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Friday, 12 September, 2025
Master´s Thesis Defense Presentations 2025
Defense Committee: Jan Zápal (CERGE, chair), Michal Bauer (CERGE), Filiáp Matějka (CERGE)
09:00 Emma Mikayelyan: Financial Literacy across the Commonwealth of Independent States: a Comprehensive Cross-Country Analysis with a Focus on Gender Disparities
Chair: Daniel Münich
Opponent: Jan Zápal
10:00 Mario Aquiles Guzmán Fredes: Water Scarcity: Its Present, Future, and Possible Mitigation Through Technology
Chair: Sebastian Ottinger
Opponent: Paolo Zacchia
11:00 Christopher Nyasha Mutama: Electricity Load Forecasting: Impact of COVID-19 on the Czech Republic’s Load Profile
Chair: Silvester van Koten
Opponent: Konuray Mutluer
Emma Mikayelyan
Abstract:
In an increasingly complex financial world, financial literacy and sound financial decisionmaking have become essential tools. This thesis conducts a detailed examination of the levels of financial literacy and its components, including financial knowledge, behavior, attitude, and well-being across eight countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), namely; Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Drawing on the dataset on financial literacy levels across the CIS in 2021 conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), my study aims to provide a comprehensive, country-specific analysis of how socio-economic characteristics correlate to financial outcomes, including financial literacy, knowledge, and well-being. My thesis replicates previous estimates by the OECD, highlighting limitations in their model specification and proposing a more parsimonious specification. Furthermore, it applies Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models separately for each country, supplemented by robustness checks to ensure the reliability and validity of the results. In addition, a consistent finding across all eight CIS countries is that men tend to outperform women in financial literacy assessments, thereby contributing to a gender gap in financial literacy. To better understand this disparity, my study implements a detailed Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method, aiming to estimate the extent and drivers of the gender gap in each country individually.
