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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

Rusnok Petr

Abstract:

After 1995, frontier economies with developed equity markets pulled ahead in productivity while economies dependent on bank lending fell behind. I argue financial structure shapes which firms take on a class of investment I call risky innovation, where the firm’s expected cash flow rises but so does risk. A risk-averse owner financed by debt absorbs the worst states herself. Under equity the investor shares every state, and the partial insurance lets her take on riskier projects with higher productivity gains. I prove that the optimal contract for such an owner is a call option, the mirror image of debt. From these theoretical foundations I test three predictions. First, I revisit Levine’s canonical result that financial structure does not matter for aggregate growth (β = +0.019, p = 0.97). I extend it into a two-period model and show that the canonical result misses transitional dynamics to a technology shock (β = +5.56, p < 0.0001 post-1995). For H2 and H3 I use EU KLEMS & INTANProd data on thirteen Western economies, twelve of them in a Rajan-Zingales style identification with the United States serving as a benchmark country. H2 relates the labour productivity contribution of intangible assets and ICT to financial structure across European sectors and finds the pattern the micro foundations predict. H3 tests the interaction of the intangible complement with IT adoption and shows capital reallocation toward IT in equity-heavy countries (β = +19.42), with bank credit and GDP per capita placebos loading wrong-signed.

Full Text: “Why ICT Matters Less in Europe: Financial Structure and Organizational Investment"