Denna uppsats försöker besvara frågan: Vad förklarar skillnader i trångboddhet mellan OECD:s medlemsländer? Detta görs genom tvärsnittsstudie där jag analyserar vilken effekt faktorerna Hyresreglering, Reglering av byggbranschen, Demografiska förändringar, Styrande regeringsparti och Välstånd har på Trångboddheten. Tjugonio av OECD:s medlemsländer har tagits med i analysen. Med hjälp av en multipel linjär regression baserat på observationsdata från variablerna presenteras resultaten. Slutsatserna är att Reglering av byggbranschen och Välstånd har störst effekt på Trångboddheten. / This paper attempts to answer the research question: What explains the differences in housing density between the members of the OECD? This is done by a cross-sectional study in which I analyze the impact of rent regulation, regulation of the construction industry, demographic changes, executive government party and wealth has on the dependent variable housing density. Twenty-nine of the OECD members have been included in the analysis. The paper is using a multiple linear regression to analyze the results. The conclusions are that the regulation of the construction industry and wealth has the greatest effect on housing density.

In 2001 the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) was created by some of the world’s leading natural gas producing and exporting countries in order to promote their mutual interests through cooperation, in particular with regard to extracting the maximum value from their natural gas exports. My core research question is: Does cooperation among GECF member countries explain those exporters’ market power in highly import-dependent natural gas consuming countries? To determine the influence of the GECF’s cooperative actions and policies, I study the GECF’s cooperative behaviour and measure the role of (collusive) producer conduct in terms of its contribution to achieving the main GECF objective: attaining gas prices that are measurably above the cost of production and hence help producers earn significant economic rents. I employ a variety of methods from the international relations literature on cooperation and cartelisation, collective action theory and an economic measurement model in three case studies. I find that cooperation among GECF members partly explains their market power in a number of import-dependent gas markets. This is so despite the GECF’s weak degree of institutionalisation. The reasons for the GECF’s influence on effective cooperative results are: first, conducive structural conditions in many gas importing markets favouring cartelisation; second, GECF members use methods such as artificial market entry barriers (e.g. long-term term contracts negotiated in a non-transparent way) to secure their market power and third, the GECF faces less severe internal procedural challenges that plague other cartels such as collective action problems, especially cheating. Cooperation among GECF exporters hence contributes to high(er) prices of natural gas. This causes economic inefficiencies and a transfer of wealth—and political power—from gas consumers to producers. It also hinders climate change mitigation as cleanerburning gas remains too expensive to replace ‘dirty’ coal in power generation.

The Value of Political Connections: Evidence from the Czech Republic Miroslav Palanský Abstract This thesis estimates the value of political connections in the Czech Republic and it is divided into two parts. The first one explores the recently extended, most advanced publicly available data set on political party financing in the Czech Republic, covering the time period 1995-2015. We analyze basic patterns in party funding and their development over time. We focus primarily on private funding from both legal and natural persons. The data show that there exists substantial heterogeneity in the volume of private funding across parties and over time, but contributions from the government budget remain the most important source of income for all larger parties. We analyze the available data on donations and discuss several issues regarding the notion that donors may view contributions as investment, yielding possible profits in the future. In the second part, we use the data set of corporate donations to construct a proxy variable for political connections and to estimate the effect of being connected to a political party on the financial performance of such firms. We find that the connected firms perform significantly better than the non- connected ones in the years following the establishment of the...

This thesis examines inter-industry wage differentials in the Czech Republic, using the European Union - Statistics on Income and Living (EU-SILC 2009) survey as our primary data source. Findings show that even after controlling for large number of workers and jobs characteristics wage differences based on industry affiliation still persist. The variation of the inter-industry wage differentials amounts to approximately 5 percent with the maximum wage level difference of 25 percent between the financial sector and agriculture. By applying two distinct methodologies we tested the hypothesis that the inter-industry wage differentials are actually caused by higher concentration of workers with better unmeasured abilities in higher-paying industries. Neither of the two methods rejected the unobserved ability hypothesis. Finally, our analysis also shows that the inter-industry wage differentials can be to a certain extent attributed to rent-sharing and different labour turnover costs across sectors.

Par-delà son aspect morphologique, l’accumulation du capital est avant tout une dynamique sociale dans laquelle les configurations que prennent les rapports sociaux jouent un rôle clé. La présente étude a pour but de montrer que dans le contexte particulier d’une économie rentière (type pétrolier, en l’occurrence), la question de la crise du régime rentier d’accumulation peut être appréhendée de façon particulièrement féconde à travers l’analyse de la combinaison des formes institutionnelles considérées comme fondamentales par l’Ecole de la régulation. L’étude se propose, sur la base d’une périodisation des formes institutionnelles, de caractériser successivement dans un premier temps les évolutions qui se sont produites dans les configurations concrètes de chacune des formes institutionnelles qui, ensemble, constituent un mode de régulation. Dans un second temps, il s’agit d’examiner la compatibilité des régulations partielles et leur aptitude à générer et piloter un nouveau régime d’accumulation qui soit en rupture avec le régime rentier. L’étude conclut que, paradoxalement, seule l’implication du politique, et donc de l’Etat, est à même de permettre la définition d’un arrangement institutionnel favorable à l’accomplissement d’une telle rupture. / Beyond its morphological aspect, the capital accumulation is above all a social dynamics in which the configurations that take the social connections play a key role. The objective of the current research study is to show that within a particular context of a rent-oriented economy (oil, in the circumstances), the accumulation issue may be understood in a productive particular way through analyses of the forms of institutional combination, which are considered as fundamental by the Regulation School. Our investigation aims, on the basis of an institutional forms periodization, to characterize successively the evolutions that occurred within concrete configurations of each institutional form, which, together, form a mode of regulation. In a second phase, we examine the compatibility of the partial regulations, and their abilities to generate and command a new accumulation system breaking with the Rent-oriented régime. Our study concludes that, paradoxically, only the politics involvement, so the government, is able to determine an institutional arrangement favorable to accomplish such a break.

La France a comme beaucoup de pays de l’OCDE connu une très forte inflation immobilière ces quinze dernières années. La hausse des prix a été particulièrement prononcée dans l’aire urbaine de Marseille-Aix-en-Provence, mettant en relief les limites des catégories et des méthodes d’analyse des marchés immobiliers de l’économie standard. L’apriorisme et les hypothèses anthropologiques de cette dernière ne permettent pas de rendre compte des dynamiques spatio-temporelles des prix. En se fondant alternativement sur les travaux de Simiand et Halbwachs d'une part et sur ceux des néo-ricardiens et néo-marxistes d'autre part, on montre qu’il est plus approprié de recourir aux notions de rente et de valeur d’opinion pour comprendre les mécanismes de formation et de différenciation spatiale des prix. A partir de données désagrégées et localisées à échelle fine sur les transactions immobilières, on identifie alors différents modes de formation des prix qui permettent d’expliquer le paradoxe apparent entre la puissante homogénéisation spatiale des prix et la très grande permanence des hiérarchies spatiales héritées de la période antérieure à l’inflation immobilière que révèle l’analyse spatiale de la hausse. Cette identification des régimes de formation des prix met en valeur le rôle des dispositifs de marché qui, à toutes les échelles, permettent le fonctionnement du marché et garantissent socialement les prix. Ces dispositifs (discours et structures géographiques avant tout) confèrent à certains territoires un rôle assurantiel qui peut exacerber à terme les inégalités inhérentes au modèle d’accession à la propriété. / In the last fifteen years, real estate prices have steeply increased in France, as in other OECD countries. Price increases have been particularly strong in the urban area of Marseille-Aix en Provence, challenging conventional economic categories, analytical methods and interpretations of real estate markets. Apriorism and the anthropological assumptions lying at the core of orthodox economics cannot account for spatial-temporal price dynamics in the Marseille region. By drawing on the work of both Simiand and Halbwachs, and of neo-Ricardian and neo-Marxist economists, this dissertation develops a framework based on the notions of "economic rent" and "opinion value" that provides a better account of price formation and spatial differencing in real estate markets. Different modes of price formation are evidenced using spatially localized, highly disaggregated data of real estate sales: the spatial analysis of real estate inflation helps explain the apparent contradiction between an increased spatial homogeneity of prices and the preservation of pre-existing price hierarchies. Further analysis of price formation regimes highlights the importance of those market devices that allow the market to work and act as price guarantees of a social nature. Such devices (essentially geographical discourses and structures) provide a form of spatial insurance against price decreases that calls into question the legitimacy and sustainability of the 'home ownership for everyone' model.

Political Finance Reform and Public Procurement:  Evidence from Lithuania. Can political donations buy influence? This paper studies whether firms trade political contributions for public procurement contracts. To answer this question, I focus on the Lithuanian political economy. Combining data on a large number of government tenders, the universe of corporate donors and firm characteristics, I examine how a ban on corporate donations affects the awarding of procurement contracts to companies that donated in the past. Consistent with political favoritism, contributing firms’ probability of winning goes down by five percentage points as compared to that of non-donor firms after the ban. Among different mechanisms, the hypothesis that corporate donors get confidential information on competing bids prevails. The empirical results are in line with predictions from a first-price sealed-bid auction model with one informed bidder. Evidence on firm bidding and victory margins suggests that contributing firms adjust their bids in order to secure contracts at a maximum revenue. I assess that tax payers save almost one percent of GDP thanks to the reform. Gender Quotas and the Quality of Politicians. We analyze the effects of the introduction of gender quotas in candidate lists on the quality of elected politicians, as measured by the average number of years of education. We consider an Italian law which introduced gender quotas in local elections in 1993, and was abolished in 1995. As not all municipalities went through elections during this period, we identify two groups of municipalities and use a difference-in-differences estimation. We find that gender quotas are associated with an increase in the quality of elected politicians, with the effect ranging from 0.12 to 0.24 years of education. This effect is due not only to the higher number of elected women, who are on average more educated than men, but also to the lower number of low-educated elected men. The positive effect on quality is confirmed when we measure the latter with alternative indicators, it persists in the long run and it is robust to controlling for political ideology and political competition. Affirmative Action and the Power of the Elderly. There is evidence that age matters in politics. In this article we study whether implementation of affirmative action policies on gender can generate additional effects on an alternative dimension of representation, namely, the age of politicians. We consider an Italian law which introduced gender quotas in candidate lists for local elections in 1993, and was abolished in 1995. As not all municipalities went through elections during this period, we can identify two groups of municipalities and use a difference-in-differences estimation to analyze the effect of gender quotas on the age of elected politicians. We find that gender quotas are associated with election of politicians that are younger by more than one year. The effect occurs mainly due to the reduction in age of elected male politicians and is consistent with the optimizing behavior of parties or of voters. Let the Voters Choose Women. Female under-representation in politics can be the result of parties' selection of candidates and/or of voters’ electoral preferences. To assess the impact of these two channels, we exploit the introduction of Italian Law 215/2013, which prescribes both gender quotas on candidate lists and double preference voting conditioned on gender. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate that the law increases the share of elected female politicians by 22 percentage points. The result is driven by the increase in preference votes cast for female candidates, suggesting a salient role of double preference voting in promoting female empowerment in politics.

The thesis deals with the valuation of the house, including land and all accessories under various conditions. The theoretical part explains the basic terminology and summarises the valuation methods used in this thesis. The practical part begins with the valuation of the house and land including all accessories, according to Ordinance for Valuation and Market Valuation Methods, specifically the Asset Value Method and the Comparative Method. The next section considers the existence of a life-use easement by a co-owner of part of the house, gardens and common areas, and sets the value of the property burdened by this easement. At the end, the property is valued as two separate apartments. All costs necessary to achieve the income from rent and property redevelopment are estimated, as well as the net annual return which would result from letting the two apartments. Final assessment of the benefit of the project is implemented through an Economic Rent Method and its comparison with the annual rent income.

This paper aims at unveiling the true nature of the Czech hunting Act by modeling the competition for property rights characteristics among gamekeepers, the subsidized group, and other users of land based resources, the taxed group. We show that the subsidized gamekeepers' group seeking to decrease public opposition tries to obfuscate the true goal of its profit-oriented efforts by supporting relatively less revealing technically imperfect institutions. It does so by advertising artificially created qualities such as tradition and public interest. What hunters try to achieve technically is to shift the reference points of desire of the other users of land-based resources in order to disable them from perceiving total policy costs. As a result taxpayers' intrinsic advantage is undermined, and contrary to the efficient redistribution hypothesis a Pareto-inferior outcome is reached. Moreover taking full account of all costs of rent-seeking, including incomplete externality internalization, institutional rigidity and created moral hazard, total social costs, connected with the outcome of competition for property rights, are not minimized. Regarding empirical testing of the theoretical propositions, analyzing hunting statistics we prove that whereas the acknowledged public goals are not met, the technically imperfect Act 449/2001 Coll. creates moral hazard in favor of gamekeepers' private interests.

The diploma thesis focuses on the identification of factors influencing the rent of office spaces in Prague. The summary of specific characteristics that distinguish office spaces market from other real estate market area and the analysis of the Prague office spaces market development between 1997 and 2010 are the integral parts of this diploma thesis. On the basis of discovered facts are the factors affecting the rent defined and their development between 1997 and March 2010 is approached. Defined hypothesis are verified by the empiric analyse of the gathered information.