A Survey of Czech Economists: What Do They Think?
| Author: | Bc. Jakub Sikora |
|---|---|
| Year: | 2016 - summer |
| Leaders: | doc. Petr Janský Ph.D. |
| Consultants: | |
| Work type: | Bachelors |
| Language: | English |
| Pages: | 56 |
| Awards and prizes: | |
| Link: | https://is.cuni.cz/webapps/zzp/detail/109849/ |
| Abstract: | Traditional consensus surveys show that economists continually cannot reach an agreement on certain key policies. According to the previous research, this is mostly attributable to the differences in the political views of the economists. This thesis aims to explore additional factors, which could potentially influence the level of consensus and what the underlying causes of different views are. The author conducted a web-based survey of Czech economists and received 116 responses; the questionnaire included questions related to the economic policy of the Czech Republic and to the background of the respondents. Subsequently, a detailed analysis of the results was performed and an econometric model was constructed. The author finds that differences in views are truly the main cause of dissent among economists while other factors mostly have a negligible impact. It seems that the tendency to have liberal (=laissez faire) opinions tends to go up with income, that women tend to be less liberal than men, and that economists raised in the countryside incline to have less liberal opinions. Moreover, it was shown that graduates from the University of Economics tend to have significantly more liberal views in comparison with the graduates from other universities, ceteris paribus. However, there is still much to be explored as the general model conducted in this thesis explained approx. 45% of the variation in the tendency to have liberal opinions. |
