This thesis extends the literature on trade-linked international environmental policy by quantifying the effects of collective taxes on polluting intermediate inputs under varying trade, market structure and labour market assumptions. Using a CGE model augmented to include emissions from intermediate inputs, I simulate the effects of coordinated and harmonized environmental taxes on output, trade, and market structure. The main objectives are to ascertain whether free trade improves regulatory policy outcomes, and to demonstrate how market structure and the relative size of trading partners affect policy responses. To this end, I consider three cases: (a) asymmetric regions competing under perfect competition (b) asymmetric regions competing under imperfect competition and (c) symmetric regions competing under imperfect competition. Using Canada-EU and NAFTA-EU trade to represent asymmetric and symmetric trade ties, the results reveal the following: When regions are asymmetric, free trade unambiguously improves regulatory outcomes for the EU, but yields mixed results for Canada. In addition, regulatory costs are lower when trading partners are symmetric. However, free trade can result in perverse outcomes. For asymmetric regions, output and market structure changes are stronger under imperfect competition, and in the presence of real wage unemployment. Results also suggest that aggregate trade flows are not very sensitive to environmental taxes but are sensitive to changes in border taxes. Finally, welfare effects do not follow a predictable pattern because they partly depend on market structure changes.

The diploma thesis "The French-Czech relations after the French EU Presidency (2009- 2013)" examines the relations between France and the Czech Republic during five years after the French presidency of the European Union in the second half of 2008, which was replaced by the Czech Presidency in the first half of 2009. It is evident that bilateral relations between Member States are influenced by their membership in the EU. The aim of this work is to find out whether we can observe a similar process in the opposite direction, that is, whether bilateral cooperation between France and the Czech Republic contributes to the Europeanisation of relations in the fields of foreign policy, defense and security, justice and home affairs, transport, environment, trade and economic relations, culture, science and education. The work is divided into two main parts. After a theoretical and methodological introduction, the first one treats the evolution of the French-Czech relations in the 20th and 21st century, the largest part of the work is the analysis of key areas derived from the text of Strategic Partnership established in 2008. In the final chapter, the author tries to generalize the Europeanisation of bilateral relations between these two EU Member States with regard to the importance of bilateral and...

<p>This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two papers address political economy and indus-trial organization aspects of agricultural policy, and the last two international aspects of environmental policy.</p><p>Paper [I] explains Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies to farmers by the influence of farmer interest-groups with an EU-wide membership. The analysis is based on panel-data for fifteen commodities over the period 1986-2003. Because the CAP is set as an overall EU policy, effective lobbying presents a collective ac-tion problem to the farmers in the EU as a whole. Indicators of lobbying, which are based on this perception, are found to explain part of the variation in agricultural support.</p><p>In Paper [II], the Bresnahan-Lau framework is used to analyze whether policy reforms, i.e. the two-price sys-tem (an input quota, 1986-1991) and a general deregulation of dairy policy (1991-1994) had any market power effects on the Swedish butter market. The results show that the null hypothesis of no market power cannot be rejected, for any of the specific policy reforms, at any reasonable significance level.</p><p>Paper [III] concerns the welfare consequences of environmental policy cooperation. It is assumed that coun-tries finance their public expenditures by using distortionary taxes, and that they differ with respect to compe-tition in the labor market. It is shown how the welfare effect of an increase in the expenditures on abatement depends on changes in the environmental damage, employment and work hours. The welfare effect is also related to the strategic interaction among the countries in the prereform equilibrium.</p><p>In Paper [IV] environmental policy in an economic federation, where each national government faces a mixed tax problem, is addressed. It is assumed that the federal government sets emission targets, which are imple-mented at the national level. It is also assumed that the economic federation is decentralized. The results high-light a strategic role of income and commodity taxation, i.e. each country uses its policy instruments, at least in part, to influence the emission target.</p>

This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two papers address political economy and indus-trial organization aspects of agricultural policy, and the last two international aspects of environmental policy. Paper [I] explains Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies to farmers by the influence of farmer interest-groups with an EU-wide membership. The analysis is based on panel-data for fifteen commodities over the period 1986-2003. Because the CAP is set as an overall EU policy, effective lobbying presents a collective ac-tion problem to the farmers in the EU as a whole. Indicators of lobbying, which are based on this perception, are found to explain part of the variation in agricultural support. In Paper [II], the Bresnahan-Lau framework is used to analyze whether policy reforms, i.e. the two-price sys-tem (an input quota, 1986-1991) and a general deregulation of dairy policy (1991-1994) had any market power effects on the Swedish butter market. The results show that the null hypothesis of no market power cannot be rejected, for any of the specific policy reforms, at any reasonable significance level. Paper [III] concerns the welfare consequences of environmental policy cooperation. It is assumed that coun-tries finance their public expenditures by using distortionary taxes, and that they differ with respect to compe-tition in the labor market. It is shown how the welfare effect of an increase in the expenditures on abatement depends on changes in the environmental damage, employment and work hours. The welfare effect is also related to the strategic interaction among the countries in the prereform equilibrium. In Paper [IV] environmental policy in an economic federation, where each national government faces a mixed tax problem, is addressed. It is assumed that the federal government sets emission targets, which are imple-mented at the national level. It is also assumed that the economic federation is decentralized. The results high-light a strategic role of income and commodity taxation, i.e. each country uses its policy instruments, at least in part, to influence the emission target.

My diploma project describes development and outcomes of the regional policy of the Czech Republic. The project is devided in two parts. The first part is oriented on the development of the regional policy and it´s aims with a perpective until 2013. The second part describes the cooperation between the Czech Republic and the Republic of Austria including particular outcomes.

This dissertation contains three essays in international macroeconomics and financial time series forecasting. In the first essay, I show, numerically, that a two-country New-Keynesian Sticky Prices model, driven by monetary and productivity shocks, is capable of explaining the highly positive correlation across the industrialized countries' inflation even though their cross-country correlation in money growth rate is negligible. The structure of this model generates cross-country correlations of inflation, output and consumption that appear to closely correspond to the data. Additionally, this model can explain the internal correlation between inflation and output observed in the data. The second essay presents two important results. First, gains from monetary policy cooperation are different from zero when the elasticity of substitution between domestic and imported goods consumption is different from one. Second, when monetary policy is endogenous in a two-country model, the only Nash equilibria supported by this model are those that are symmetrical. That is, all exporting firms in both countries choose to price in their own currency, or all exporting firms in both countries choose to price in the importer's currency. The last essay provides both conditional and unconditional predictive ability evaluations of the aluminum futures contracts prices, by using five different econometric models, in forecasting the aluminum spot price monthly return 3, 15, and 27-months ahead for the sample period 1989.01-2010.10. From these evaluations, the best model in forecasting the aluminum spot price monthly return 3 and 15 months ahead is followed by a (VAR) model whose variables are aluminum futures contracts price, aluminum spot price and risk free interest rate, whereas for the aluminum spot price monthly return 27 months ahead is a single equation model in which the aluminum spot price today is explained by the aluminum futures price 27 months earlier. Finally, it shows that iterated multiperiod-ahead time series forecasts have a better conditional out-of-sample forecasting performance of the aluminum spot price monthly return when an estimated (VAR) model is used as a forecasting tool.

This dissertation explores aspects of financial stability from three different perspectives. In the first essay, we empirically analyze to which extent popular global systemic risk measures (SRMs) yield comparable results with respect to the systemic importance of a financial institution and, in particular, from which determinants the degree of consistency of the classification by the various SRMs depends. It turns out that rank correlations, in general, are more sensitive towards macroeconomic factors such as the unemployment rate, and to a minor degree towards factors that can be interpreted in a broader sense as proxies for the stability of a bank such as the market-to-book ratio and the loans-to-deposits ratio. Further analyses reveal the inconsistency of systemic risk ranks and the difficulty to detect specific explanatory factors across several different settings. In the second essay, we assess the potential of activity on Twitter for improving forecasts of daily and intra-daily stock and index return volatilities. For this purpose, a unique high-frequency dataset of a comprehensive sample of more than 150 stocks of large international companies, systemically important banks, as well as several leading international stock indices is constructed. Our results show that there is no clear advantage of adding Twitter information by assessing the forecast performance of a plethora of different model specifications. We also reveal the necessity to consider different set-ups since they partly deliver opposing results. However, even though Twitter information is sometimes valuable, we find that forecast improvements in general remain marginal. In the third essay, we characterizes the formation of self-enforcing international financial regulation agreements. Our analysis allows evaluating the desirability and feasibility of cooperative solutions and explains the challenges associated with the process of cooperation. We model the cooperation of national financial regulators in a game-theoretical framework that considers financial stability to be an impure public good. Joint national supervisory effort is supposed to increase aggregate welfare in terms of a more stable financial system both on a global and on a local level by simultaneously generating incentives to free-ride. In our basic version of the model, we show that partial cooperation of two or three countries is stable and improves the welfare of all countries relative to the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium. Further analyses highlight the role of additional club benefits. When signatory countries of a coalition gain benefits over and above the joint welfare maximization, stable coalitions of any size become feasible.