This thesis deals with questions of funding sport from lottery incomes and other similar games. The aim of this study is to present a relation between gambling and sport in a complex way. The preliminary theoretic part explains terminology and principle of venture operations, including historical evolution. Furthermore, this thesis is focused on determination of positive and negative externalities of gambling towards sport. Practical part describes a crucial legal form of gambling in Czech Republic. Apart from that this thesis evaluates consequences caused of legal modifications in recent years. Following is the analysis of funding sport from incomes of loterries in selected EU countries. The final part deals with (de)regulation of betting sector in Europe.

Thesis deals with the gambling industry in the Czech Republic since 2012, when the major amendment of lottery act was introduced, which allowed municipalities to regulate or eventually completely prohibit gambling with generally binding ordinances. The complete ban, which began to be implemented within some municipalities, caused an emergence of the black market. This economically interesting phenomenon is in terms of the thesis resolved - its origin and forms of expression. Furthermore, the thesis deals with the emergence of new laws that will gradually apply from 2016 and 2017. It analyses the impact on companies operating in the sector, the state budget and municipal budgets. There is also research of background data and economic models that the Ministry of Finance results from and in contrast to the critical analysis of the social costs of gambling it is being considered whether prepared regulation in the form of substantial increases in taxes is adequate or not. As the solution method was chosen descriptive analysis of relevant materials, especially the outputs from the Ministry of Finance, specifically established institutions, municipalities and real companies operating in the sector, as well as explanatory reports from lawmakers proposing new laws. The executed analysis provides a critical look at some of the background bases of the regulator. It impeaches the calculation of the social costs of gambling, which are further imbedded into a broader context in order to revalue the severity of the problem. Also is examined the estimation of the additional revenue from gambling after the tax increase, shifting the point of profitability and the transition to the emergence of a black market. The main contribution of this thesis is the emphasis on the greatest possible objectivity in the analyzing and processing of a wide range of inputs, which are further critically evaluated. This thesis comprehensively summarizes the situation of the gambling industry, its present and future regulation considering its bases and possible impacts.

This thesis examines gambling as one of the causes of poverty in households. Gambling is very widespread in Czech republic because of outdated legislation governing gambling. Higher availability of gambling causes higher incidence of pathological gambling, which is the worst type of gambling. Negative impacts of pathological gambling on society are described based on results of foreign empirical studies and statistics from the Czech gambling market. The following topic is the legislative regulation of gambling in Czech republic and abroad. Two approachs of regulation are described in detail and compared to each other. These are liberal approach and strict approach to the regulation of gambling. The practical part analyzes economic indicators of the Czech gambling market, approach of Czech municipalities to the regulation and upcoming drafts of mendments to the Lottery Act which should be valid in 2016 and 2017. The results of the analysis indicate that the current drafts of the new regulation do not effectively address the sissues of pathological gambling in Czech republic. In the conclusion of the thesis there are some recommendations which should be included in a new regulation. In this thesis, data published by the Ministry of Finance and the Department of Health Information from the period 2003 - 2013, is used. There are also used data published by various international bodies.

My thesis focuses on the risk-taking behavior of financial agents, aiming particularlyat better understanding how risk attitudes can change over time. It alsoexplores the implications that these changes have on financial markets, and on theeconomy as a whole.The first paper, which is a joint work with Kim Oosterlinck and Andrey Ukhov,studies how risk aversion of financial markets’ participants is affected by the SecondWorld War. The literature links extreme events to changes in risk aversion but failsto find a consensus on the direction of this change. Moreover, due to data limitationsand difficulties in estimation of risk aversion, the speed of the change in risk aversionhas seldom been analyzed. This paper develops an original methodology to overcomethe latter limitation. To estimate changes in attitude toward risk, we rely on thedaily market prices of lottery bonds issued by Belgium. We provide evidence on thedynamic of risk attitude before, during and after the Second World War. We findsubstantial variations between 1938 and 1946. Risk aversion increased at the outbreakof the war, decreased dramatically during the occupation to increase again afterthe war. To our knowledge, this finding of reversal in risk attitude is unique in theliterature. We discuss several potential explanations to this pattern, namely changesin economic perspectives, mood, prospect theory, and background risk. While theymight all have played a role, we argue that habituation to background risk mostconsistently explains the observed behavior over the whole period. Living continuouslyexposed to war-related risks has gradually changed the risk-taking behavior ofinvestors.In the second paper, I derive a measure of risk aversion from asset prices andanalyze what are its main drivers. Given the complexity of eliciting risk aversionfrom asset prices, few papers provide empirical evidence on the dynamics of riskaversion in a long-term perspective. This paper tries to fill the gap. First, I providea measure of risk aversion that is original, both because of the length of its sampleperiod (1958- 1991) and the methodology used. I study the relationship betweenthis new measure of risk aversion and several key economic variables in a structuralvector autoregression. Results show that risk aversion varies over the period. Aworsening of economic conditions, a decrease in stock prices or a tighter monetarypolicy lead to an increase in risk aversion. On the other hand, an increase in riskaversion is linked to a larger corporate bond credit spread and has an adverse effecton stock prices.The third paper explores the impact of asset price bubbles on the riskiness offinancial institutions. I investigate the effect of a real estate boom on the financialstability of commercial banks in the United States using exogenous variations intheir exposure to real estate prices. I find that the direction of the effect dependson bank characteristics. Although higher real estate prices have a positive impacton bank stability on average, small banks and banks that operate in competitivebanking markets experience a negative effect. I reconcile these findings by providingevidence that higher real estate prices benefit commercial banks by raising the valueof collateral pledged by borrowers but at the cost of an increase in local bankingcompetition. This increase in competition affects banks that have a low marketpower more severely, which explains why small banks and banks facing a high degreeof competition display relatively lower stability during a real estate boom. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis tackles the problem of understanding deep neural network with piece- wise linear activation functions. We leverage tropical geometry, a relatively new field in algebraic geometry to characterize the decision boundaries of a single hidden layer neural network. This characterization is leveraged to understand, and reformulate three interesting applications related to deep neural network. First, we give a geo- metrical demonstration of the behaviour of the lottery ticket hypothesis. Moreover, we deploy the geometrical characterization of the decision boundaries to reformulate the network pruning problem. This new formulation aims to prune network pa- rameters that are not contributing to the geometrical representation of the decision boundaries. In addition, we propose a dual view of adversarial attack that tackles both designing perturbations to the input image, and the equivalent perturbation to the decision boundaries.

In the wake of declining state support for higher education, many state leaders have adopted lottery earmark policies, which designate lottery revenue to higher education budgets as an alternative funding mechanism. However, despite the ubiquity of lottery earmarks for higher education, it remains unclear whether this new source of revenue serves to supplement or supplant state funding for higher education. In this paper, we use a difference-in-differences design for the years 1990–2009 to estimate the impact on state appropriations and state financial aid levels of designating lottery earmark funding to higher education. Main findings indicate that lottery earmark policies are associated with a 5 percent increase in higher education appropriations, and a 135 percent increase in merit-based financial aid. However, lottery earmarks are also associated with a decrease in need-based financial aid of approximately 12 percent. These findings have serious distributional implications that should be considered when state lawmakers adopt lottery earmark policies for higher education.

As part of the Immigration Act of 1990, the United States has held an annual Diversity Visa (DV) lottery, encouraging nationals of countries that historically sent few migrants to the United States to apply for one of 50,000 legal immigrant visas. The DV lottery has reshaped global migration, making possible for the first time significant voluntary immigration from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States, and serving U.S. public diplomacy in the region by sustaining the American Dream. Drawing on a range of archival and published sources and oral interviews conducted in Africa, this dissertation illuminates how immigration and American global power have shaped each other since the end of the Cold War. It traces the history of the lottery from its legislation in Washington to its operation in sub-Saharan Africa, where, transmitted by non-state actors, it shaped African perceptions of the United States. Sparked by the advocacy of undocumented Irish immigrants in the United States in the late 1980s, policymakers created the lottery as an instrument for legal migration outside of family, employment, and refugee admissions categories. Motivated by domestic politics, and aiming to make visas available to white Europeans shut out of the system since 1965’s Hart-Cellar Act, Congress embraced “diversity” to attract immigrants from countries underrepresented in the immigration stream. Once enacted, immigration attorneys and others amplified the program for personal profit, attracting eager applicants both within and outside of U.S. borders. The lottery was the subject of the world’s first internet spam in 1994, and its operation coincided with the global spread of internet cafés, which became, by the early 2000s, key sites of DV lottery participation and migration commercialization in Africa. The lottery provided a rare chance at geographic mobility for Africans after the end of the Cold War, making it powerful in the countries examined in this dissertation: Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. As neoliberal reforms reconfigured many African states’ economies in the 1980s and 1990s, individuals sought increasingly to escape in search of greener pastures. Unlike other contemporary migration policies, the lottery unintentionally created a channel of legal access to the United States for Africans. Local entrepreneurs seized the visa lottery as an opportunity to profit from fellow Africans’ desperation and aspiration to depart. They transformed the abstract policy into a concrete possibility and promoted positive impressions of the United States as a land of “milk and honey,” reshaping African migrations and international relations in the process. / History

Title: Customers typology of Czech betting companies. Objectives: The main objective of this research is to create a typology of curent customers typology of Czech betting companies. Methods: In order to obtain the results, marketing quantitative research was conducted in the form of both electronic and personal questioning. The basic set was all bettors in the Czech Republic and the sample was composed of 210 respondents. They were represented by customers who bet online through the computer and through the application, as well as those from physical bookmakers. The field ran for two weeks. Results: The results of the research are presented in the analytical part of this work. They are a source of hypothesis validation and, for the synthetic part, in which, by means of mathematical-descriptive methods, the bookmakers were divided into three types, briefly named as Computers, Applications and Offices. Keywords: Typology, customer, segmentace, betting companies, bets, lottery, marketing, marketing research

No description available.

<p>The paper explores theoretical shortcomings in the egalitarian theory by John Rawls and provides a complementary view on the problem of morally arbitrary contingencies. The conception of natural lottery, which Rawls presents to signify the starting range of morally arbitrary inequalities, falls short in philosophical grounding. According to critics, the notion of natural lottery appeals to the philosophical conception of moral luck which undermines ascription of moral responsibility. Since moral responsibility is a basic prerequisite for egalitarian justice, the appeal to morally arbitrary contingencies of the natural lottery may be self-defeating for the theory.</p><p>Criticizing Rawls’s approach to morally arbitrary contingencies Susan Hurley investigates philosophical groundings for judgment of moral responsibility. Philosophical inquiries into moral luck differentiate four categories of luck and expose the difficulties of ascription of moral responsibility for it. The conception of moral luck implies epistemological shortcomings in the rational judgment of moral responsibility. Hurley claims that ascription of moral responsibility requires another logical strategy.</p><p>The critical discussion by Norman Daniels refers to another egalitarian theory by Ronald Dworkin which suggests ascription of moral responsibility on a gradual scale. The theory divides the naturally contingent recourses into categories of brute luck and option luck. This strategy stratifies normative standards of responsibility by the criteria of individual choice and circumstances.</p><p>Considering the strategy of gradual ascription of responsibility, I suggest to apply a moral developmental perspective as an additional outlook on the moral responsibility in egalitarian theory. The theory of moral development by Lawrence Kohlberg provides an explanation of a gradual development of moral responsibility through a natural order of developmental stages. It stratifies the moral responsibility into a hierarchical model of measurement and systematizes the order of normative standards.</p>