Search

This thesis deals with the impact of weather on the natural gas market. We describe the development of the natural gas market in the recent past and its current structure. Both these contingencies contributed to the growing importance of hedging against weather risk. Weather is unambiguously the primary determinant of demand in the natural gas market. For that reason, we build a model predicting consumption in the Czech natural gas market with respect to its temperature sensitivity. Such an analysis frequently serves as the first indicator of the need for weather risk hedging, which is since the 90's commonly done with weather derivatives. Therefore we go through so called burn analysis that determines the fair price of an option with regard to past temperature measurements.

The main focus of this thesis is the futures option pricing in electricity sector. We begin with description of fundamental features of futures options and describe specifics of electricity and markets where it is traded, which influenc option pricing. Further on, we will choose, according to defined criteria, three pricing methods resp. models that will be subject of our interest for the rest of the work - Black model, binomial model and Monte Carlo simulation. These models will be then briefly described and the basic idea of their approach to option pricing will be introduced. In the last, most important part, of this thesis we deal with empirical testing of all the three above mentioned pricing methods using data obtained from European Energy Exchange in Leipzig. In order to find best model for electricity futures option pricing we first calculate option premiums according to single models, these estimates are compared with the market premiums and based on the average percentage difference between these two values the most accurate model is chosen. To the author's best knowledge, the thesis presents the broadest empirical testing of futures option pricing models in electricity sector.

This paper examines factors associated with awareness of the EU energy labels of household appliances and the factors associated with the choice of appliance energy class using a dataset of 2136 households in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania. The results for five major appliances indicate that household knowledge of energy use increases label awareness, while households with a large share of elderly decrease label awareness. Factors that influence awareness of energy labels have a limited impact on appliance energy class choice. Significant country differences also exist. Romania shows higher household propensities to be aware of the energy class of appliances than Czech Republic, while Bulgaria shows lower propensities of label awareness compared to the benchmark of Czech Republic.

This bachelor thesis deals with the liberalisation of the gas market. In the first part, the European Union is studied along with its attitude to liberalisation processes. History of liberalisation is mentioned as well as last findings, opinions and European gas market characteristics. Second part deals with the description of the development of gas pricing mechanism. Third part focuses on the process of liberalisation in the Czech Republic. At the end, the industrial and household data from 2001 to 2011 are analysed.

The aim of my bachelor thesis is to introduce the issues of migration from the economic point of view based on data focused on the Czech Republic. There is only the net immigration analyzed in this thesis due to the lack of relevant data available for the emigration ones. The net immigration is represented by the difference of number of foreigners working in the CR legally. There is a linear regression model used in this analysis and dependence of difference of number of foreigners working in CR on several economic variables is estimated by the ordinary least squares method. There are quarterly data collected in 2001-2009 used in the analysis. The results show that the largest impact on the growth of number of working foreigners has the growth of unemployment rate. This impact is negative, which corresponds to the economic theory presented in the theoretical part of this thesis. Other variables significant for the difference of number of foreigners are year-to-year difference of real wage and difference of real gross domestic income.

The main aim of this work is to overview the historical development and contemporary gas industry situation in Slovak Republic. Special importance is given to the gas crisis which occured on January 2009 and to the role of the gas storages during this crisis. The last chapter of the work shows the possibility of modelling the natural gas pumping from the underground reservoirs.