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Parenting of Sons or Daughters, Household Decisions Making and Family Characteristics
Maksymovych, Sergii ; Jurajda, Štěpán (advisor) ; Kabátek, Jan (referee) ; Palguta, Ján (referee)
The first chapter examines how household living conditions are related to alternative allocations of control over decision-making in the household. This study has three main findings. First, more equally shared decision-making in a household is closely connected to better household living conditions. Second, while predominant decision-control accrued to any of partners is correlated with worse living conditions, this is more pronounced for women rather than men. Finally, the distribution of the mode of decision-making in households does not strongly predict the regime of family finances. The second chapter contributes to the body of research indicating the presence of a parental preference for a particular gender of children. The main objective of this paper is to test between the two main explanations for the existence of such preference, namely differences in the costs of raising sons and daughters versus the gender bias (corresponding to parental utility derived from a child's gender or from characteristics exclusive to that gender). Our evidence corroborates the cost difference explanation in countries exhibiting daughter preference. In the third chapter, I obtain three findings regarding the impact of the first-born child's gender on family stability. First, couples who have a first-born...
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Information complexity of strategic voting
Palguta, Ján ; Turnovec, František (advisor) ; Doležel, Pavel (referee)
This thesis in political economy considers the concept of strategic optimisation of voting behaviour under imperfect information. Under strategic voting we understand an act of voting for other than voter s best preferred (order of) alternatives. Motivation for this thesis comes from the empirically witnessed fact that a substantial portion of the electorate votes for their second or third best preferred alternatives, seeing that their most preferred alternatives face in expectation low probabilities of voting success. At other instances, the voters vote strategically with the intentions of strengthening the coalitional partners to their best choices or to weaken the coalitional partners of the undesired parties. Despite to the evident individual rationality of the strategic voting, strategic voting is typically socially suboptimal. Strategic voting leads to social choices that do not reflect the truthful preferences of the public. Via a series of computation-based simulations the thesis studies the relative vulnerability of the most common voting procedures to strategic manipulation. The thesis categorizes these voting procedures by their degree of susceptibility to voting manipulation. By standard econometric techniques it confirms that strategic voting is most threatening in small groups,...
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The impact of higher wages of politicians on municipal elections
Palguta, Ján ; Pertold, Filip
This study investigates whether raising local representatives’ pay has the potential to motivate\ncitizens to stand for election and thus improve the selection of elected councillors. We look\nat the influence pay has on the number of political subjects that enter the election (i.e. on the political competition), and at the selection of representatives in terms of their education, previous profession, gender and age. To identify the causal effects of salaries, we use the existence of sharp increases in the salaries paid to mayors based on municipality size.\n
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Who is your mayor? Electoral competition and characteristics of political representatives in small Czech municipalities
Palguta, Ján
This study empirically demonstrates that the electoral competition for seats in the municipal councils substantially declines with the size of municipalities. Municipalities with 10,000-20,000 inhabitants see an average of 8.8 candidates competing for one council seat, while municipalities with under 1,000 inhabitants have an average of just 2.2 candidates. About 450,000 Czech citizens reside in municipalities “affected” by the very small pool of candidates (no more than two) for one council seat. In summary, this study demonstrates that the residential structure in the Czech Republic contributes to limited competition between political candidates in small municipalities, which can reflect upon the quality of representatives and consequently upon the quality and efficiency of municipal administration. Together with the high costs of administration in small municipalities, low political competition represents another undesirable aspect of the highly atomized residential structure in the Czech Republic.
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Economic Impact of Voting and Procurement Rules
Palguta, Ján ; Filer, Randall (advisor) ; Guriev, Sergei (referee) ; Gylfason, Thorvaldur (referee)
In the first chapter of this dissertation, I examine the impact of increasing the number of parties in political representation bodies on public spending and selection of politically-connected suppliers in public procurement. By exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the vote share of parties near the representation threshold in Czech municipal elections, I find that municipalities having more parties represented in their councils allocate fewer procurements to corporate donors of political parties, attract more suppliers to procurement tenders and reduce procurement prices. The impact of broader party representation is pronounced in politically competitive councils, but is not related to whether marginally represented parties are incumbent or not. The second chapter presents evidence of how policies that create opportunities to avoid open competition in procurement lead to the manipulation of procurement values. We exploit a policy reform in which public bodies were given autonomy to preselect potential contractors below newly defined discretionary thresholds. Manipulation is revealed through bunching of procurements just below the thresholds in construction works and services, and to a lesser degree, in goods. Among manipulated contracts, we document a threefold increase in the probability...
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Information complexity of strategic voting
Palguta, Ján ; Turnovec, František (advisor) ; Doležel, Pavel (referee)
This thesis in political economy considers the concept of strategic optimisation of voting behaviour under imperfect information. Under strategic voting we understand an act of voting for other than voter s best preferred (order of) alternatives. Motivation for this thesis comes from the empirically witnessed fact that a substantial portion of the electorate votes for their second or third best preferred alternatives, seeing that their most preferred alternatives face in expectation low probabilities of voting success. At other instances, the voters vote strategically with the intentions of strengthening the coalitional partners to their best choices or to weaken the coalitional partners of the undesired parties. Despite to the evident individual rationality of the strategic voting, strategic voting is typically socially suboptimal. Strategic voting leads to social choices that do not reflect the truthful preferences of the public. Via a series of computation-based simulations the thesis studies the relative vulnerability of the most common voting procedures to strategic manipulation. The thesis categorizes these voting procedures by their degree of susceptibility to voting manipulation. By standard econometric techniques it confirms that strategic voting is most threatening in small groups,...
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Information complexity of strategic voting
Palguta, Ján ; Doležel, Pavel (referee) ; Turnovec, František (advisor)
The thesis computationally simulates 10 different voting procedures for small numbers of voters and small numbers of competing alternatives so as to study the vulnerability of these procedures to strategic voting. This is followed by a study of vulnerability of strategic voting to the variation in the amount of information that individual strategic agents possess. The susceptibility to strategic voting is shown to be a function of the number of election participants, of the number of competing alternatives, of the used voting procedure and prominently of the amount of information that the individual voter holds about other voters' voting preferences. Once we strip the agent of the full knowledge of the collective preference profile, we confirm the vulnerability of strategic voting both to an absolute and relative reduction in the amount of information. A minimal reduction in strategic agent's holding of information severely threatens her ability of successful strategic manipulation.
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Political competition in local governments and public procurement
Palguta, Ján
Municipalities in the Czech Republic manage 23.9% of the total public expenditure (approximately 10% of the GDP), with approximately half of these funds redistributed through public procurement. This is a very significant amount of public resources that should be given due attention. This analysis demonstrates that the composition of municipal governments significantly influences the process of public procurement. Our methodology allows to interpreting the estimated relationships as causal, rather than as mere correlations.
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Political party donors on the public procurement market
Palguta, Ján
Entrepreneurs who make donations to political parties in the Czech Republic have a considerable share in the public procurement market. From 2007 to 2013, political donors were awarded 16.3 percent of public procurement contracts, which amounts to 16.6 percent of the contracts value. On average, the annual value of public procurements awarded to political donors was 32.8 billion CZK, which amounts to 0.7 percent of the GDP. Our analysis cannot determine whether contracting authorities select political donors using less transparent tender procedures in order to choose effective contractors who have proven themselves to the contracting authority in the past, or whether the political donations play a part in the selection process.
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