Internal Research Seminars

Health inequality has a significant genetic component and socio-economic factors, including education, can moderate the effects of genes. However, little is known about whether more years of education can effectively moderate the relationship between genetic conditions and severe contemporary diseases and medical conditions. I use UK Biobank data to investigate the relationship between education, genetic endowment, and four health conditions: heart attack, cancer, stroke, and type-2 diabetes. To avoid the potential endogeneity of education, I focus on the long-term health consequences of a 1972 increase in the UK school-leaving age (ROSLA). As a measure of genetic endowment, I use an index of genetic predispositions for obesity. Genetic predispositions are typically summarised by a weighted average of individual genetic markers called polygenic scores (PGS), where weights are derived from analyses performed on different populations. Furthermore, the outcomes of these analyses often differ from the outcomes the PGS is used to predict. This may skew the results of follow up studies of other outcomes, including cancer. I introduce a two-step method that adjusts the available weights to new outcomes, and show that genetic predisposition for obesity increases the risks of the four diseases I study. The results based on my new method show that the additional year of schooling driven by the ROSLA reform diminished the importance of genetic predispositions for the risks of cancer and heart attack by 40%. The results offer new evidence on how environments moderate the inequalities in health that have been tilted from birth.

We exploit a historical experiment that occurred in Czechoslovakia after World War Two to study the drivers of social capital accumulation in an extremely unfavorable environment. Between 1945 and 1948, the Sudetenland became the scene of ethnic cleansing, with the expulsion of nearly three million German speakers and the simultaneous influx of nearly two million resettlers. Focusing on the areas where at least 90 % of the population was forced to leave, we show that the municipalities hosting a church built before 1945 developed significantly higher social capital under the communist rule, which persisted after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the current days.

We estimate the impact of temperatures on work related accident rates in Italy by using daily data on weather conditions matched to administrative daily data on work related accidents. The identification strategy of the causal effect relies on the plausible exogeneity of short-term daily temperature variations in a given spatial unit. We find that both high and cold temperatures impair occupational health by increasing workplace injury rates. The positive effect of warmer weather conditions on work related accident rates is larger for men, in manufacturing and service sectors, and for workplace injuries. Colder temperatures lead to a substantial increase in commuting accidents, especially during rainy days.

This paper examines how cognitive and non-cognitive abilities relate to economic preferences. Cognitive abilities are a comprehensive structure of abilities (attention, memory, intelligence, etc.) that are interconnected. From the existing literature, it follows that the level of cognitive abilities has an influence on the decision-making of individuals and can positively or negatively affect their incomes and future economic planning. However, the level of cognitive abilities is not enough to fully understand the individual and his decisions. For this reason, we will also focus on non-cognitive abilities in the research. These are most often characterized by personality traits that are commonly measured by the Big Five test. This test assesses the following personality traits – neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Personality traits are another factor that characterizes the overall individuality of a particular individual. However, it is currently unclear how non-cognitive abilities relate to economic preferences. In the presentation, we will introduce the study design and discuss how the relationship between cognitive abilities, personality traits and economic preferences will be investigated.

With its current skyrocketing prices, electricity costs became one of the most discussed issues over the past year as it is an essential input for any economic activity. Unlike private businesses or consumers, public institutions cannot purchase electricity freely but are bound by a procurement framework and rules on how electricity contracts need to be concluded.

In principle, a public institution can purchase electricity through public tenders or through commodities exchanges. The key question is how the lowest prices can be achieved and which of these procurement options – competition in public tenders or trades at the commodities exchanges – prompts the desired outcome. This contribution aims to investigate this empirically.

We collected unique data on public institutions’ energy contracts in Czechia between 2013 and 2021 from the Czech public registry of procurement deals. The data allows us to distinguish between contracts concluded through public tender or through commodities exchanges, identify the size of the contract and its final price.

Our results suggest that there is generally a higher degree of competition at the commodity exchanges in comparison to public tenders and that the prices at commodity exchanges are lower. Although many factors might result in lower prices, our analyses suggest that the competitiveness of the environment in public tenders and on the commodities exchanges is the main driving factor.

Our findings have important implications for how electricity – an essential production input – should be purchased by public institutions. The results point to possible saving for public institutions when purchasing energy on commodities exchange as compared to public tenders.

The research explores relationship between perceived wealth inequality and political attitudes. Based on relative deprivation theory, I assume, that information treatment showing actual level of wealth inequality may increase willingness to take part in different political activities and even lead to higher level of anti-system attitudes. The aim of the presentation is to introduce preliminary results based on collected data and discuss possibilities for further research. Crucial areas to assess are the form of information treatment, and possible narrowing of the target group (from representative sample of Czech population to its specific parts, for example people living in peripheral regions).

In recent years, the debate about central banking and climate change has gained significant momentum. It can be said that central bankers and regulators reached a consensus that climate change will affect central banking but there seems to be no consensus on what should central banks do in reaction. This paper analyses the current debate about the so-called green central banking. It classifies policies of European central banks and prudential regulators that were applied, discussed, or proposed as a reaction to the phenomenon of climate change. The paper is based on annual reports and other official statements of these institutions which are analyzed by textual analysis. The classification should clarify the debate in a broader socio-economic context and offer a common language for climate change-related policies of central banks.

I investigate how workers respond to learning that a manager trusts them less than she does their peers. In a laboratory experiment, responsibility for a manager’s earnings is divided unequally between two workers. I vary whether this responsibility allocation decision is made by the manager, or by a random device on the manager’s behalf. Importantly, being entrusted with more/less responsibility for the manager's payoff does not change the workers' wages. Despite this, I find that workers are less generous toward the manager when they are intentionally, as opposed to randomly, assigned a lower level of responsibility. This effect is mediated by the emotional response to learning that the manager chose to place her trust in the other worker. I find no positive effect of being entrusted with higher responsibility. My results demonstrate that managerial decisions that are materially irrelevant for workers can generate a negative reciprocal response if they reveal to the worker that she is less trusted relative to her peers.

This study examines the role of historically defined social identity in human capital development over time by focusing on a region from India where social identities are defined along the lines of castes and religious groups. It investigates the evolution of gaps across social groups in children’s cognitive outcomes and parental investment in children’s education from ages 5 to 15. Significant gaps in test scores and parental investment are found between children from lower and upper Hindu castes. These gaps, which originate early in childhood and persist throughout the 10 years of the study period, cannot be completely explained by the differences in socioeconomic status across social groups. Moreover, the perception of social discrimination is also found to be a significant contributor to the gaps in cognitive outcomes and parental investment across social groups. While parents’ perceived social discrimination is associated with lower parental investment throughout childhood, it is negatively associated with children’s cognitive outcomes only at later ages.

The unforgettable COVID-19 shock can only be reversed by a viable vaccination strategy. In this paper, we investigate the willingness to be vaccinated (WTV) against COVID-19. We provide first-of-its-kind empirical evidence on the citizens (N=11,932) of the EU-27 by employing recent data from the European Commission. Controlling for the correlations in the error terms, we utilize a simulated multivariate probit regression model. Our results show that amongst all the statistically significant drivers of the WTV, the positive perception (vaccination works and has no side effects); R&D information (clarity on how vaccination is developed, tested, and authorized) have the largest impact on the WTV. We find that the group of variables on social feedback, and trustworthy sources of information are to be considered for WTV policy. The counteracting policy gaps are also identified. Our work is novel and has implications for COVID-19 vaccination policies across the EU.

Stochastic processes based on standard Brownian motions can't address an established "stylized fact" in finance: the long-range dependence or memory effect. This issue has stimulated the inclusion of alternative diffusion mechanisms in the price modeling, namely fractional Brownian motion and its relatives. Here, we will revisit the application of fractional-based diffusions for option pricing purposes and its relation with the efficient market hypothesis. Moreover, we will address some further extensions based on multifractional Brownian motions and their capabilities to mimic some financial features, proposing new results around them.

In this paper, I investigate the long-term dynamics of informational market efficiency between portfolios of different levels of market capitalisation. The convergence in market efficiency between portfolios, represented by different S&P and FTSE indices, can be observed in time. However, the convergence was mostly completed by 2006. An asymmetrical response to shock is observed between portfolios. Lower capitalised portfolios were more negatively affected by them. A positive relationship between market efficiency and market capitalisation was observed for all indices, however, the market efficiency of S&P 500 was lower than that of S&P 400 and S&P 600 from 2006 onward.

This paper aims to verify if the price fluctuation of the Ruble during the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian crisis was predictable, as indicated via implied volatility and investor's (general population's) attention. It uses high-frequency attention, implied volatility, and price data and provides evidence that both attention and implied volatility are relevant for predicting price fluctuations in the short run.

In this proposal, we aim to briefly present several hypotheses of our recent research interest, which stems from an ongoing military conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The impact the conflict has on assets price variation cannot be doubted, and the information availability may play an integral part in assets high price variation as it did in no conflict before. Thus, we want to explore the magnitude of attention through google search queries and whether attention to the conflict may lead to higher asset price variation in global equity markets. We are also interested in the influence regarding asset prices and the proximity to the conflict. Current preliminary results suggest that the attention towards the conflict is significant in the after-invasion period and helps predict volatility.

The existing literature provides mixed results on the usefulness of implied volatility for managing risky assets, while evidence with respect to expected shortfall predictions is almost nonexistent. Given its forward-looking nature, implied volatility might be more useful than backward-looking measures of realized price fluctuations. On the other hand, the volatility risk premium embedded in implied volatility leads to overestimation of the observed price variation. This paper explores the benefits of augmenting econometric models used in forecasting the expected shortfall, a risk measured endorsed in the Basel III Accord, with information on implied volatility obtained from EUR/USD option contracts. The day-ahead forecasts are obtained with a two-step procedure, where the estimates of value-at-risk for several quantiles are combined to approximate the predicted expected shortfall. We consider several classes of econometric models: historical simulation, GARCH, quantile regression--based HAR and combination forecasts. Using formal statistical tests, we verify whether the resulting expected shortfall forecasts are well behaved and test the models' accuracy. Our results provide evidence that the information provided by forward-looking implied volatility is more useful than that in backward-looking realized measures. These results hold across multiple model specifications, are stable over time, hold under alternative loss functions and are more pronounced during periods of higher market uncertainty, when managing asset risk matters most.

Institutional economy understands the institutions to be factors of economic growth. It also understands the inclination towards entrepreneurship as and institution. This creates a room for analysing the entrepreneurial contribution to economic growth. The idea is to study the connections between people's behaviour in terms of their desire to run a business, and the performance of the economy. Using pubic opinion polls, I aim to define and quantify an entrepreneur as an institution, add the institution into a neoclassic growth model, and explore what role the entrepreneurs have in the Czech Republic and Austria. These two countries are similar in size and culture, however, one has a 40 years long experience with the entrepreneurial activity being forbidden. The study can therefore show another dimension of what needs to be changed in order to transform an economy.

Rising economic inequality has been a long-lasting trend across the world for the last few decades.  At the same time, we can observe the rise of extremist and populist political parties in many countries, including established democracies. Is it possible to identify a causal link between these phenomena? The coronavirus disease and consequent lockdown restrictions created a natural experiment that give us an opportunity to explore this link. Many areas of the economy were affected heavily, meanwhile, others experienced only minor problems which resulted in heterogeneous development of economic inequality. In my research, I intend to use this heterogeneous impact of the pandemic and explore the voting behaviour and support for anti-system parties across regions of the Czech Republic.

This paper reports the results of a study that examined racial biases among judges evaluating professional boxers during bouts in the U.S. Data were collected for 184 mixed-race bouts and contained extensive information on boxers and judges. The results showed that white boxers were more likely to receive top scores from white judges than from non-white judges, all else equal. The results also showed that white boxers were more likely to win a bout when the crew of judges was all white than when the crew was racially diverse. We attribute our findings to white own-race bias.

The technological development that has occurred in the last two decades has resulted in the transfer of many activities to the digital space. Currently, access to the Internet and the use of digital services by consumers are not only facilitating but also a condition for full participation in social, cultural and professional life. Digitization is therefore extremely important in the context of social exclusion and its financial component. Research conducted around the world (Bayero, 2015; EFInA, 2013; Ouma, Odongo, & Were, 2017) indicates the enormous role played by the development and dissemination of mobile payments in reducing the scale of financial exclusion, especially in underdeveloped and developing countries. On the other hand, however, increasing digitization and concerns about using digital services or the inability to use them may contribute to financial exclusion in developed countries. The use of modern technologies may limit access to financial services and thus reduce the scale of financial inclusion (Martinez, 2013; Reddy, 2017). In this paper, I use survey data to identify factors influencing the digital financial inclusion of consumers.

When people take decisions under risk, it is not only the expected utility that is important, but also the shape of the distribution of utility: clearly the dispersion is important, but also the skewness. For given mean and dispersion, decision-makers treat positively and negatively skewed prospects differently. This paper presents a new behaviourally-inspired model for decision making under risk, incorporating both dispersion and skewness. We run a horse-race of this new model against six other models of decision-making under risk and show that it outperforms many in terms of goodness of fit and shows a reasonable performance in predictive ability. It can incorporate the prominent anomalies of standard theory such as the Allais paradox, the valuation gap, and preference reversals, and also the behavioural patterns observed in experiments that cannot be explained by Rank Dependent Utility Theory.

Using a vignette experiment, the present study investigated implicit gender biases against female applicants and whether these biases affect females’ chances of being employed/dismissed and the pay they are offered. A total of 155 HR specialists participated in the study. In Task 1, they were randomly assigned to conditions and evaluated three candidates (all three either men or women) for the post of regional sales manager based on the applicant’s competences, hireability, likeability, and proposed salary. In Task 2, participants were showed a set of vignettes presenting six employees selected for potential dismissal. The paper contributes to the literature by pointing to differential treatment of men and women in the labour market context. While women are likely to be directly discriminated against by significantly lower pay offers, men may suffer from a strong backlash when they have lower educational attainment and display feminine working patterns.

A sample of 155 HR managers participated in an experimental vignette study. In Task 1, they evaluated three CV resumes in terms of the candidates’ competence, hireability, likeability and wage proposal of three candidates applying for a regional manager post. Half of the sample received CVs presented as females’ and half as males’, otherwise the CVs were identical. Generally, male and female candidates were evaluated similarly in terms of competence and hireability. Average and worst male candidates were evaluated as less likeable than identical females. However, wages offered to female candidates were significantly lower than those offered to male candidates. We were unable to identify moderators of the phenomenon other than female HR managers driving the effect. In Task 2, participants were showed a set of vignettes presenting six employees (3 men and 3 women) preselected to be dismissed due to the economic crisis. Apart from basic demographics, the employees were described in terms of age, years in the company and frequency of absences. Again, we switched employees’ gender for half of the sample. We have found that HR managers are more likely to dismiss male employees and that they are particularly unforgiving to male workers with frequent absences.

Big Data Analytics (BDA) has become a crucial source of competition and over the last several years been ranked among the top agenda items of business and IT executives. While some research has been conducted to explore the link between BDA and its potential business value, current knowledge on the link between BDA and innovation performance remains unclear. To fill this gap, based on the dynamic capabilities view, this research proposes a conceptual model to explore how and under what mechanisms, using BDA can influence innovation performance. This research conceptualizes firm agility, in terms of dynamic capability, and introduces three related constructs (i.e., sensing agility, decision-making agility, and acting agility). We also consider the moderating roles of data-driven culture and BDA team sophistication. Using the survey data, we uncover that dynamic capabilities mediate the link between BDA use and innovation performance. Besides, we find out that data-driven culture moderates the link between sensing agility and decision-making agility; however, such a moderating effect is not observed on the relationship between BDA use and sensing agility. This research also supports the moderating role of BDA team sophistication on the link between BDA use and sensing agility. We conclude the paper by providing contributions and future research directions.

Agents with extreme positions may take actions in order to trigger a conflict. In the degree of violence, these actions may range from violent riots to symbolic political acts and the creation of fake news. We develop experimental design that investigates whether a provocateur can trigger a conflict by making cheap-talk statements. The experiment consist of three treatments: control without provocateur, treatment with provocateur and treatment where provocateur's preferences are known.

We analyse commuting patterns in Bratislava's fast growing sub-urban region with sub-optimal developed infrastructure. Standardized discrete choice model is used to estimate demand for individual car transport as well as for public buses and trains and to obtain corresponding elasticities with respect to travel costs, times and income. We find low rate of substitution between available modes. Direct price elasticity for public modes is in accordance with often cited rule of thumb -0.3. Negative income elasticities of demand for buses and trains, together with low direct price elasticity for car transport can be hard to overcome when looking for solution of current traffic problems in the region. We use modelled demand to predict effects of two recently proposed policies - new parking system in Bratislava city and construction of highway D4R7. In case of first policy, we expect massive reduction in car usage due to increased costs for car commuters. On the other hand, new highway would have only limited impact on mode choice and could reduce number of train commuters.

The paper aims to determine whether the political conflict between Catalonia and Spain leads to higher foreign exports in the region. Empirical analysis, based on the gravity model approach, indicates that the trade and intrastate conflict in Catalonia are related. Both the Poisson model with country and time fixed effects, and the fixed-effects panel data model show that Catalan foreign exports are positively associated with the past values of conflict in the region. Testing for endogeneity fails to support the view of a reciprocal relationship between domestic conflict and foreign trade.

Previous literature has explored how agents respond to a signal of perceived distrust and shows that it lowers the agent’s motivation to act in the trustor’s (or principal’s) best interests. Distrust, in these studies is conveyed through either limiting the agent’s choice set or increasing the extent to which the agent is monitored. The proposed study is based on the idea that distrust may also be conveyed when a principal deliberately reduces the power of an agent to influence a given outcome based on the agent’s past track-record of performance. This may occur in situations in which a superior should decide, based on the past performance of the workers reporting to her, how to allocate responsibility among them. In such situations, the level of responsibility allocated to a worker may reflect the superior’s expectations of that worker’s performance relative to others. In other words, it may convey a signal of the extent to which a superior (dis)trusts how well one worker would perform relative to others. While it may seem natural for superiors to place the most responsibility possible with the worker that performed the best in the past, this could backfire if there is a large drop in the performance of the employee who feels he has been made needlessly irrelevant. This is because this worker might perceive the allocation decision as a signal that he has been distrusted as a result of a superior having an (unreasonably) low expectation of his performance. In the real world, it could be that this feeling that one has been made (disproportionately) less relevant is actually independent of the level of responsibility one has. In order to measure the pure effect of being made to feel less relevant (or feeling distrusted), we propose a lab experiment that varies the deliberate nature of the allocation decision while keeping the level of responsibility constant. Based on the previous literature, our hypothesis is that workers who are deliberately made less relevant will perform worse than those for whom the decision was not deliberate, keeping the level of responsibility constant. Additionally, we predict that this effect will be stronger for males than females and so we plan to gender balance the experimental treatments.

The presentation introduces the issue of gender in economics. I will show why gender matters in economic research and how should it be investigated. I will discuss three working papers: one on the approaches to measure gender-related self and gender differences and two showing possible applications of the approach in the research practice. I will start with explaining what a good “gender measure” is and which conditions it should satisfy. Then, I will proceed with discussing pitfalls of the dominating simplistic “gender as a variable” paradigm contrasting it with a “gender as an influence” approach. The main aim of the presentation is to point out possible gains from abandoning the traditional perspective treating biological sex as an explanation of observed differences in favour of a more sensitive, gender-oriented approach.