates of the effective population sizes were 52 for the reference population, 62 for the grey variety and 45 for the black variety. The estimated percentage of genetic diversity lost due to non-random mating within subpopulations and the reference population was 1.0, 1.0 and 1.2%, respectively. The total loss of genetic diversity in the reference population, in the grey variety and in the black variety was 11%, 13% and 17%, respectively.
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