| 1. |
- Fuentes, Christian
(författare)
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Green Retailing : A socio-material analysis
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The marketing and consumption of green products has grown significantly in recent years. As mediators between producers and consumers, retailing sites play an important role for the distribution of green products. It is through stores and other retail sites that green products are marketed and made available to consumers. But how does retailing work to circulate green products? How are green products made part of specific consumption worlds and practices? And does green retailing facilitate the development of more environmentally sustainable patterns of production and consumption? Green retailing: a socio-material analysis offers a critical account of green retailing. Using practice theory and drawing on an ethnographic study of an outdoors retail chain, this book argues that the understanding of green retailing benefit from the acknowledgement of the complexities involved in retail practices. The book analyses the work done by the Nordic Nature Shop to make their green outdoors products meaningful and functional to consumers. It shows how the retail chain uses its outlets to create a world in where their products are become necessary while simultaneously giving the products the qualities needed to function in this world. Green outdoors products are through the Nordic Nature Shops marketing work framed as tools and problem solvers that mediate between society and nature and protect fragile environments. Through their marketing of green products, the Nordic Nature Shop promises that it is possible to consume the outdoors in a greener way. However, in offering consumers products that resolve the contradiction between wanting to enjoy and wanting to protect the outdoors, the Shop also makes a number of resource intensive outdoors consumption practices possible. This means that while the Nordic Nature Shop contribute to the greening of contemporary consumption practices it simultaneously reproduces consumer culture and discourages the emergence of more reflexive and critical forms of consumption.
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| 2. |
- Bondesson, Niklas
(författare)
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Tracing the drivers of B2B brand strength and value
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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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| 3. |
- Reffgen, Alexander
(författare)
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Essays on Strategy-proof Social Choice
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis makes a contribution to strategy-proof social choice theory, in which one investigates the conditions under which it is possible to construct social choice functions (i.e., voting procedures) that can never be manipulated in the sense that some voter, by misrepresentation of his true preferences, can change the outcome of a voting and obtain an alternative he prefers to the one that honest voting would give. The thesis consists of three separate essays, which provide complete characterizations of the strategy-proof social choice functions in different formal frameworks as described in the following. The first essay, “Generalizing the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem: partial preferences, the degree of manipulation, and multi-valuedness”, has its starting point in the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, which is the fundamental result of strategy-proof social choice theory. This result states that if exactly one alternative should be elected from a set of at least three eligible alternatives, then a social choice function is strategy-proof if and only if it is dictatorial. This result is generalized in three ways: First, we prove that the theorem is still valid when individual preferences belong to a convenient class of partial preferences. Second, we show that that every non-dictatorial surjective social choice function is not only manipulable, but can be manipulated in such a way that some individual obtains either his best or second best alternative. Third, we prove a variant of the theorem where the outcomes of the social choice function are subsets of the set of alternatives of an a priori fixed size. In the second essay, “Strategy-proof voting for multiple public goods” (co-authored with Lars-Gunnar Svensson), we consider a voting model where the set of feasible alternatives is a subset of a product set of several finite categories, and we characterize the set of all strategy-proof social choice functions for three different types of preference domains over the product set, namely for the domains of additive, completely separable, and weakly separable preferences. The third essay, “Strategy-proof social choice on multiple single-peaked domains and preferences for parties”, starts from the concept of single-peaked domains, which play an important role in strategy-proof social choice theory because they admit a large class of non-dictatorial strategy-proof social choice functions. These domains are generalized to multiple single-peaked domains, where the set of alternatives is equipped with several underlying orderings with respect to which a preference can be single-peaked. The main result in this essay provides a complete characterization of the strategy-proof social choice functions on multiple single-peaked domains. We show also in the framework of a spatial voting model for party elections that multiple single-peaked domains are appropriate to represent preferences over parties.
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| 4. |
- Cieslak, Katarzyna
(författare)
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The Work of the Accounting & Controlling Department and its Drivers: understanding the concept of a business partner
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The role of accountants in organizations is intriguing in the current context of the broad changes in the profession observed by many. Mainly because of technological advancements, what has previously required a considerable amount of time and effort, i.e. bookkeeping & reporting, has been assumed to ‘just happen’ easily, with a corollary that it should not be taken for granted, that the accounting department has to exist in companies in the way it has in the past. Seen in a positive light, the technological changes create opportunities for accountants to develop the management accounting/controlling aspects of their work and become increasingly involved in managing the business, contributing to the company’s performance. However, although the rhetoric of the accounting & controlling department be(com)ing a ‘business partner’ has been present for a number of years in both academy and business, theory about the business orientation of accountants is claimed to be underdeveloped and often anecdotal. Building on previous empirical research and theory about the work of the accounting & controlling department and incorporating thoughts from management control and practice theories, this empirical study of five accounting teams within one international company - a leading supplier of packaging solutions, tries to address this theoretical gap. This is achieved through entering a micro organizational realm, whereas previous literature has tended to look at macro–level drivers of change. In sum, the framework built in this study tries to address two questions: ‘what does it mean to be a business partner?’ and ‘which micro organizational forces drive the work of the department and why?’ The study describes the different dimensions of the work of accountants including activities, interactions and used competences; and it explores and explains how organizational forces influence these dimensions, creating a local environment conducive, or not, to business partnering. The identified organizational drivers include, for example, issues linked to organizational design, organization of the accounting department, schedule of management meetings, attitudes of general managers and IT systems. The study framework hopefully offers an increased understanding of the phenomenon of business partnering, and it may also help practitioners in their transformation journey.
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| 5. |
- Weisdorf, Jacob
(författare)
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Malthusian Progress
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Some scholars maintain that pre-industrial England was held in a Malthusian ‘trap’, and that this trap prevented the sustained growth of real wages until as late as 1800. Opponents to this view argue that the structural transformations occurring in preindustrial England – urbanization, labour reallocation between sectors, and human capital investments – are features of development that are incompatible with the idea of Malthusian stagnation. These opponents also reject the idea that Malthusian forces drove English wage rates down to a biological minimum. The contest between the Malthusian and anti-Malthusian views is one of the key themes addressed in the present dissertation. Are the anti-Malthusian views entirely at odds with the idea of Malthusian stagnation? Or can they be understood in the context of an economy ruled by Malthusian forces? The dissertation offers two key contributions. The first is a theoretical demonstration that, even though a Malthusian society is inherently stagnant in the sense that sustained economic growth is absent, scattered advances in technology can permanently raise the long-term wage rate. The key reason why new technology can have a short-term as well as a long-term (i.e. permanent) effect on the wage rate is the fact that a technological development can influence the degree to which the standard of living impacts upon birth and death rates. The second contribution of the dissertation is the empirical illustration that pre-industrial England, in spite of its Malthusian demographic features demonstrated elsewhere, was not a subsistence economy but one that was characterized by surplus labour, human capital investments, and wages above the biological minimum.
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| 6. |
- Hess, Wolfgang
(författare)
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The Analysis of Duration and Panel Data in Economics
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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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| 7. |
- HOU, Ai Jun
(författare)
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Essays on Financial Market Volatility
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis examines the volatility in the equity and short-term interest-rate markets, and the spillover from the short term interest rate market to the equity market. It consists of three papers and focuses on adapting and proposing models for the estimation and forecasting of financial market volatility. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the parametric and nonparametric volatility models, as well as the estimation methods used in this thesis. Chapter 2 applies a nonparametric smoothing technique to examine the volatility of the Chinese stock markets due to the unique characteristics of the Chinese markets. The results suggest that the leverage effect exists in the Chinese stock markets: Bad news does affect the return volatility more than good news. Further, compared with the superior performance of the nonparametric model in the in-sample and out-of-sample forecast, the parametric models tend to overestimate the volatility process in turbulent periods and yield larger estimation errors. The results also suggest that the nonparametric model is a more appropriate tool to use in estimating the Chinese stock-return volatility than the parametric GARCH models. Chapter 3 proposes a semi-parametric procedure to estimate the volatility of the weekly three-month U.S. Treasury bills. The new approach accommodates asymmetry, levels effect and serial dependence in the conditional variance and the volatility is estimated by a nonparametric smoothing technique. Results from our Monte Carlo simulation illustrate the robustness of the semiparametric approach when estimating short-rate volatility with misspecification in the short-rate drift function and the underlying innovation distribution. The empirical application to three-month U.S. Treasury bill yields suggests that the semiparametric estimation procedure provides superior in-sample and out-of-sample volatility forecasts compared to the widely used diffusion volatility models. Finally, we demonstrate that the semiparametric approach has pertinent implications for pricing long-dated and path-dependent interest-rate derivatives. Chapter 4 examines the equity-return volatility and the spillover effects from short-term interest rates in the EMU area. The empirical study is carried out by estimating an extended Markov switching GJR-in-mean model with a Bayesian-based Markov chain Monte Carlo methodology. Our results suggest that two regimes exist in the EURO area stock markets; a high-mean low-variance (bull) market and a low-mean high-volatility (bear) market. Most of the EURO countries have the same regime-switching status between the bull and bear markets. Our results also suggest that bad news from unexpected stock returns (negative residuals from returns) has an asymmetrically larger effect on the returns and the volatility than good news has. Such an impact is larger in the bear market than in the bull market. As implied in the news-impact surface, we find that changes in short-term interest rates only significantly affect stock market volatility in the bear period in most of the EMU countries.
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| 8. |
- Janlöv, Nils
(författare)
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Measuring Efficiency in the Swedish Health Care Sector – Levels, Trade-offs and Determinants
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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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| 9. |
- Johansson, Pernilla
(författare)
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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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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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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| 10. |
- Faran, Turaj
(författare)
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The Industrialization Process in the Chinese Mirror - Continuity and change in transition from collective agriculture to market economy in China
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Abstract in UndeterminedThe dominant explanation for China's unprecendented rates of economic growth in the last three decades has regarded them as the consequence of the reform policies that, after Mao, the Chinese leaders embarked upon in 1978. The present study, in contrast, argues for continuity between the socialist period and the post-refrom era in China's economic course.Chinse socialism, it is argued, should best be understood as a strategy of industrialization which, in absence of a modern agricultural sector, had t proceed with more stringent institutional arrangements. the particular features of China's socialist agriculture, namely the rural Communes, were crucial for making up for the missing contributions of the agriculatutal sector in the process of industrialization. The Communes, by merging agricultural activity with rural industry, eventually managed to produce the modern agricultural inputs crucial for the increase of productivity in agriculture. Once the technological breakthrough was there, the collectivist institutions of rural China served no purpose in the inductrializatiion process. The transition to market and private agriculture became feasible in the new context of a modern, productive agriculture.The model elaborated here for China's transition has relevance for the study of the industrialization process in other Third World countries which show less stringent forms of deviation from market than the socialist strategy of industrialization in China.
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