The purpose of this work is to quantify the influences that affect the sales of selected products for toilet paper segment in the retail chain Tesco Czech Republic. The model is based on a long-term observation of the time series of sales and average prices for selected products. For the quantification is used an estimation of exponential function fot model which is subsequently verified. Parameter estimation is calculated by using the software EViews. The work compares the results of the model for different products and searching for the most effective way of promotion for each brand. The calculated parameters can be implemented for the planning of sales for toilet paper segment. The results show differences between branded and private toilet paper brand, that are caused by differences in the perception of quality by consumers.

The thesis aims is to determine the impact of minimum wage on unemployment of men, women, and the overall unemployment rate in the Czech Republic and selected EU countries. The theoretical part will be discussed different theoretical concepts that deal with the economic impact of the minimum wage as well as empirical studies that examine the impact of the minimum wage on unemployment and the arguments for and against introducing a minimum wage. Subsequently, the thesis will deal with the historical and current development of minimum wages in various EU countries and international documents which affect the formation of the minimum wage. The last part will be based on an econometric model determining whether a minimum wage, growth rate of GDP and the share of the minimum wage to the median wage influence the unemployment of men, women, and the overall unemployment rate in the period 1995 to 2014 the Czech Republic, Luxembourg and Hungary.

The main goal of this thesis is to find out whether National football league players are, even 15 years after the birth of unrestricted free agency, still paid monopsonistic salaries or whether competition among NFL teams eliminated them. After a theoretical discussion, which will help to form expectations about the player market, models in line with the standard theory of labor compensation and with Becker's human capital theory are estimated. The part of the research following the standard theory focuses mainly on estimations of players' marginal revenue product and subsequently on comparison of their wages with their MRP. To do so, OLS regressions, as well as quantile regressions, are run. The part of the research following the human capital theory has a supporting role and is used to further confirm the previous findings. It is represented by OLS player salary estimation. The hypothesis that players under a full control of their teams are still paid salaries below their MRP cannot be rejected, thus confirming a presence of monopsonistic salaries. A significant effect of free agency status on player salaries is also found. Exclusive rights players are paid significantly lower salaries than all free agents, while restricted free agents are paid significantly lower salaries than unrestricted free agents. Superstar players are found to have salaries in excess of their MRP regardless of their free agency status.

The main goal this master thesis is the identification of key factors influencing the performance and production of Czech agriculture. The work contains into three parts. First part summarizes theoretically background concepts for construction models with looking historical contexts. The second part builds a data base for another work. The third part of the thesis is computational, formulates specific numerical models of possible answer. This part contains a discussion of the results and definitions of possible limits.

This study develops a framework for pricing output traits derived from agriculture biotechnology and the effects on competing technologies post-introduction of the genetically modified (GM) variety. The price impact model determines processor or consumer adoption rates and changes in processor, farmer, and tech firm surplus as a result of the release of the new GM variety. Several implications result from this research. First, adoption of the GM variety may not be as high as expected due to the lower cost of using conventional varieties for processing or consumption inputs. Second, both processors who adopt the GM variety and those who continue to use conventional varieties will have an increase in surplus as a result of the introduction of the GM variety. Lower costs of conventional varieties will also result in new entrants into the market.

This dissertation consists of three essays on the design of regulatory systems intended to inform market participants about product quality. The central theme is how asymmetric information problems influence the incentives of customers, regulated firms, and certifiers, and the implications these distortions have for welfare and market design. The first chapter, Regulation by Information Provision, studies quality provision in New York City's elevator maintenance market. In this market, service providers maintain machines and are inspected periodically by city inspectors. I find evidence that monitoring frictions create moral hazard for service providers. In the absence of perfect monitoring, buildings rely on signals generated by the regulator to hold service providers accountable, cancelling contracts when bad news arrives and preserving them when good news arrives. Regulatory instruments, such as inspection frequency and fine levels, can therefore influence provider effort in two ways: (i) by directly changing the cost of effort (e.g. fines for poor peformance); (ii) by changing expected future revenue (through building cancellation decisions). Using a structural search model of the industry, I find that the second channel is the dominant one. In particular, I note that strengthening the information channel has two equilibrium effects: first, it increases provider effort; and second, it shifts share towards higher-quality matches since buildings can more quickly sever unproductive relationships. These findings have important policy implications, as they suggest that efficient information provision --- for example, targeting inspections to newly-formed relationships --- is a promising avenues for welfare improvement. The second chapter, Quality Disclosure Design, studies a similar regulatory scheme, but emphasizes the incentives of the certifier. In particular, I argue that restaurant inspectors in New York City are locally averse to giving restaurants poor grades: restaurants whose inspections are on the border of an A versus a B grade are disproportionately given an A. The impact of this bias is twofold: first, it degrades the quality of the information provided to the market, as there is substantial heterogeneity in food-poisoning risk even within A restaurants. Second, by making it easier to achieve passing grades, inspector bias reduces incentives for restaurants to invest in their health practices. After developing a model of the inspector-restaurant interaction, counterfactual work suggests that stricter grading along the A-B boundary could generate substantial improvements in food-poisoning rates. The policy implications of these findings depends on the source of inspector bias. I find some evidence that bias is bureaucratic in nature: when inspectors have inspection decisions overturned in an administrative trial, they are more likely to score leniently along the A-B boundary in their other inspections. However, it's not clear whether this behavior stems from administrative burden (a desire to avoid more trials) or a desire to avoid looking incompetent. Pilot programs that reduce the administrative burden of giving B grades are a promising avenue for future research. The last chapter, Real-Time Inference, also studies the incentives of certifiers, namely MLB umpires charged with classifying pitches as balls or strikes. Unlike in \textit{Quality Disclosure Design}, I find that umpire ball/strike decisions are remarkably bias-free. Previous literature on this topic has noted a tendency for umpires to --- for a fixed pitch location --- call more strikes in hitter's counts and more balls in pitcher's counts. I propose a simple rational explanation for this behavior: umpires are Bayesian. In hitter's counts, such as 3-0, pitchers tend to throw pitches right down the middle of the plate, whereas in pitcher's counts, they throw pitches outside the strike zone. For a borderline pitch, the umpire's prior will push it towards the strike zone in a 3-0 count and away from the strike-zone in an 0-2 count, producing the exact divergence in ball/strike calls noted in previous work. While implications for broader policy are not immediately obvious, I note several features of the environment that are conducive to umpires effectively approximating optimal inference, particularly the frequent, data-driven feedback that umpires receive on their performance.

This dissertation consists of three essays on the economics of education and market design. The first two chapters are united in their attention on school choice issues. Chapter 1 considers a specific application, whereas chapter 2 focuses on a matching mechanism widely used in multiple applications. Both chapters 1 and 3 explore equity concerns in education but through very different lenses (affirmative action vs. educational investment) and very different settings (the United States vs. Vietnam). Chapter 1 addresses the diversity issue that is especially prevalent in elite schools that select students based on exams. Whereas previous studies only consider the direct impact on elite schools, I quantify the effects of two widely-discussed affirmative action plans on both elite and regular schools in New York City. I find that the two plans have quite different effects. First, there is a trade-off between improving diversity and maintaining student quality in elite schools as measured by state test scores in middle school. Despite taking into account the socioeconomic status of students' neighborhoods, the Chicago plan gives rise mostly to reshuffling within elite schools. Thus, both the overall racial composition and quality of incoming students are largely preserved as in the status quo. In contrast, the Top 7% plan, which would accept into the elite sector students in the top 7% by academic performance of each public middle school, causes considerable flows of students between the elite and regular sectors. The elite sector experiences a substantial increase in the proportions of Black and Hispanic students, along with a decrease in average student quality. Analyzing the difference between the outcomes of these two policies provides some insight into how the two objectives—diversity and peer quality in elite schools—might be better balanced in general. The second difference between the plans arises because they transform the distribution of diversity across schools in different ways. The Chicago plan reduces the differences among schools within the elite sector, while the Top 7% plan reduces the gap in diversity between the two sectors even as it increases within-sector dispersion. Both plans result in considerable changes in school assignments in the regular school sector, thus affecting the average student quality in these schools. Chapter 2, joint work with Guillaume Haeringer and Silvio Ravaioli, uses a lab experiment to study learning dynamics when participants receive feedback in centralized matching mechanisms. Our design allows for two types of learning: to coordinate within the same environment as well as to understand the underlying mechanisms. We provide additional evidence to previous work that the majority of the deviations from truth-telling, the dominant strategy in the Deferred Acceptance mechanism, are those that do not affect payoffs. Furthermore, by explicitly analyzing learning, we can confirm that at least some of the participants learn about the optimality of truth-telling, and their departures from it happen primarily when they face the same environment being repeated. Finally, we find that when learning to coordinate, agents tend to retain their previous strategy when the payoff from this strategy is high. This is suggestive evidence of reinforcement learning. Chapter 3 documents the pattern of educational investments for high school students across different demographics and their effects on performance on the college entrance exam and in college. Survey data from Vietnam shows that high school students from higher-income households have higher education expenditure and participation in extra classes (both at the extensive and intensive margin). Minority and rural students invest less than their non-minority and urban counterparts even after controlling for income. Out of these investments, only extra classes during the school year education expenditure other than that on extra classes are effective in increasing college entrance exam scores. In terms of college performance, a higher entrance exam score leads to a slightly higher grade point average at graduation, controlling for academic department fixed effects and investments in high school. Neither education expenditure or participation in extra classes in high school show any significant effects on college performance, except that already captured in the entrance exam scores. I record multiple gender differences. Female high school students tend to receive more investments. Even though they perform slightly worse on the entrance exam than their male peers with the same investments, they perform better in college, given the same entrance exam scores.

Education is at the center of upskilling human capital in developing countries, thereby positively influencing economic growth and development. For decades, many education policies targeted at developing countries have been narrowly focused on improving access to basic education (Barrett et al., 2015). However, access to education does not always translate into educational attainment. Thus, beyond the initial goal of expanding access to education in developing countries, there has been a growing focus on delivering quality education on the development agenda for developing countries in recent years. One popular policy instrument in enhancing education quality has been school choice. Analysis of school choice and the subsequent academic performance outcomes can provide new insight on the economics of education to policymakers, schools, parents and students alike. This dissertation consists of three essays, which focus on understanding the demand for public schools and the returns to school quality in a merit-based competitive school assignment system. In particular, these papers investigate how positive recognition of ability through awards can affect the students’ decision-making process; what the students might gain from attending a more selective school; and how students balance between their preferences for school characteristics and maximizing their chances of admission in a competitive school choice market. Altogether, this dissertation highlights the role of information as well as educational background in explaining differences in school choice decisions and achievement outcomes. In chapter 1, I examine the role of positive recognition on students’ school choice decisions and achievement outcomes in the context of academic competitions. Academic competitions are an essential aspect of education. Given the prevalence and the amount of resources spent organizing them, a natural question that arises is the extent of the impact on winners’ education outcomes when their talent is recognized. I exploit the award structure in Vietnam’s annual regional academic competitions to answer this question. By leveraging the pre-determined share of awards, I apply a regression discontinuity design to assess the effects of receiving a Prize and receiving an Honorable Mention. I find that both types of awards lead to improvements in educational outcomes, and the results are persistent after three years. I also find some evidence of specialization associated with receiving a Prize Award. I hypothesize that long-term effects can be partially explained by school choice: winners are significantly more likely to apply to and consequently enroll in higher-quality schools. There are also prominent differences in educational choices and outcomes along gender lines: female students are more sensitive to award receipts than male students. These findings underscore the positive motivational effects of awards, even among the top performers in a highly competitive schooling market. In chapter 2, I explore the impacts of attending a selective school on students’ educational outcomes. Students in Vietnam are assigned to public high schools based on their performance in a placement exam as well as their ranked choice of schools. Public schools are often oversubscribed, which contributes to exogeneous admission score cutoffs below which students are not considered for admission. By applying a regression discontinuity research design to these admission score cutoffs, I find that students who are marginally admitted to their top-choice public schools are exposed to significantly higher-achieving peers while finding themselves at the bottom of the ability distribution. They experience some improvements in standardized test scores at the end of their high school, but fare worse in school-based achievements and graduation outcomes. These findings highlight the importance of the potential trade-offs between attending more selective schools with better peer quality while receiving a lower ordinal rank in the ability distribution in the assigned school. In addition, the impacts of selective schools on students vary along the lines of the students’ own attitude towards studying as well as their middle school educational background. This substantial heterogeneity collectively highlights the importance of considering the students’ past educational background in interpreting how selective schools might impact students’ outcomes. In chapter 3, I investigate students’ preferences, strategic behaviors and welfare outcomes under a competitive school choice market by conducting a survey on school choice participants in two school districts in Vietnam. The original survey data on school choice participants, coupled with administrative data, afford me the opportunity to understand true preferences and strategies without involving strong assumptions on the students’ beliefs. In order to balance out their own preferences and chance of admission in such a competitive setting, the majority of students exhibit strategic behaviors. However, students from less advanced educational backgrounds tend to have large belief errors and are more likely to make strategic mistakes. Consequently, these students are at a disadvantage, as they find themselves among lower-achieving peers in their new schools. With preference data from the survey, I estimate the students’ preferences for school characteristics and find evidence of heterogeneity in students’ preferences for school characteristics: students from more advanced educational backgrounds value school selectivity and teacher qualification more than their peers. Using these estimates to evaluate students’ welfare under the current assignment mechanism as well as a counterfactual strategy-proof deferred acceptance algorithm, I find that switching to deferred acceptance algorithm can be welfare-improving, particularly for high-performing students. Overall, this paper provides a starting point to directly study the drawbacks of manipulable assignment mechanisms by using survey data and highlight the potential disparity in preferences and application strategies that can further widen the gap in educational mobility.

<div> <div> <div> <p>First Chapter: The ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator for spatial autoregressions may be consistent as pointed out by Lee (2002), provided that each spatial unit is influenced aggregately by a significant portion of the total units. This paper presents a unified asymptotic distribution result of the properly recentered OLS estimator and proposes a new estimator that is based on the indirect inference (II) procedure. The resulting estimator can always be used regardless of the degree of aggregate influence on each spatial unit from other units and is consistent and asymptotically normal. The new estimator does not rely on distributional assumptions and is robust to unknown heteroscedasticity. Its good finite-sample performance, in comparison with existing estimators that are also robust to heteroscedasticity, is demonstrated by a Monte Carlo study.<br></p><p><br></p><p>Second Chapter: This paper proposes a new estimation procedure for the first-order spatial autoregressive (SAR) model, where the disturbance term also follows a first-order autoregression and its innovations may be heteroscedastic. The estimation procedure is based on the principle of indirect inference that matches the ordinary least squares estimator of the two SAR coefficients (one in the outcome equation and the other in the disturbance equation) with its approximate analytical expectation. The resulting estimator is shown to be consistent, asymptotically normal and robust to unknown heteroscedasticity. Monte Carlo experiments are provided to show its finite-sample performance in comparison with existing estimators that are based on the generalized method of moments. The new estimation procedure is applied to empirical studies on teenage pregnancy rates and Airbnb accommodation prices.<br></p><p><br></p><p>Third Chapter: This paper presents a sample selection model with spatial autoregressive interactions and studies the maximum likelihood (ML) approach to estimating this model. Consistency and asymptotic normality of the ML estimator are established by the spatial near-epoch dependent (NED) properties of the selection and outcome variables. Monte Carlo simulations, based on the characteristics of female labor supply example, show that the proposed estimator has good finite-sample performance. The new model is applied to empirical study on examining the impact of climate change on agriculture in Southeast Asia.<br></p></div></div></div><div><div><div> </div> </div> </div>

Firms are the unit cells of the economy. Understanding how they create value is key todesigning policies that promote sustainable growth. In this dissertation, I study how two major trends: globalization and rising inequality, affect the causes and consequences of firm growth. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the interaction of multinational firms and domestic firms in developing countries, while chapter 3 looks at the unequal distribution of consumer gains from the expansion of a firm in the United States. Specifically, in Chapter 1, I study how the presence of multinational firms affects how domestic firms grow. I investigate the hypothesis that uncertainty about product quality, a distinctive feature in developing countries, leads consumers to prefer products made by multinational firms headquartered in high-income countries, as opposed to domestic firms. Combining barcode-level consumption data from Mexico with information about the origin of the producers of the goods, I measure a precise foreign price premium of at least 16%. While the availability of foreign goods increases consumers’ welfare, the dominance of foreign firms may also hinder the growth of domestic firms. I then document the following novel facts about the consumer packaged goods industry in Mexico: 1) domestic firm sales growth is driven by older goods rather than new goods; 2) domestic goods have slower and longer life-cycles than foreign goods; 3) the extensive customer margin is key to growth for both types of firms; 4) domestic firms depend relatively more on the intensive margin for customer growth; and 5) new customers of older domestic goods are poorer than those of new goods. I estimate a demand model, showing that the price premium elicited in the raw data can be attributed to consumers’ relative preference for foreign goods. Importantly, this preference fades over time. I show that this is consistent with consumers learning about product quality, and provide consumer-level empirical evidence for this mechanism. Demand-side policies may be useful complements to classic industrial policy tools. Chapter 2 looks inside multinational firms to understand how contextual factors may affect the probability of spillovers from multinationals to the domestic sector. A distinct feature of multinationals is a three-tier hierarchy: foreign managers (FMs) supervise domestic managers (DMs) who supervise production workers. Surveys suggest that language barriers impede interactions between FMs and DMs. An experimental protocol that offers DMs free English language courses confirms that lowering communication costs increases their interactions with FMs. A second experimental protocol that asks human-resource managers at domestic firms to rate hypothetical resumes reveals that multinational experience and, specifically, DM-FM interactions are valued in the domestic labor market. Taken together, the protocols suggest that reducing language barriers can improve transfers of management knowledge to domestic workers, and a longer-run survey indicates treatment DMs’ improvements in soft skills. We further examine why MNCs and DMs may under-invest in language training. Complementary policies such as language subsidies can increase the probability of positive spillovers from Foreign Direct Investment. In Chapter 3, I study the expansion of a large, high-quality firm in the United States and itsimpact on the competitive landscape. The arrival of high-end grocery stores in neighborhoods is a harbinger of gentrification. However, economic theory generally predicts that the entry of firms is good for consumer welfare. This paper combines barcode-level retail data with a newly collected dataset on the opening dates of Whole Foods, a high-end grocery chain in the United States, in new neighborhoods, to estimate the effect of entry. I show that Whole Foods’ entry causes prices to rise by three percent for households in the bottom half of the income distribution, while prices don’t change for households in the top half of the income distribution. This finding is robust to changing the sample of stores and the set of control variables and to a falsification test using announcement dates instead of entry dates. Building on differentiated competition models, I show that this unexpected effect of entry can happen because incumbent stores catering to high-income households are closer to Whole Foods’ assortment and therefore behave pro-competitively when Whole Foods arrives, while incumbent stores catering to low-income households are quite differentiated and are able to raise their prices. Policies seeking to address gentrification should take the business side of this phenomenon into account.