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Relation of Debt Relief to Social and Military Expenditures: Empirical Evidence
Nykl, Jan ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Pleticha, Petr (referee)
This work focuses on the relationship between sovereign debt relief on one side and government expenditure on healthcare, education, and armed forces on the other side. Each effect is estimated separately using two dynamic panel data methods: Arellano-Bond Difference GMM and Arellano-Bover/Blundell-Bond System GMM. I use three subsets of a dataframe that contains 114 recipients of post-1991 debt relief. The health spending analysis was performed on 110 countries observed in the period of 1995 to 2017; the education expenditure equation was estimated using data on 104 countries from the period 1991 to 2018; and the military spending subset contains data on 103 countries also observed between 1991 and 2018. I found a statistically significant negative effect of debt relief on military expen- diture and a significant positive effect of debt relief on education spending. The latter was, however, sensitive to the choice of estimation method. The effect on health expenditure is unclear. 1
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The Czech exchange rate floor: Depreciation without inflation?
Baxa, Jaromír ; Šestořád, Tomáš
After the introduction of an exchange rate commitment and an immediate 7% depreciation of the Czech koruna of in 2013, output growth resumed but inflation remained low. Consequently, the Czech National Bank did not return policy to normal for more than three years. Using a time-varying parameter VAR model with stochastic volatility, we show that this was not surprising. The exchange rate pass-through to prices had been rather low and gradually decreasing since the early 2000s, suggesting limited potential effects of the exchange rate commitment on inflation. On the other hand, the pass-through to output growth increased. These results hold even when the period of the exchange rate floor and the zero lower bound is excluded from the sample, and they are robust to other sensitivity checks. Our results are consistent either with a flattened Phillips curve, or rising quality of the Czech exports and participation in global value chains, or a small effect of the exchange rate commitment on inflation expectations when not paired with temporary price-level targeting. Moreover, we highlight the usefulness of models accounting for time variation of parameters for policy analysis.
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Behavior and institutional change
Baxa, Jaromír ; Kouba, Karel (advisor)
The main aim is to explain, why we can observe strong persistence in human or firm behavior despite substantial change of economic environment and why persistence of informal institutions occurs. During recent two decades there were various trials to provide explanation of persistence of behavior based on presumption of existence of path dependency and increasing returns, reflecting findings of experimental economics with methodological background in bounded rationality or using simulations of interactions or networks. My practice is slightly different as I'm trying to incorporate findings of cognitive psychology and social cognitive learning into economics. Cognitive psychology implies that behavioral regularities, routines, are based on subjective mental models. Evolution of behavior can be now understood as evolution of routines and mental models, and thanks to their nature routines have high propensity to long persistence despite changing environment. This approach is applicable to evolution of informal institutions and it allows to explain persistence of them using shared mental models. Then informal institutions are seemed as behavioral regularities used by decisive part of the society and their evolution can be now described as diffusion of new behavioral regularity in the society and modeled using...
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The Impacts of Non-Tariff Measures on China's Tea Exports
Liu, Ling ; Semerák, Vilém (advisor) ; Baxa, Jaromír (referee)
Tea is China's traditional export-earning agricultural product. For a long time, China's tea exports have occupied an extremely important position in the international market. With the further opening of the international agricultural product market and the increasingly fierce competition in the international tea market, China's tea exports are increasingly being affected by technical barriers.The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze which factors are affecting Chinese green tea exports. In addition, there is a focus on the trade status of Chinese green tea in the EU market, Japan and the United States. To achieve this objective, this paper adopts a modern approach to gravity models, i.e. an approach which uses specifications based on micro-foundations. Specifically, The paper uses a specification which explicitly takes into account the nature of multilateral trade resistance (MTR). More specifically, estimators based on traditional panel methods (combined with the recommended structures of dummies) and Silva-Tenreyro's (2006) PPML estimator (also combined with dummies). The results show that the maximum residue limits(MRL) of pesticides in importing countries have significantly impacted the export of Chinese tea. The cultural effects such as the Language similarity have a positive...
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What Drives the Current Account (Im)balancesin the EU and Are they Relevant to Economic Policy?
Mainka, Jacob ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Paulus, Michal (referee)
Bibliographic note MAINKA, Jacob. What Drives the Current Account (Im)balances in the EU and Are they Relevant to Economic Policy? Praha, 2020. 85 pages. Master thesis (Mgr.). Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies. Supervisor Jaromír Baxa, Ph.D. Abstract With the global financial crisis and the ensuing European sovereign debt crisis, current account imbalances have attracted enormous interest as both a cause and an indicator. The question therefore arises as to what drives them. In this master thesis I carry out a one-way fixed effects panel regression for the 28 EU countries for the period 1999-2018, testing thirteen potential drivers of the current account. From my baseline model, fiscal balance, domestic credit to private sector, total age dependency ratio and the output gap are found to be of robust statistical significance. An additional panel regression was only able to confirm to a small extent the German view that current account imbalances, high foreign debt and deviations from the inflation target bear responsibility for macroeconomic instability. In addition, I show that the current account has limited information value, its underlying drivers are difficult to target by economic policy, and that imbalances as such do not present a serious concern. Upper and...
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What explains different duration of the Great Recession across countries?
Petrů, Vojtěch ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Hlaváček, Michal (referee)
The research concerning differences in duration of the Great Recession is limited and inconclusive. We define duration of crisis as the count of years lost due to the crisis, and estimate the determinants of crisis duration on the dataset of 54 developed and developing countries. This thesis contrasts with previous literature by employing Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to accommodate for the large amount of potential explanatory variables and to address model uncertainty. Moreover, an innovative measure of export competitiveness, which accounts for the changes in non-price factors such as quality, is used. The results bring suggestive evidence of positive impact of developed financial markets, high share of private consumption and improvements in export competitiveness. We also find positive effect of fiscal policy stimulus once it is controlled for the feedback loop of uncertainty which appears when heavily indebted countries finance fiscal stimulus through issuance of additional debt. Lastly, it needs to be concluded, that the results are not robust to all prior specifications. In particular, the more restrictive Beta binomial model prior shrinks the statistical significance of aforementioned results heavily. JEL Classification F12, F21, F23, H25, H71, H87 Keywords Great Recession, Crisis duration, Economic...
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Do markets believe in austerity? Did they ever believe?
Švéda, Josef ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Hlaváček, Michal (referee)
We assess the effects of austerity announcements on investors' perception of the government's solvency across the financial cycle. To do so, we construct a unique news dataset utilizing a newswire database which consists of governmental and parliamentary approvals of austerity measures for 11 European countries. We also follow more regular statements of governmental representatives towards austerity measures. The effects are studied on 10-year sovereign bond yield spreads vis-à-vis Germany during the period 01:2000-12:2019. Implementing pooled OLS regressions, we find significant decreasing effects in the pre-crisis period especially for the GIIPSH group (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Hungary) and decreasing although not significant effects in the post-crisis period. The crisis period manifests itself with increased surprise effects of announcements. The markets adopted announcements of the GIIPSH group as signals of deteriorating solvency which led to further increases of yield spreads. On the other hand, prudent countries (Czechia, France, Netherlands, Poland, and Slovakia) enjoyed a low sensitivity to their announcements across the cycle. Finally, we find that markets react rather on final announcements of austerity measures than to comments expressed by national representatives....
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The Effects of Electronic Records of Sales: A Synthetic Control Method Analysis
Besedová, Monika ; Havránek, Tomáš (advisor) ; Baxa, Jaromír (referee)
The objective of this thesis is to analyze the impact of the electronic records of sales (ERS) implemented on December 1, 2016, in the Czech Republic. The ERS orders given entrepreneurs to use special cash boxes and to send data about single sales to the Financial Authority immediately after each transaction. Experience shows that the ERS reduced tax evasion and the shadow economy. This thesis fills a gap in literature as no study has yet examined the impact of ERS on macroeconomic variables - gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, unemployment rate and harmonized consumer price index (HCPI). To analyze it, I apply SCM by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003), Abadie et al. (2010) and Abadie et al. (2015) that proposes the way how to evaluate the impact of political interventions using a quantitative approach. Using data from the Eurostat and OECD databases from Q1 2004-Q3 2019, the method allows me to construct a counterfactual outcome for GDP per capita, unemployment rate and HCPI in the absence of the implementation of the ERS. I also apply the extension of original SCM - generalize synthetic control method by Xu (2017) and augmented synthetic control method by Ben-Michael et al. (2018) as robustness checks. Moreover, the interference procedures include the modified confidence interval by Firpo and Possebom...
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The Impact of International Sanctions on The Economy of Iran
Kraváček, Tomáš ; Baxa, Jaromír (advisor) ; Palanský, Miroslav (referee)
The pursue of Iran's regional ambitions since the very existence of the Islamic republic has commonly collided with the interests of other regional players such as Saudi Arabia and Israel supported by the U.S. Consequently, Iran has been often a target of various U.S. sanctions. Later, after the continuing Iranian reluctance to abide by the international rules concerning its nuclear programme, the EU joined the U.S. in sanctioning Iran. In 2012, the oil embargo was imposed by the former which dramatically reduced the value of Iranian exports. In this thesis, we apply the synthetic control method to estimate the effect of international sanctions on the economy of Iran. We estimate the possible development of Iranian GDP per capita during the 2010-2015 period had it not been for the international sanctions. Our results show a steady growth of the GDP per capita in the absence of the sanctions. In 2015, the last year of the sanctions, the difference between our estimated GDP per capita and the actual one is 1,911 U.S. dollars. Keywords synthetic control method, nuclear programme, GDP per capita, Iran, sanctions, trade, oil
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