| 1. |
- Bondesson, Niklas
(author)
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Tracing the drivers of B2B brand strength and value
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- By building a strong brand that is favourably perceived by target customers, a firm can establish a competitive advantage that enables greater revenues and profitability. This is at least what the branding literature always has assumed, and something few marketing and brand managers seem to disagree with. When asked how exactly a brand can be charged with such great value, however, neither academia nor practitioners can provide definitive answers. This is especially true for business-to-business markets (B2B): although some of the world’s strongest and most valuable brands are operating in B2B markets, research on this area is clearly trailing behind business reality. This thesis aims at bridging the fuzzy and subjective customer-based perspective on brands with their potential economic outcomes for brand-owning firms. It does so by studying a single case (a packaging solutions supplier) in great detail, including face-to-face interviews and 678 observations drawn from a survey completed by professional packaging buyers in 8 countries across Europe. The study relies mainly on brand equity theory, together with thoughts from theories on shareholder value, psychology, corporate branding, business relationships and industrial marketing. More specifically, it is concerned with understanding the customer-perceived determinants (brand image) of brand strength and brand value in business markets. Or, in other words: which specific customer perceptions and behaviours make a brand valuable and profitable? The proposed model, which is the main outcome of this study, can be seen as a first step towards an integrated and nuanced B2B Brand Equity Chain. The model divides brand strength into a volume premium and price premium dimension, and includes five brand image dimensions: brand familiarity, product solution, service relationship, company reputation and brand community. The empirical findings support previous work within the area, but also add a number of elements that increases the explanatory power of existing models, and establishes a unique link between branding and bottom-line performance in business markets.
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| 2. |
- Hess, Wolfgang
(author)
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The Analysis of Duration and Panel Data in Economics
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis is divided into two distinct parts. The first part contains three chapters dealing with the analysis of duration data from an econometric perspective and with application to trade durations. The second part, consisting of the final chapter, focuses on the analysis of panel data and proposes a new test for poolability of the slope coefficients in cointegrated panel regressions. Chapter 2 introduces a novel hazard rate model that is much more flexible with respect to the imposed covariate effects than the conventional cloglog, logit, and probit specifications. In fact, the proposed Pareto hazard model incorporates the most commonly used cloglog and logit specifications as special cases. Using simulated data and data on US unemployment durations, Chapter 2 shows that the Pareto model works very well in practice, and that it also allows for covariate effects that are entirely different from those implied by both the cloglog and the logit specification. Since most durations of economic interest are continuous by nature but artificially grouped into discrete intervals, a further important contribution of Chapter 2 is to show that the proposed discrete-time duration model can be linked to an underlying continuous-time process. More specifically, the choice of hazard specification in the discrete-time framework is motivated by the asymptotic distribution of threshold excesses of a continuous duration variable. Finally, the fact that the Pareto hazard model nests the cloglog as a special case entails an additional advantage. Since the cloglog model is the discrete-time analogue of the Cox model, the Pareto model can be used to test the proportional hazards assumption imposed by the Cox model, even when duration times are coarsely grouped. This particular virtue of the Pareto model is also utilized in Chapter 3. Chapters 3 and 4 (both co-authored with Maria Persson) provide econometrical and empirical contributions to the emerging literature on the duration of trade. Chapter 3 contains an extensive discussion of the ineligibility of the predominantly used continuous-time duration models for the analysis of trade survival, and provides empirical evidence supporting the use of discrete-time models in this context. Based on the findings in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 employs discrete-time methods to analyze the duration of EU imports. As a result, the contributions to the existing literature on trade survival are twofold. First, the empirical analysis in Chapter 4 is based on data that have not previously been used by any of the existing studies on the duration of trade. Second, since there is at this point no clear, commonly accepted theoretical explanation for the ephemerality of trade, Chapter 4 seeks to provide a thorough empirical analysis of the phenomenon, with the intention of thereby facilitating theoretical developments on the subject. While Chapters 2-4 have exploited the rich information contained in panel data by focusing on individual duration times, Chapter 5 (co-authored with Joakim Westerlund) is concerned with a different way of utilizing the information in panel data sets. Specifically, Chapter 5 makes use of the time-series variation in panel data to test whether or not the slope coefficients in panel regressions differ between the cross-sectional units. The chapter proposes a new poolability test based on the Hausman principle, whereby two estimates of the cointegration parameters – one individual and one pooled – are compared. The proposed test allows for dependence among the cross-sectional units, and simulation results suggest that it works very well even in small samples. A further advantage is that the test statistic is based on the maximum difference between the individual and the pooled parameter estimates. This makes it possible to identify the cross-sectional unit that violates the homogeneity assumption in case the null hypothesis of equal parameters is rejected. Thus, subpanels that are suitable for pooling can be identified by applying the Hausman test in an iterative fashion.
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| 3. |
- Janlöv, Nils
(author)
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Measuring Efficiency in the Swedish Health Care Sector – Levels, Trade-offs and Determinants
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis measures cost efficiency in the production of health care and social services in Sweden. The object of analysis is not provider efficiency, but instead the relative efficiency of political organizations or different contractual arrangements. The thesis focuses on: 1) the measurement of cost efficiency, 2) the investigation of potential trade-offs between quantity of health care services and the quality of care, and 3) the exploration of determinants of cost efficiency. The first essay investigates the relative cost efficiency of the 21 Swedish county councils - how the councils fulfil their responsibility of providing and financing health care for their residents on the basis of need. Two models are estimated: one focusing on a traditional productivity measure and the other on quality in terms of health-related outcomes. Efficiency is estimated using non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA). The population weighted DEA-scores are 0.951 and 0.953 in the two models. The results also indicate that quantity and quality of care are complements in the production process. Councils which are net receivers in the equalization grant system have lower efficiency scores in both models. The second essay investigates the cost efficiency of Swedish municipalities in the delivery of care for the elderly. The first objective is to obtain a measure of cost efficiency, the second is to quantify the sources of cost efficiency and the third is to explore the relationship between cost efficiency and indicators of quality of care. It is based on a cross-sectional dataset consisting of 272 municipalities. Cost efficiency is estimated with a stochastic frontier cost function, using the modelling approach of Battese and Coelli (1995). The estimated average cost inefficiency is as high as 46 percent. Our empirical results also show that the share of private provision, rural location and small scale of operations are associated with higher efficiency. Furthermore, more educated staff is associated with greater efficiency. Finally, favourable results concerning outcome quality indicators, such as a lower prevalence of fall injuries, are associated with higher efficiency. This seems to indicate that there is no trade-off between cost efficiency and quality (outcome indicators) in Swedish care of the elderly. The third essay provides an analysis of the evolution of cost efficiency in public contracting of primary care during the first year after the primary care reform in Stockholm county council. A key element of the 2008 reform is the introduction of active individual listing and free choice of suppliers, where reimbursement follows the patient. The analysis is based on data from all the 147 primary care centres that delivered services during the period 2007-2008 and performed by stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). We analyze whether cost efficiency is influenced by different market characteristics and contractual arrangements. The relationship between cost efficiency and quality of care is investigated by including measures of patient satisfaction. The results show that cost efficiency in quantitative terms improved substantially. In addition, it seems that the increase in cost efficiency was not at the expense of patients’ experiences, nor did patients utilize other forms of care to a greater extent. A positive association between quality proxies and cost efficiency suggests that patient-driven competition may have worked well in this respect.
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| 4. |
- Johansson, Pernilla
(author)
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From debt crisis to debt relief: A study of debt determinants, aid composition and debt relief effectiveness
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis explores the external debt situation of developing countries and donor responses in terms of aid composition and debt relief. Primarily, these issues are important for future debt sustainability and therefore for creating beneficial conditions for accelerating growth and reducing poverty. With a focus on domestic factors (e.g. regime type) and exogenous shocks (e.g. terms of trade volatility), Chapter 2 provides empirical evidence about debt accumulation in developing countries over the period 1975–2004. The results show that neither domestic factors nor exogenous shocks explain debt accumulation to a great extent. Instead, the most important factor explaining debt accumulation is initial debt, suggesting that country-specific factors beyond regime type and exogenous shocks are more important. The results, moreover, appear to lend support to a change in the debt regime recently as high debt countries accumulated more debt in the beginning of the sample period but less debt over the period 1995–2004. Chapter 3 studies whether the poorest and most indebted countries receive foreign aid in the form of grants rather than loans. By studying bilateral aid flows to low- and middle-income countries between 1975 and 2004, the chapter provides empirical evidence on the determinants of the grant component of aid flows. While the analysis finds no evidence that more indebted countries receive a higher grant component, it shows that poorer countries tend to receive a significantly higher grant component of aid. The results suggest that the recent grant versus loan debate should focus not only on a total increase in the grant component of aid but also on the actual allocation of the grant–loan mix to recipient countries. Chapter 4 evaluates the effectiveness of debt relief over the period 1989–2004. Using a sample of 118 developing countries, this chapter empirically assesses the impact of debt relief on growth via (1) resources made available for investment from reduced debt service payments and (2) improved incentives to invest from a reduced debt stock. Although the results show no general evidence of a growth effect from debt relief, the study provides certain evidence that it promotes investment and thereby growth in countries not classified as HIPCs. Overall, the thesis suggests that future debt sustainability is possible – mainly because of a changing debt regime and an increase in grant flows. It questions, however, whether debt relief is able to generate what it promises in heavily indebted countries.
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| 5. |
- Fjertorp, Jonas
(author)
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Investeringar i kommunal infrastruktur: Förutsättningar för en målfokuserad investeringsverksamhet
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Capital assets in local infrastructure constitute an overbearing concern for society, with the generation of benefits for the population being its prime purpose. Nevertheless, the conditions for the capital investment activities within local governments are diffuse. Which different kinds of investment goals actually exist? How to explain the priority of different capital investment goals? What explanations are there to understand variation in development of capital investment volume between different local governments? The overriding purpose is to analyse and systematise conditions for goal-focused capital investment activities within Swedish local governments. More specifically, the purpose is: i) to identify and classify the goals for the capital investments that are performed, ii) to explain variation in development of capital assets volume and iii) to explain the priority of different kinds of capital investment goals. The study was design with a combination of four inductive case studies and two deductive statistical generalisation studies. Data from a national database was used, as well as data generated by a questionnaire sent to all Swedish local governments. Hypotheses were generated from a new-political-economy framework. The case studies result in a classification for capital investments goals. The classification visualise the diversity of different kinds of investment goals. The conclusions from the generalisation studies is that decisive factors related to both population, finances and politics can explain variation in development of capital assets volume. Even the priority of different kinds of capital investment goals, can be understood by decisive factors related to population and finances. Conclusions about general conditions are that i) politicians tend to strive to attain balance between the capacity to provide service and the actual amount of population, ii) politicians tend to use all resources available for the single administration to attain determined goals, it happens while they consider the demands of attaining sustainable economic conditions and iii) politicians tend to strive for legitimacy, by accommodating to the demands from stakeholders, especially from trade and industry.
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| 6. |
- Cassinger, Cecilia
(author)
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Retailing Retold: Unfolding the Process of Image Construction in Everyday Practice
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Retailing Retold offers an alternative approach to the analysis of how international retail images are translated across national boundaries. The approach extends the view on image in previous research as an instrument for monitoring the effects of marketing strategies on consumers’ perceptions of the retailer. Instead, it suggests that the usefulness of image resides in its ability to capture the relationship between international retailing and the lived culture. Informed by communication and cultural studies, the book argues that the formation of retail image needs to be understood as a construction process whereby consumers give retailing meaning in everyday practice. To this end, image construction is posited as a spatial storytelling in which consumers make sense of their experiences of retailing. In the tension between the strategically planned retail place and the lived spaces of those who use it, image is produced. In the book the image construction process is empirically explored through consumers’ storytelling of a major international furnishing retailer situated in Sweden and China. The exploration demonstrates how image is built via the manner by which the retailer is retold. By being retold, the retailer is silently provided with a unique and embodied existence in an everyday culture. The findings reveal a set of spatial tensions involved in the construction of an international retail image, which give fresh insights into how images of planned environments evolve with time and place.
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| 7. |
- Ericsson, Fredrik
(author)
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Säkringsredovisning - Implementeringen av IAS 39 i svenska icke-finansiella börsföretag och konsekvenser för säkringsverksamheten
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Since January 1, 2005 all publicly traded companies within the EU must prepare their consolidated financial statements in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The transition to IFRS brought with it major changes in the accounting for financial instruments through the introduction of the highly controversial accounting standard IAS 39 Financial Instruments: Recognition and Measurement. This applied in particular to hedge accounting, i.e. the accounting for financial instruments held with the purpose of reducing exposures to various kinds of risks. Prior to the transition to IFRS, hedge accounting was a virtually unregulated area in Sweden. With the introduction of IAS 39, hedge accounting instead became subject to a comprehensive, highly complex and restrictive system of rules. This thesis is about how Swedish non-financial listed firms have implemented the rules on hedge accounting in IAS 39. The study shows the problems that arose in the firms when implementing the standard and identifies the reasons why some firms eschew hedge accounting for some or all of their hedges. Furthermore, the accounting consequences of different types of hedges are generally considered to have a considerable impact on firms’ hedging activities. A central question in this thesis is therefore also if the introduction of the restrictive rules on hedge accounting in IAS 39 has had an impact on the hedging activities in Swedish non-financial firms, and if so, in what way.
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| 8. |
- Erntoft, Sandra
(author)
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The use of health economic evaluations in pharmaceutical priority setting - The case of Sweden
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The production of health economic evaluations of pharmaceuticals is a global, multibillion dollar industry. Despite this fact, little is known about what happens after a health economic evaluation has been produced. Will it be used at all, and if so, how? Who uses economic evaluations and for what purposes? Are there differences in the use patterns between decision makers at macro, meso and micro levels? Are decision makers willing and able to use them, and to what extent can the patterns be explained by contextual factors? This dissertation aims to provide answers to these questions. The concepts "use" and "barriers to use" are developed and the influence of contextual factors, demands for transparency, internal and external institutions, and logics on the use patterns are investigated. The use and barriers to use are addressed by an empirical investigation of Swedish pharmaceutical decision makers at the Dental and Pharmaceutical Benefits Agency (TLV), a county council formulary committee and prescribing physicians. Differences in the use patterns and the barriers to use are found among the Swedish macro (TLV), meso (county council formulary committee) and micro (physicians) decision makers. The findings from the empirical research on Swedish decision makers are also contrasted with decision makers in other countries in a systematic literature review. Through triangulation of observations, interviews and analysis of documents it is suggested that the use may be defined according to the purpose of the use and consequently the phase of the priority setting process (i.e. preparation, expert comments, decision making or launch). In addition, a conceptual model of the use and barriers related to the acceptability of health economic evaluations among decision makers is suggested, integrating findings from research in health economics, priority setting and institutional theory. According to this model, barriers to use may be explained by six factors ; 1) budget restrictions, 2) decision making rules used to reduce uncertainty, 3) demand for transparency, 4) internal institutions, 5) external institutions, and 6) the existence of prevailing templates.
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| 9. |
- Bohman, Magnus
(author)
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Bonden, bygden och bördigheten. Produktionsmönster och utvecklingsvägar under jordbruksomvandlingen i Skåne ca 1700-1870
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The great transformation of Swedish agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries was part of a European-wide development sharing similar characteristics. While researchers agree that extensive agro-technological, social and institutional changes took place, opinions differ with regards to the causes, spread, timing and sequence of events. Through a systematic study of agricultural production, land use and long term development in different geographical settings, this thesis contributes with new knowledge and sheds new light on one of the most important episodes of long term societal change. The aim of the thesis is to investigate how natural conditions and institutions affected the production patterns of agriculture during its transformation in the 18th and 19th centuries. Focus is set on valuing the importance of natural conditions, local traditions, cultivation techniques and property rights on the production patterns of peasant agriculture. Revising a model presented by previous research illustrating factors affecting pre-industrial agricultural practice, the study delineates to new models presenting time-dependent hypothetical relationships. The results show that agricultural practice during the 18th century was still marked by the production patterns of traditional agricultural regions, the collective nature of the open field system and the cultivation techniques and limitations of traditional agriculture. Market incentives had a weaker impact as well as local variations in natural conditions due to a lower degree of commercialisation and individualism. Entering the 19th century, the situation changed. Through enclosures the open field system was abolished. Due to the individualisation and consolidation of land, agricultural practice became more affected by local variations in natural conditions and less marked by the traditional production patterns of the agricultural regions. New cultivation techniques enabled peasants to overcome the limitations of traditional agriculture and create a bigger surplus. Meanwhile, the market had a bigger impact due to the expansion of both domestic and foreign markets and a gradual deregulation of trade. Moreover, the results show that the traditional agricultural regions (plain land, brushwood/intermediate land and woodland) differed regarding production and land use patterns as well as their paths of development during the agricultural transformation.
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| 10. |
- Helgertz, Jonas
(author)
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Immigrant Careers - Why Country of Origin Matters
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation examines the labor market outcomes of a population of natives and immigrants in Sweden from 1968 and until 2001. Previous research has consistently pointed to the importance of an individual’s country of origin, without being able to fully explain why this is the case. The standard approach is to use the country of origin as a way to measure everything occurring prior to migration, including linguistic and cultural differences from the destination country. Using unique information on an immigrant’s experience prior to migration, this thesis differentiates some of the mechanisms which are usually merged into the country of origin effect. Including measurements of language skills, labor market experience, formal education and early-life conditions, the thesis empirically estimates the magnitude of their effects on immigrants’ post-migration labor market outcomes. The thesis furthermore assumes a full career perspective and examines the influence of such pre-migration factors on the immigrants’ entire labor market career in Sweden. In the initial transition to the Swedish labor market, the influence of language skills is shown to be important for highly-skilled immigrants in particular. This finding is consistent with the expectation that communicative skills are more highly valued in occupations that require advanced formal skills. This is supported by the finding that those highly-skilled immigrants who are familiar with a language belonging to the Swedish language family experience a considerably more favorable transition to the Swedish labor market compared to those characterized by a greater linguistic distance. Still, among the immigrants in high-skill occupations prior to migration, labor market experience obtained prior to migration is also associated with a positive and non-negligible effect on the initial transition to the Swedish labor market. According to the results of the thesis, worse labor market outcomes for immigrants could also be caused by health conditions experienced during infancy, measured as the infant mortality rate. Establishing that conditions at the time of the individual’s birth are associated with attained adult income is therefore another key finding of this thesis. Furthermore, as individuals’ outcomes are observed at an age empirically shown to be a good predictor of lifetime earnings, this indeed suggests that an individual born under comparatively adverse conditions is likely to become permanently disadvantaged in the labor market. The infant mortality rate, measuring the health conditions to which an individual is exposed during their first year of life, has improved considerably worldwide over time. Despite this, contemporary immigrant cohorts typically have experienced comparatively worse early-life conditions than birth cohorts who migrated in the 1960s or the 1970s. An extension of the results therefore becomes to associate a part of the observed immigrant disadvantage to having been exposed to comparatively adverse conditions during early-life. More specifically, such a disadvantage may be manifested both as a greater initial disadvantage subsequent to migration, and as a less favorable career trajectory compared to an individual subjected to more favorable early-life conditions. The labor market changes characterizing Sweden in the time period examined in this thesis were expected to be associated with substantial implications regarding the immigrant’s career opportunities. The decline of low-skill jobs in general, and the private manufacturing sector in particular, implied a contraction of typical entry-jobs for immigrants in the Swedish labor market. Simultaneously, the growing share of high-skill jobs in the public and the private service sectors was believed to be associated with requirements that many immigrants do not fulfill. This thesis shows considerable differences in the opportunities for career progress between labor market sectors. The shrinking private manufacturing sector indeed appears to be associated with an absence of career opportunities for immigrants, increasing with linguistic distance. Immigrants are also disadvantaged in the private service sector, which tentatively is linked to this sector’s comparatively high demands for communicative skills. Furthermore, employers in this sector could be more likely to rely on informal recruitment methods which may lead to an exclusion of immigrants. Therefore, it is expected that the public sector is a more beneficial sector for immigrants in terms for career opportunities, given their greater reliance on formal recruitment methods. An exception to the favorable immigrant career opportunities in the public sector is, however, represented by individuals from countries with mother tongues most distant from the Swedish language in terms of origin and writing system. Lastly, among immigrants with advanced formal qualifications obtained prior to migration, substantial differences in their income assimilation trajectories are observed that is linked to the educational type of their formal degree. In particular, immigrants with pre-migration degrees within Health Care are observed to experience a comparatively favorable post-migration labor market experience. Regardless of the educational type to which an individual’s degree belongs, formal human capital investments are found to exert a positive effect on that individual’s trajectory towards income assimilation.
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