Joklová, T. Economic independence of seniors in the Czech Republic. Diploma thesis. Brno: Mendel University, 2018. This diploma thesis focuses on research of the economic independence of seniors in the Czech Republic. In the literary research are presented basic aspects related to the given issue. The work itself contains information on the space investigated, quantitative research and qualitative research. All parts of own work are interconnected and they can draw adequate conclusions from the subject. The first part of own work focuses on the current situation of the 50+ age group in the company. The second part of own work is devoted to quantitative research. It is processed by IBM-SPSS software, which offers the ability to convert binary logistic regression. The data are obtained through the international SHARE database. The third part is based on qualitative research in the form of in-depth interviews that are processed through MAXQDA software. The aim of the thesis is to propose recommendations on the strengthening of economic independence of elderly people in the Czech Republic, based on the results of own research.

Thesis advisor: Thomas Chemmanur / Thesis advisor: David Solomon / This document comprises three essays regarding actual share repurchases. In Chapter 1, I show that external pressure in the form of equity analysts asking questions about a firm's actual repurchases can lead firms to more extensively follow through on their recently announced open market share repurchase programs. Such a phenomenon cannot be explained by mere firm characteristics. Instead, only analysts' questions that are shorter, more focused on share repurchases, and blunter in language appear to drive firms for greater follow-throughs. The second essay, detailed in Chapter 2, presents another motivation for firms to actually buy back shares under their active open market share repurchase programs. Specifically, firms with higher accounting quality will likely repurchase more shares to signal their accounting superiority after another firm operating in the same product market issues a financial restatement. As a result, the repurchasing firms separate from the pooling equilibrium with lower accounting quality firms and thus incur lower accounting-related litigation risks. Finally, in the third essay, located in Chapter 3, we compare cash dividends with share repurchases. Firms with greater heterogeneity in beliefs between insiders and outsiders, and among outside equity holders more likely prefer share repurchases to cash dividends for payout. Importantly, this finding can partially explain the disappearing dividend puzzle where rising heterogeneity in beliefs in the economy may have contributed to the substitution of cash dividends with share repurchases in the past two decades. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Finance.

Thesis advisor: Donald Cox / This dissertation consists of three related chapters. A unifying feature throughout all is a focus on the role of regional earnings distributions, especially at the Commuting Zone level, in driving social and economic behavior. The first chapter examines the role of women's and men's expected earnings, across Commuting Zones, in driving women's and men's location choices (migration). The second chapter, a collaboration with Lia Yin, examines the roles of the upper and lower tails of the earnings distribution in driving crime rates, with a key distinction made between crimes motivated primarily by emotional gain, and those motivated by financial gain. Both chapters one and two use simple structural models, identified by Shift-Share (Bartik) instruments as instrumental variables. The third chapter delves into the history, meaning, and scope of Shift-Share instruments, develops several new variants, and tests them in an application to measuring effects of earnings inequality single parenting rates. The first chapter, "How Women and Men Choose Where to Live Based on Each Other's Expected Earnings," considers how the distribution of earnings between genders may influence the distribution of the population via internal migration. Might the earnings potential of prospective spouses drive migration choices? Migrants who flock to places with high-earning prospective partners can cause sex ratios to become unbalanced. Shortages of men have been shown to increase rates of single parenting, and shortages of women to increase crime. Past attempts to answer this question have been limited to brief windows in time, and have lacked causal identification. I build a 7-decade panel of U.S. Commuting Zones from Census and American Community Survey data, computing gender-specific Shift-Share (Bartik) instruments in order to isolate exogenous variation in women's and men's expected earnings. I find that both women and men place at least twice as much priority weight on men's expected earnings as they do on women's, indicating a gender asymmetry in preferences. This asymmetry slightly erodes over time from 1970 to 2019, consistent with a shift in norms. Because women and men prioritize men's earnings over women's by about the same amount, gender differences in earnings play little role in driving sex ratio imbalance. However, women place more weight than men do on the sum of women's and men's earnings, so that the ratio of women to men increases by about 1% per 10% increase in earnings. More balanced sex ratios may follow from policies that reduce overall (gender neutral) inequality, such as between urban and rural areas. The second chapter, "The Distinct Roles of Poverty and Higher Earnings in Motivating Crime," considers how the two extremes of the earnings distribution bear upon people's propensity to turn to crime. Does inequality lead to more crime? We develop a new model that articulates how Poverty (the lower tail of the earnings distribution) and Earnings (the upper tail) enter into equilibrium crime rates. In our model, individuals in Poverty have less to lose in the context of criminal punishment, so are less averse to committing crimes in general. The presence of high Earnings (therefore things worth stealing) heightens the expected gain to offenders per crime - but specifically in terms of financial gain, not emotional gain. We estimate our model on a comprehensive panel of U.S. Commuting Zones (1980-2016), deploying novel Shift-Share instruments to correct for reverse causality (of crime on the earnings distribution). Corroborating our hypothesis, we find that high Earnings plays a much larger role in driving crimes that yield financial gain to the offender (various forms of theft) than it does for crimes of emotional gain; while Poverty is a driving force equally across both types of crime. In each case, not accounting for reverse causality would underestimate both effects, often by more than double. The third and final chapter, "Novel Shift-Share Instruments and Their Applications," digs deeper into the topic of Shift-Share (Bartik) instruments, which are vital in both of the earlier chapters. Shift-Share instruments are among the most important tools for causal identification in economics. In this paper, I crystallize main ideas underlying Shift-Share instruments - their core structure, distinctive claim to validity as instruments, history, uses, and wealth of varieties. I argue that the essence of the Shift-Share approach is to decompose the endogenous explanatory variable into an accounting identity with multiple components; preserve that which is most exogenous in the accounting identity, and neutralize that which is most endogenous. Following this framework, I show clearly how several variants in the literature are related. I then develop formulas for several new variants. Particularly, I show how to develop Shift-Share instruments for distribution summaries beyond the mean - the variance, skew, absolute deviation around a central point, and Gini coefficient. As an empirical application that highlights the themes of the paper, I measure the effect of earnings inequality on rates of single parenting in the U.S., comparing results using each of various alternative instruments for the Gini coefficient. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Cycling, and micromobility tools like bike share, have increasingly been recognized for their health, economic and environmental benefits, and municipalities have recently made encouraging the use of these modes of urban transportation both a policy and a financial priority. Many studies, using varying methods, have identified and confirmed an association between an increased presence and connectivity of cycling infrastructure (bike lanes, cycle tracks, etc.) and cycling or bike share ridership. Determining a more explicit causal link between infrastructure and ridership, however, often proves challenging to researchers, due to data limitations and a variety of simultaneous, exogenous, factors that abound within complex urban transportation systems. Given the financial impacts of capital investment in infrastructure, more closely establishing this causal link, and identifying infrastructure’s ability to generate cycling and bike share traffic, is of growing importance to municipal governments and taxpayers. Using Hamilton Bike Share (HBS) trip logs and GPS trajectories occurring between January, 2019 and August, 2022 (n = 741,369 and 609,746, respectively), this thesis constructs individual shapefiles of each HBS trip for GIS analysis through Dalumpines and Scott’s (2011) GIS-Based Map-Matching Algorithm. It investigates the impact of ten separated cycling infrastructure projects in Hamilton, constructed between 2019 and 2022, on HBS ridership along the respective intervention segments. The thesis also holistically analyzes the spatial and ridership impacts of one infrastructure intervention, the Victoria Avenue cycle track, on the distribution of riders using the segment of interest, a more precise classification of post-intervention trip natures (‘induced’ or ‘diverted’) using a novel categorization process, and maps the impact of the iv segment on trip diversion to use the cycle track. Results indicate that five of the ten interventions have had significant, positive, impacts on monthly HBS ridership along their respective segments, with others having nearly statistically significant results as well. Moreover, the Victoria Avenue cycle track lessened the cost of distance associated with using Victoria Avenue, and 46.9% of trips along the cycle track post-intervention, were determined to be ‘induced’ trips. Finally, of the streets in the Victoria Avenue cycle track’s neighborhood, the cycle track segments were the only segments to experience ridership increases post-intervention, which indicates a significant level of trip diversion and funneling of trips to use the cycle track. These results enhance findings from the literature and more concretely quantify the direct impacts of infrastructure investments. Investments in infrastructure appear to make a significant difference in increasing ridership and serve to benefit more than just existing riders. This thesis can have an important impact on municipal active transportation planning, policy, and financing, through its results and by providing a methodological foundation for future research into infrastructure’s impacts on a variety of users. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

<P> This dissertation aims to advance empirical research in the realm of knowledge sharing in virtual communities and to help practitioners better understand the factors that inhibit (cost) or motivate (benefit) such behaviour. The impact of some costs and benefits (factors derived from social exchange theory) may be contingent upon certain social contexts or conditions (factors derived from social capital theory). To this end, two research models were developed (i.e., a main effects model and an interaction model) that integrate these two theories together. New constructs specific to the virtual community context were also incorporated. To test these models, an online survey was administered to 968 members of a large IT professional virtual community comprising millions of registered users. </p> <p> Findings from a structural equation modeling analysis of this data set suggest that specific benefits and social capital factors have direct effects on an individual's intention to share knowledge, and more importantly, the impacts of some benefits are contingent upon certain social capital factors. Specifically, the impact of online score rewards on an individual's intention to share knowledge with others in the virtual community is contingent upon that person's trust in the people who are seeking knowledge from that individual. Additionally, the impact of reciprocity on an individual's intention to share knowledge is moderated by pro-sharing norms in the virtual community. </p> <p> A major contribution of this dissertation is the provision of new theoretical insights that help explain how certain benefits and social capital factors affect knowledge sharing activity in virtual communities. It is hoped that these insights will help builders and managers of knowledge-based virtual communities better promote online knowledge sharing behaviours and improve the sustainability of such communities in the future. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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This thesis examines factors that influence the daily number of trip departures and arrivals at over 100 hubs comprising Hamilton, Ontario’s (Canada) bike share program – SoBi (Social Bicycles) Hamilton. SoBi operates all year, and during its first year of operation (April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016), over 200,000 trips were generated on SoBi bikes. The study utilizes data from SoBi Hamilton, the 2011 Canadian Census, the 2011 Transportation Tomorrow Survey, Environment Canada, and Hamilton’s Open Source Data initiative. From these master files, daily trips, meteorological data, temporal variables, socio-demographic and built environment attributes were obtained to generate a comprehensive suite of explanatory variables to explain the daily trips at each hub. A multilevel regression approach was used to understand the associations between bike share usage at each hub and each suite of explanatory variables at two temporal scales: total daily trips at hubs and total daily trips across four time periods of the day. Findings demonstrate that weather and temporal attributes play a significant role in trip departures and arrivals. In addition, hub attributes vary in significance throughout different times of the day for trip departures and arrivals. Overall, the methodology and findings allow us to identify factors that increase SoBi usage, which can also benefit city planners and engineers who are implementing a bike share system with the goal of maximizing bike share activity in urban centers. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Scheduling forms an important aspect of operating systems because it has a direct impact on system performance. Most existing general-purpose schedulers use a priority-based scheme to schedule processes. Such priority-based mechanisms cannot guarantee proportional fairness for every process. Proportional share schedulers maintain fairness among tasks based on given weight values. In both of these scheduler types, the scheduling decision is done per-process. However, system usage policies are typically set on a per-consumer basis, where a consumer represents a group of related processes that may belong to the same application or user. The COPS framework uses the idea of consumer sets to group processes. Its design guarantees system usage per consumer, based on relative weights. We have added a share management layer on top of a proportional share scheduler to ease the administrative job of share assignment for these consumer sets. We have evaluated our system in real world scenarios and show that the CPU usage for consumer sets with CPU-bound processes complies with the administrator-defined policy goals. / Master of Science

This thesis gives a brief account on the segmented Chinese stock markets. The indexes of A shares, i.e. shares on the domestic market sold only to domestic investors and the H share index, i.e. foreign shares sold on a foreign stock market, Hong Kong, and sold only to foreigners are compared. With time, the Chinese government is opening up its stock market more and more and allowing more interaction between local and domestic stock markets, but one step at a time. Three major attempts to open up the markets are described and investigated on their effect on the integration of the H share market and the A share market. We checked for the introduction of CEPA, QDII and “through train”. The tests applied were ADF test, Engle-Granger cointegration test and Granger causality test. We found no cointegration for the entire sample and in none of the subsamples we used. The findings on the causality relations among the different stock markets don’t confirm any of the four causality relations defined before. We don’t see any unidirectional causality and it changes over time. We cannot confirm the global center hypothesis or the home bias hypothesis, but we can also not claim that the markets are completely segmented and show no correlation among prices. There is a correlation and there are causality links but they change every time the government changes its regulations. However, it is not clear what kind of regulations will make the causality change in which direction.

Pledging a share in a business corporation In my master thesis I focus on pledging a share of shareholder a limited liability company, which is a relatively common legal disposition with the share. Master thesis is based on valid and effective legal regulation that brought a number of innovations. In some chapters there is also mentioned the historical development of the institute for better orientation of the readers. The thesis examines legal literature, legal periodicals as well as attempts to capture also the applicability of existing case law on the new legislation. The main contribution of this work is to provide an interpretation of the provisions of which so far there is little consensus in the legal community, as well as pointing on problems and risks that regulation brings, especially from the perspective of the pledgee. The thesis is divided into four chapters, each chapter focuses on a different area of pledging a share of shareholder a limited liability company. The first chapter defines general issues of pledge and define the subject of a lien and includes a brief introduction of the legal nature of the share. In the second chapter, the reader is introduced into the mode of the establishment and creation of a pledge to a share, assumptions of its pledgebility and the process of...