The Diploma thesis is focused on analysis of widespread theoretical and methodical techniques of government spending effectiveness evaluation. Emphasis is as well put on advantages and disadvantages clarification of particular methods, their mutual relations and on possible result interpretation error sources. In the theoretical part are suggested different modifications of traditional techniques, which extends usage abilities of those methods. Practical application is intentionally demonstrated on problematic healthcare area, since its controversy allows to better display different ways of real analytic tasks solving. The second chapter contains alternative evaluation approach suggestion in form of computer model of human life economic value estimation. Because of mutual synthesis of different methods, text provides to a reader a complex evaluation system with wide spectrum of usability.

The thesis is focus on problems of increasing ratio of mandatory spending and total spending of state budget when I apply my mind to statutory mandatory spending which contains social transfers (especially benefits of pension insurance). I apply my mind to development of mandatory spending, retirement system and prepared retirement reform in individual parts of the thesis. Within retirement reform I am concerned with approved changes, basic parameters of retirement reform and I characterize newly established second pillar of retirement system. I focus on II. pillar in detail and I analyze how many people (especially employees) are going to probably join the II. pillar. When I practice the analysis I respect basic facts and conditons of joining the II. pillar and I take into account various recommendations of that. In closing I also calculate which impact the joining the II. pillar have on revenue part of state budget.

Orientador: Jamile Sanches Codogno / Resumo: Diante do envelhecimento populacional, a sociedade depara-se com o aumento do número de aposentados. No entanto, o prolongamento da vida não se limita à extensão da longevidade, alcançando também mudanças na forma como os anos adicionais são vividos. Esse contexto tem pressionado a utilização do sistema de saúde e tem comprometido também a renda familiar de muitos aposentados por gastos com serviços de saúde. Pensando nisso, o objetivo do presente estudo é avaliar o perfil de aposentados residentes no município de Rio Claro – SP, em relação aos fatores associados à inatividade física e saúde, incluindo gastos com serviços de saúde. Este estudo é constituído por dois momentos: primeiro momento (2014) considerado linha de base, investigou 205 indivíduos que se encontravam aposentados a partir de um estudo populacional realizado anteriormente; e no segundo momento (2018) buscou-se investigar os 205 aposentados da linha de base mais 95 indivíduos que relataram perspectiva de aposentadoria nos três anos seguintes, totalizando 300 indivíduos a serem investigados para o presente estudo. Foram avaliadas informações pessoais e referentes a aposentadoria; nível de atividade física atual e prévio, condição econômica, histórico de doenças e gastos com saúde. Esta tese está estruturada em 5 capítulos, sendo; Capítulo 1: introdução, objetivos, revisão de literatura, delineamento da tese; Capítulo 2: estudo transversal com objetivo de avaliar o perfil de aposentados residentes no município ... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Faced with an aging population, society is presented with an increase in the number of retired people. However, increasing life expectancy is not limited to the extent of longevity, but also changes in the way the additional years are lived. This context has put pressure on the use of the health system and has also compromised the family income of many retired people with health service expenditures. With this in mind, the objective of the present study is to evaluate the profile of retired people living in Rio Claro - SP, in relation to factors associated with physical inactivity and health, including health service expenses. This study was composed of two moments: first moment (2014) considered baseline, investigated 205 retired individuals from a population of a previously conducted study; and at the second moment (2018) we investigated the 205 baseline retired people plus 95 individuals who reported retirement prospects in the following three years, totaling 300 individuals to be investigated in the present study. Personal information as well as information on retirement, current and previous level of physical activity, economic condition, disease history, and health expenditure were evaluated. This thesis is structured in 5 chapters, as follows; Chapter 1: introduction, objectives, literature review, thesis outline; Chapter 2: cross-sectional study, in which 171 retired people participated, aiming to evaluate the profile of retired people residing in the city of Rio Clar... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

Analyzing the effect of military expenditure on economic growth has been an essential task for U.S economists. This thesis analyzed macroeconomic components for the last 70 years by estimating the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model and vector autoregressive model. To interpret the empirical analysis, historical analysis of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Wars in the Middle East, was made. One found the negative effect of military spending during wartime on the economic growth of the United States. This thesis suggests that the policymakers and military commanders should focus on shortening the state of war to minimize economic damage to the United States. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Master´s thesis deals with problems of consumer behaviour in the Czech republic. Theoretical part of thesis defines basic concepts and data, which relate to consumer demand and information necessary to understand the analysis part. The following part deals with critical analysis of consumer basket and spending costs of households in different commodities. Analytic part is also aimed at economic development and according to it we can deduce reactions of households and related consumer behaviour. At the end the thesis is completed by suggestions to reduce excess spending expenditures, which are recommendation for citizens of the Czech republic.

La mise à l’agenda politique des questions environnementales connait depuis les années70 un dynamisme sans précédent dans les pays européens. Cette tendance s’est exprimée par l’offre de politiques environnementales de la part des partis politiques lors des campagnes électorales, et la mise en place de plans de finances publiques dédiés à la protection de l’environnement lors des mandats politiques. Au travers de cinq essais s’inscrivant dans l’économie politique de l’École des choix publics, cette thèse s’attache à déterminer si les hommes politiques ont agi de sorte à maximiser leur intérêt personnel ou au contraire à servir le bien-être collectif. Le premier chapitre interroge l’insertion des questions environnementales au sein de la diversité des idéologies politiques des grands partis français tandis que le chapitre 2 analyse les déterminants de l’offre environnementale dans les programmes des partis politiques en Europe depuis 1970. Les chapitres 3 et 4 mobilisent les données de finance publique environnementale des pays européens depuis 1995 et analysent successivement la programmatique de l’offre environnementale et l’impact des règles électorales sur le niveau de dépense publique à l’échelle du budget central et du budget global des États. Le chapitre 5 oppose successivement l’entrepreneuriat politique à l’entrepreneuriat associatif et l’entrepreneuriat de marché comme solution efficace aux problèmes environnementaux. / In the 70s, European countries have started seeing a significant politicization of environmental issues. This trend was expressed by political parties through a platform of environmental public policies during political campaigns, as well as the setting of environmental budgets by the presidents during their terms of office. By means of five essays falling into the scope of the Public Choice School of Thought, this thesis aims at determining whether politicians’ behavior have been motivated by self-interest or rather by global well-being satisfaction.The first chapter examines how environmental issues have integrated the spectrum of French political parties of all ideologies whereas the second chapter analyses the determinants of an environmental offer and this within the European political parties since 1970. Chapter 3 and 4 focus on environmental public spending done dy European countries since 1995, and analyze the application of the environmental political pledges and the impact of the electoral rules inplace on environmental public spending at both, the central budget scale and the total budget scale of states. Chapter 5 compares political entrepreneurship to associative entrepreneurship and market entrepreneurship to determine the most efficient way of solving environmental issues.

This study develops and empirically tests a model of the determinants of federal spending for crime-fighting policies. An inter-disciplinary approach to building the model is utilized that merges ideas from budgeting, policy analysis and criminology. Four factors hypothesized to impact federal spending for the administration of justice are operationalized as eight variables and tested using ordinary least squares regression analysis on time series data. The factors hypothesized to impact federal spending in this area are economic constraints imposed on government spending, the ideological makeup of Congress and the president, the actual crime rate, and the public's attitude toward crime. Five of the eight variables demonstrated statistical significance at the.10 level or better.

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation is composed of three independent chapters in the field of the economic geography and international trade. However, there is one uniting theme between all three chapters: geographic spillovers. In each chapter, a source of geographic spillovers that is relevant to policymakers is investigated. Further, each chapter addresses a theoretical or data-driven challenge to identifying these spillovers and implements an improved methodology for estimation. In particular, the first chapter studies agglomeration and congestion spillovers, the impact of employment density on the productivity of workers and the amenities associated with living in a location, respectively, by using variation from a natural experiment. The second chapter studies fiscal multipliers, the effect of government spending on economic activity, by using variation from the same natural experiment. Finally, the third chapter studies import spillovers, the impact of neighboring firms' experience sourcing from foreign markets on the likelihood that firms in the same location and industry enter into those same markets, by using detailed data on Serbian firms.</p> <p><br></p> <p>In the first chapter, <em>Agglomeration and Congestion Spillovers: Evidence from Base Realignment and Closure</em>, I quantify agglomeration and congestion spillovers using variation from a natural experiment by instrumenting for changes in local employment with proposed changes to civilian employment at military installations through the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. I find an agglomeration spillover elasticity consistent with the existing literature. However, my estimate of the congestion spillover elasticity is smaller in magnitude than common parameterizations of quantitative economic geography models. All else equal, with a weaker congestion spillover elasticity, more of the distribution of economic activity across space is due to natural advantages and disadvantages. This result implies smaller gains from implementing the optimal spatial policy. </p> <p><br></p> <p>In the second chapter, <em>Local Fiscal Multipliers and Defense Spending</em>, I estimate county-level fiscal multipliers using shocks to military employment to instrument for local defense spending. Aggregate shocks to military employment are subject to the Base Realignment and Closure process, which is designed to isolate the recommendations of the Department of Defense from political influences. By exploiting variation in military employment, I address the endogeneity of government spending when using changes in defense spending to estimate fiscal multipliers. In addition, this method addresses the attenuation bias due to geographic measurement error that results from using data on military contracts alone with small geographic units. This extends the common method for estimating state- and national-level fiscal multipliers using variation in defense spending to more local geographic units. My estimates imply a local income multiplier between 0.5 and 0.8, which is smaller than existing estimates that use non-defense-based sources of variation, but larger than the existing estimates based on variation in defense contract spending. </p> <p><br></p> <p>In the third chapter, <em>International Sourcing and Firm Learning: Evidence from Serbian Firms</em>, we find that compared to non-importers, importers are more productive and pay higher wages as they source better quality and cheaper production inputs. However, little is known about how these firms learn about their sourcing markets. We quantify the impact of neighboring firms' importing experience on the decision to start sourcing inputs from new markets using merged customs and administrative data from Serbian firms. We find that firms are more likely to start importing from a new market if firms in the same industry and location have imported from that market and if those firms increased their imports over time. Further, our results support a distinction between imports and exports for the decision to enter foreign markets; unlike exports, import sourcing choices are not independent across countries, but are substitutes. We also investigate origin-country and firm heterogeneity. Our results indicate that the impact of neighboring firms' importing experience is greater for source countries in the European Union market and for firms that are high productivity, foreign owned, and previous importers. Together, these findings suggest that a firm's spatial connections are an important factor in its access to global markets as sources for inputs.</p>

In recent years, the desire for financial privacy and anonymity spurred the growth of electronic cash and cryptocurrencies. The introduction of decentralized cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, accelerated their adoption in society. Since digital information is easier to reproduce, digital currencies are vulnerable to be spent more than once – this is called a double-spending attack. In order to prevent double-spending, Bitcoin records transactions in a tamper-resilient shared ledger called the blockchain. However, the time required to generate new blocks in the blockchain causes a delay in the transaction confirmation. This delay, typically around one hour in Bitcoin, is impractical for real world trade and limits the wide-spread use of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. In this thesis, we propose a solution to prevent double-spending attacks and thus enable fast transaction confirmations using the security guarantees of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). We achieve this by enforcing sign-once semantics that prevent the payer from reusing designated signing keys to sign more than one transaction. We also provide a way for the payee to verify whether a specific signing key is subject to sign-once semantics. The payee, however still receives the funds later, once the transaction is verified similarly to existing credit card payments. In this way, our solution reduces transaction confirmation times of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies and is also compatible with existing deployments since it does not require any modifications to the base protocol, peers, or miners. We designed and implemented a proof-of-concept of our solution using Intel SGX technology and integrated it with Copay, a popular Bitcoin wallet from BitPay. This thesis also presents the security evaluation of our system along with other possible extensions and enhancements. / De senaste åren har begäran efter sekretess och anonymitet för ekonomisk transaktioner sporrat tillväxten av elektroniska kontanter och kryptovalutor. Introducerandet av decentraliserade kryptovalutor, som t.ex. Bitcoin, har accelereratibruktagningen av dylika valutasystem. Digitala valutor är dock sårbara för dubbelspenderande (eng.double spending) eftersom digital information är lättare attreproducera. För att förhindra dubbelspenderande bokför Bitcoin valutatrans-aktioner i en distribuerad databas, den så kallade blockkedjan (eng.blockchain), som kan motstå förvanskling av bokförda transaktioner. Tiden som krävs för attgenerera nya block i Bitcoins blockkedja leder dock till en fördröjningen företransaktioner som skapas i databasen kan bekräftas. Denna fördröjning, som oftas varar kring en timme, är opraktisk för handel i verkliga världen och begränsardärför den allmänna spridningen av blockkedgebaserade kryptovalutor. I denna avhandlingen föreslår vi en lösningen som hindrar dubbelspenderandegenom att utnyttja säkerhetsgarantier hos anförtrodda exekveringsmiljöer (eng.Trusted Execution Environments). Vi åstadkommer detta genom att hindra beta-laren från att återanvända specifika kryptografiska nycklar för att digitalt signera flera transaktioner. Vi möjligjör också ett sätt för mottagaren att bekräfta ifall en kryptografisk underteckningsnyckel är skyddad på ovannämnda sätt. Mottagaren erhåller dock betalningen först senare, likt existerande kreditkortsbetalningar. Vår lösningen förminskar transaktionstiden för Bitcoin-betalningar på ett sätt som är kompatibelt med existerande användningssätt eftersom lösningen inte kräver modifikationer i grundläggande Bitcoin-protokollet. Vi utvecklade en prototyp av vår lösning genom att utnyttja Intel SGX teknologi och integrerade prototypen med CoPay, en popular plånboksapplikation för Bitcoin utveckald av företaget BitPay. Vi presenterar även en utvärdering av säkerheten i vårt system och beskriver möjliga utökningar och förbättringar. / <p>This thesis is part of Erasmus Mundus 2-Year Masters NordSecMob program. </p>

This thesis takes an exploratory approach to On Demand Pay, an upcoming technology and employer benefit that allows employees to take out part of their earned salary before payday. With the technology relatively new, the academic literature around On Demand Pay is still in its infancy and we know little about how it affects employees beyond the financial benefit. Based on qualitative and exploratory interviews, the goal of this thesis is to explore ways in which On Demand Pay could affect employees and employer in a small Swedish software consultancy. The results indicate that the financial aspect of being able to take out a salary advance and having more flexibility around when to receive a salary might not affect software developers in the mid- to high-earner range in a particular positive or negative way. It could however negatively affect developers temporarily, as it can interfere with established budgeting habits. Still, there are indications of On Demand Pay positively affecting job satisfaction coming from a feeling of increased recognition and appreciation by the employer.