| 51. |
- Palmberg, Johanna, 1978-
(författare)
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Family Ownership and Investment Performance
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation provides an economic analysis of families as owners of large listed firms. The essential research question is whether family ownership provides an efficient form of governance. Family ownership and control is evaluated from different angles; how ownership, control, management, and board structure affects firm performance, and executive compensation.Chapter two “A Contractual Perspective of the Firm with an Application to the Maritime Industry” is a conceptual paper analyzing the contractual structure of a firm. The chapter conceptualizes the relations between firms, and markets, and gives a transaction cost perspective of why firms are organized the way they are.The third chapter “The Impact of Vote Differentiation on Investment Performance in Listed Family Firms” investigates ownership and control in Swedish family controlled firms. The analysis shows that family control is beneficial, but only if voting rights and cash-flow rights are aligned.The fourth chapter “Family Control and Executive Compensation” analyses whether families use remuneration as a way to expropriate minority shareholders. The study shows that managers in family-controlled firms have alower share of variable compensation than managers in non-family controlled firms. The analysis shows further that family control has a reducing effect on the total level of CEO-compensation.The last chapter “Board of Directors, Dependency, and Returns on Investment” investigates if there is a relationship between ownership structure, board of directors, and firm performance. The marginal q analysis indicate that firm dependent directors have a negative impact on firms’ investment performance. Owner-dependent and employee elected directors do not affect firm investment performance.To sum up, the empirical results show that family ownership and control affects remuneration in listed firms, and the firm investment performance. The analysis further shows that there are clear differences in the ownership and governance structure between family and non-family controlled firms.
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| 52. |
- Perrotta, Maria Carmela, 1981-
(författare)
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Aid, Education and Development
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four essays in development and political economics.Aid Effectiveness: New Instrument, New Results?Despite a voluminous literature, the question of whether aid leads to growth is still controversial. To observe the effect of aid, researchers have used instrumental variables that must be exogenous to growth and explain well aid flows. We propose a new instrument based on aid quantities as predicted by the priority that different recipients are given by the donors. We find a positive and significant, though relatively small, effect of aid.Hidden Redistribution in Higher EducationThis paper advances and tests the hypothesis that overspending in higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa reflects patterns of redistribution towards the elites close to the political leaders, when this level of education is accessible exclusively or mostly to such groups. I find support for this hypothesis, but the bulk of the Sub-Saharan Africa spending anomaly remains to be explained.The Impact of a Food For Education Program on Schooling in CambodiaFood for education (FFE) programs, which consist of meals served in school and in some cases take-home rations, are considered a powerful tool to improve education and health outcomes for children in the developing world. In this paper, we evaluate the Cambodia FFE and find that it increased enrollment rates, school attendance and achieved education. We also investigate who benefited the most, and how cost-effective such a program is compared to other types of interventions.Heterogeneity in the Growth Elasticity of PovertyIncreasing per capita incomes are generally associated with decreasing poverty rates. After the UN Millennium Declaration, a big research effort has focused on the responsiveness of poverty to growth using the concept of growth elasticity of poverty: the percentage change in poverty associated with a 1 percent growth in per capita income. This paper investigates, with help of new data, the heterogeneity around a well known average relationship. The main focus is on the effect of constitutions.
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| 53. |
- Rickne, Johanna, 1980-
(författare)
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Essays in Development, Institutions and Gender
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained essays. In the first essay, me and Johan Lyhagen develop a test of economic convergence or divergence using time series methods. The usefulness of the method is illustrated in an analysis of the growth pattern between Chinese regions in 1952-2007. Comparing all combinations of regional pairs, we find evidence of economic divergence in roughly half of the cases. In the other half, we instead find that regions have grown while maintaining stable income differences. The second essay compares average earnings and productivities of men and women employed in roughly 250,000 Chinese industrial enterprises. Women are found to earn, on average, 12% less than men. This gender wage gap stems entirely from a wage disadvantage for women with less than twelve years of education. For women with more than twelve years of education, the average wage exceeds the average wage of skilled men. The third essay takes as a starting point the situation that ten years after the establishment of China’s Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, coverage is still incomplete owing to large-scale firm evasion. This study draws on a highly representative panel of Chinese firms for 2001-2005 to describe the pattern of firm participation across time, ownership, region, and industrial dimensions. A simple theoretical model is then used to derive the prediction that firms are more likely to provide UI if they operate in tighter labor markets. This prediction receives empirical support, but the effect is quantitatively small. The forth examines the real exchange rates of oil exporting countries. In a simple theoretical model, strong institutions insulate real exchange rates from oil price volatility by generating a smooth pattern of fiscal spending of oil revenue over the price cycle. Empirical tests on a panel of 33 oil-exporting countries provide evidence that countries with high bureaucratic quality and strong and impartial legal systems have real exchange rates that co-move less with the oil price.
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| 54. |
- Rödin, Magnus, 1976-
(författare)
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Gender, Ethnicity and Labor Market Disparities
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Acculturation identity and employment among second and middle generation immigrants This paper explores the employment implications for individuals with a foreign background of identification to the ethnic group and to the majority culture. Results indicate that what matters for employment outcomes is an attachment to the majority culture while a strong attachment to the ethnic group is not per se detrimental for employment outcomes. Acculturation Identity and Higher Education: Is There a Trade-off Between Ethnic Identity and Education? This paper examines the role of identification to home and host cultures on the pursuit of higher educations. Results indicate that men with a bicultural identity are associated with higher probabilities of completed tertiary educations than men that identify only with the majority culture. Results put into question the premise of oppositional identities, i.e. a trade-off between ethnic identity and higher educational achievement. Is It How You Look or Speak That Matters? - An Experimental Study Exploring the Mechanisms of Ethnic Discrimination Using a laboratory experiment, this paper explores if beliefs about an individual’s performance are affected by how this person looks and speaks. Results show that individuals not perceived as stereotypically Swedish are considered to be worse performers. However, when candidates are presented by both looks and speech, differential evaluations based on looks disappear. Instead, we find strong negative beliefs about performance for candidates that speak Swedish with a foreign accent. Gender Differences in Exiting Tournaments - Experimental Evidence from Mexico, Norway and Sweden Using data from a television game-show, this study examines if men and women, who have actively self-selected into a competitive environment, differ in their propensity to exit a high-stakes tournament. Results show no gender differences in the propensity to leave the tournament in all three countries tested.
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| 55. |
- Skult, Eva, 1945-
(författare)
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Studies in Saving under Uncertainty
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three essays.In Precautionary Saving under Correlated Risk, I show that the sign of the correlation between the random variables might determine whether saving increases or decreases when risk is introduced. Precautionary saving is thus not confirmed. In the second part of this chapter, the consumer must also allocate her saving between an insurance and an interest-bearing asset. It is shown that switching the sign of correlation changes the optimal insurance ratio and probably also optimal saving.Saving and Portfolio Choice by Mutually Altruistic Consumers treats the effects of mutual altruism between two individuals. Compared to the Utilitarian social optimum there is, on the one hand, a tendency to higher saving and lower risk share resulting from the higher uncertainty of future income in the Nash equilibrium. On the other hand, there is a tendency to lower saving and higher risk share arising from the possibility of a free ride on the generosity of others, named "Samaritan's Dilemma". Analytically, it was not possible to determine the size or the direction of divergences in the choice variables. Numerical examples show that the effect of the Samaritan's Dilemma outweighs the effect of the greater uncertainty of future income in the Nash equilibrium. However, the divergence in saving between the two solutions is rather small.In the literature, uncertain lifetime has been used to explain both unexpectedly low and unexpectedly high saving by the elderly. In The Effect of Uncertain Lifetime on the Saving of the Elderly, risk is introduced into the remaining lifetime and the consequences of a background risk are investigated. Introducing uncertain lifetime into the certainty model results in a slower decumulation of wealth from the date of retirement. On the contrary, introducing uncertain lifetime into a model with uncertain investment income results in a swifter decumulation and an earlier depletion of wealth.
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| 56. |
- Söderberg, Johan
(författare)
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Price Setting, Inflation Dynamics, and Monetary Policy
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained essays. Essay 1: Staggered prices are a fundamental building block of New Keynesian DSGE models. In the standard model, prices are uniformly staggered, but recent empirical evidence suggests that deviations from uniform staggering are common. This essay analyzes how synchronization of price changes affects the response to monetary policy shocks. I find that even large deviations from uniform staggering have small effects on the response in output. Aggregate dynamics in a model of uniform staggering may serve well as an approximation to a more complicated model with some degree of synchronization in price setting. Essay 2: The welfare cost of inflation in the canonical New Keynesian DSGE model is due to price dispersion. Calibration of the model to match an empirically plausible markup leads to very elastic demand curves. As a consequence, even a small dispersion of prices leads to large distortions in households' allocation of consumption among different goods and substantial welfare losses. The empirical literature suggest, however, that demand adjusts sluggishly to price changes. In this essay, customer markets are integrated in an otherwise standard New Keynesian model by assuming that individual households can only optimize their consumption of an individual good at irregular intervals. With this specification, the welfare loss due to price dispersion is significantly smaller. Moreover, output gap stabilization should be assigned a much more important role in the conduct of monetary policy than previously found in the literature. Essay 3: A main argument for New Keynesian DSGE models is that they have solid microfoundations, but staggered prices and wages are exogenously imposed. How plausible are sticky prices and wages in these models? We show that, in a standard model, there is implausibly large volatility of production and labor supply on the microeconomic level. Also, rationality is violated as households sometimes end up with negative markups, and substantial "menu costs" are needed in order to rationalize the assumed behavior. We present an alternative model with efficiency wages and customer markets that has similar dynamics at the macro level and more plausible behavior on the micro level. In the alternative model, substantially smaller menu costs are required to support an equilibrium with sticky prices and wages.
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| 57. |
- Thulin, Per, 1963-
(författare)
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Essays on Regional Growth, Comparative Advantages and Foreign Direct Investments
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four essays, covering four different topics. The first essay investigates the relationship between inter-firm labor mobility and regional productivity growth. Previous studies have shown that density is positively correlated with growth. I claim that it is not density in itself, but rather the attributes associated with it that drives economic growth. One such attribute is the increased possibility for labor mobility and knowledge diffusion that follows when firms and individuals locate in close proximity to each other. This hypothesis is tested using density as an instrument for labor mobility. The result shows that labor mobility increases regional growth rates. The second essay examines the relationship between agglomeration economies and relative wage costs in influencing location of multinational corporations. An inflow of firms to certain regions and industries is likely to increase demand for labor. If mobility of labor is low increased costs can be expected to deter additional inflows of firms, albeit agglomeration economies may compensate for higher wages. The empirical analysis finds that FDI has become increasingly sensitive to differences in wage costs across industrialized countries, but also that agglomeration economies related to knowledge externalities positively influences higher costs. The third essay looks at the impact of FDI on home country investments. Previous research has been inconclusive as regards the effects on domestic investments. In this article, we show that this inconclusiveness can be explained at a disaggregated level as a function of the way industries are organized. We argue that a complementary relationship can be expected to prevail in vertically integrated industries, whereas a substitutionary relationship can be expected in horizontally organized production. The empirical analysis confirms a significant difference between the two categories of industry as regards the impact of outward FDI on domestic investment. The fourth, and final, essay of this thesis analyses how increased R&D expenditures and market size influence the distribution of comparative advantage. Previous studies report ambiguous results and also refer to periods when markets were much more segmented and production factors less mobile. The empirical analysis comprises 19 OECD-countries and spans the period 1981 to 1999. It is shown how an increase in R&D-expenditures by one percentage point implies a three-percentage point increase in high-technology exports, whereas market size fails to attain significance. In addition, institutional factors influence the dynamics of comparative advantage.
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| 58. |
- von Below, David, 1979-
(författare)
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Essays in Climate and Labour Economics
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four essays in climate and labour economics.Uncertainty, Climate Change and the Global EconomyUsing a modified version of the RICE model of the global economy and climate, we explore the uncertainty about various natural and socio-economic processes, and how this feeds through to uncertainty about climatic and economic outcomes. Under a Business-As-Usual scenario, the median increase of global mean temperature in 2105 will be around 5.0 °C. The 99-percent confidence interval ranges from 3.4 to 7.3 °C. Uncertainty about socio-economic drivers lie behind a non-trivial part of this uncertainty about global warming.Temperature Feedbacks to the Carbon Cycle in Climate–Economy ModelsThere is great uncertainty about how much of future CO2 emissions will be absorbed by the biosphere, due in part to uncertainty about climate sensitivity. Several well-known climate-economy models do not take this effect into account. We extend the carbon cycle component of the DICE model such that carbon flows between atmosphere and biosphere are made temperature dependent. Our results suggest that the baseline DICE model understates atmospheric CO2, particularly after fossil fuels have been phased out.Optimal Carbon Taxes With Social and Private DiscountingAn analytically tractable climate-economy model is extended to allow for a social planner that discounts the future differently than private agents. If a planner discounts the future at a different rate than private agents, the laissez-faire and the socially optimal rate of fossil-fuel depletion differ substantially. This calls for optimal carbon taxes that fall over time, eventually turning into subsidies. Welfare losses in the event that the first-best can not be implemented are substantially larger with differences in discount rates.Last In, First Out? Estimating the Effect of Seniority Rules in SwedenThe ‘last-in-first-out’ principle in Sweden was reformed in January 2001 such that employers with ten or fewer employees were allowed to exempt two workers from the seniority rule. We find that both hires and separations increased in small firms relative to large firms by 5 percent. This also implies that there were no effects on firms’ net employment. Our results show that firms reacted to changes in the seniority rules, but the effects are not overwhelmingly large.
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| 59. |
- Winstrand, Jakob, 1973-
(författare)
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Essays on Valuation of Environmental Attributes
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained essays. Essay 1. Radon is a radioactive gas which may occur in buildings and originates mainly from radioactive bedrock and radioactive building materials. In this paper we examine the willingness-to-pay for mitigation of residential radon. A rich data set, from the municipality of Stockholm (Sweden) for the period 1994 - 1996, enables estimation of models accounting for spatial correlation. Our estimate of the marginal willingness-to-pay is approximately SEK 58 200. Our results show that failure to account for the spatial structure inherent in the data, tend to over-estimate the marginal willingness-to-pay for mitigation of residential radon. Essay 2. This study examines the impact of a refinery on property values. The objective was to study the impact of the non-aesthetic view, the odor, and the impact of the reduced quality of coastal amenities in the surrounding area. To carry out the analysis, a spatial hedonic house price model was applied to transaction data enriched with a measure of visibility of the refinery determined by site inspection. The results indicate that all property values increase with distance to the refinery, but at more than twice the rate in the upwind direction, suggesting a negative effect of odor on property prices. In the proximity of the refinery, a view of the refinery tends to have a negative effect on property values, for example at 1 000 m the estimated effect is -24.5 %. At larger distances, as other positive objects in the view become dominant, the effect turns positive. At 2 000 m the effect is 0.8 %. To study the impact of the reduced quality of coastal amenities, we examined the premiums paid for properties with a sea front and sea view. The results show large differences in premiums and the estimated premium for a sea front (view) in a non-adjacent parish is 139.4 % (69.0 %) and in an adjacent parish 47.7 % (23.7 %), suggesting that a lower quality of coastal amenities could have a strong negative effect on property values. Essay 3. In this paper we conduct a choice experiment to assess aesthetic improvements in the neighborhood of a refinery located on the Swedish west coast. Considered improvements are: a reduction of vessels operating the refinery jetty, elimination of the odor of crude oil, and removal of the chimneys. We find that respondents marginal willingness-to-pay for an elimination of the odor of crude oil amounts to SEK 3 075. The marginal willingness-to-pay for removal of the chimneys is estimated to SEK 2 082. We find no support for preferences in favour of a reduction of vessels operating the refinery jetty. We also examine if the preferences for the aesthetic improvements differ between permanent residents and second-home owners. The results suggest that both groups have the same preferences regarding the proposed improvements in the environment surrounding the refinery.
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| 60. |
- Yanagizawa Drott, David, 1978-
(författare)
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Information, Markets and Conflict : Essays on Development and Political Economics
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis consists of four essays.The first essay, “The Strategic Determinants of U.S. Human Rights Reporting: Evidence from the Cold War”, uses a country-level panel dataset to test the hypothesis that the United States biases its human rights reports of countries based on the strategic value of these countries. The results show that allying with the U.S. during the Cold War significantly improves reports on a country's human rights situation from the U.S. State Department relative to Amnesty International.The second essay, “Watchdog or Lapdog? Media and the U.S. Government during the Cold War”, builds on the first and investigates the extent to which strategic objectives of the U.S. government influenced news coverage during the Cold War. Two relationships are established: 1) strategic objectives of the U.S. government cause the State Department to under-report human rights violations of allies; and 2) these objectives reduce the news coverage of human rights abuses for allies in six U.S. national newspapers.The third essay, “Propaganda and Conflict: Theory and Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide”, investigates the impact of the infamous "hate radio" station Radio RTLM on participation in the Rwandan Genocide. The results show that Radio RTLM substantially increased participation. Complete radio coverage in a village increased participation by 65 to 77 percent, and a simple counter-factual calculation suggests that approximately 9 percent of the genocide, corresponding to at least 45 000 Tutsi deaths, can be explained by the radio station.The fourth essay, “Tuning in the Market Signal: The Impact of Price Information on Market Exchange in Uganda”, estimates the impact of access to market price information on agricultural market outcomes. By exploiting a natural experiment in Uganda, the results show that access to price information causes rural farmers to sell larger shares of their output and receive higher farm-gate prices, while decreasing the market price in urban markets. Together, the results indicate that the price information reduced market failures by alleviating frictions between farmers and traders.
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