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Wednesday, 24 June, 2026

Master´s Thesis Defense Presentations June 2026

Defense Committee: Teresa Freitas-Monteiro, Jan Zápal, Yiman Sun

9:00

Blend Berisha: How Wartime Violence Shapes Post-Conflict Voting: The Electoral Legacy of War in Kosovo

10:00

Boris Gerát: Risk Channel of Monetary Policy and Heterogeneity in the Financial Sector

11:00

Rebeka Hoblik: Priming Protectionism: 19th Century Tariff Exposure and the Shape of Public Discourse in Newspapers

13:00

Maggi Cardoso Giovana: Financial Incentives and Sustainable Mobility: Evaluating the Impact of the Ecobonus Program in Italy

14:00:

Petr Rusnok: Why ICT Matters Less in Europe: Financial Structure and Organizational Investment

15:00

González Munoz René Sebastian: Intertemporal consistency and performance in project realization outcomes

Gerát Boris

Abstract:

This thesis investigates the heterogeneity in responses of U.S. financial subsectors to risk shocks transmitted through the monetary policy channel. Using a hierarchical Bayesian Vector Autoregression framework with Cholesky identification and the Wu and Xia (2016) shadow rate as the monetary policy instrument, the analysis documents pronounced differences across the banking, shadow banking, and hedge fund sectors. The banking sector behaves as a risk receiver, maintaining credit market access and expanding loan issuance, while shadow banking acts as a risk amplifier, deleveraging rapidly and contracting wholesale funding. The hedge fund sector shows weak and imprecisely identified responses, consistent with its idiosyncratic nature. The thesis also introduces three custom risk indices extending the Financial Stress Index methodology: a hierarchical principal component index built from time-series data, a sentiment-based index using FinBERT, and a composite of both. The time-series index performs competitively relative to Federal Reserve benchmarks, while the sentiment index captures recession episodes descriptively but underperforms in structural identification.

Full Text: “Risk Channel of Monetary Policy and Heterogeneity in the Financial Sector"