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- Albrecht, Martin
(författare)
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Enabling socio-technical transitions – electric vehicles and high voltage electricity grids as focal points of low emission futures
- 2017
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Today humankind is facing numerous sustainability challenges that require us to question CO2 intensive practices like those present in the transport and energy sector. To meet those challenges, many countries have adopted ambitious climate targets. Achieving such targets requires an understanding of the wider socio-technical context of transitions. The aim of this licentiate thesis is therefore to analyse such socio-technical transitions towards low-emission futures enabled by the electrification of passenger cars and high voltage grid development.A combination of different transitions theories (for ex. Multi-level perspective and Technological innovation systems) and institutional theory has been used. To reach the aim paper I analyses the climate impacts of electric vehicles (EVs) and policy measures to achieve a breakthrough scenario for EVs. The results show that a mixture of short and long term policies are needed that take into account the technology development stage and behavioural aspects of EV adopters. Paper II addresses the need to include the high voltage transmission grid and its planning procedures as a central part of debates on transitions. Therefore the opportunities, challenges and reasons for conflict in the established regime are studied. The results show that in order to achieve a sustainable grid development regime, it is necessary to spend time on achieving legitimacy and social sustainability. The third paper uses semi-structured expert interviews and focuses on innovation dynamics for EV adoption. By focusing on dynamics instead of single policy measures, it is possible to grasp interactions within a niche, but also in between a niche, regime and landscape. The results show that strong initial technology legitimacy was needed to start substantial innovation dynamics. This could be further strengthened with a strong and broad coalition of actors. Both those factors led, if present, to an improved variety and match of policy instruments.As such this thesis has shown that transitions are not just about technology or policy instruments as such but about the dynamics and processes needed to enable them. This can be relevant in other transitions that otherwise may underestimate the importance of these components.
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- Eriksson, Liselotte, 1978-
(författare)
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The Making of the Swedish Life Insurance Market 1855-1914
- 2008
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This licentiate thesis examines the development of the life insurance industry during the period 1855-1914. The aim with the study is to recognise dimensions not frequently addressed by previous research on the insurance industry, namely the impact of social dimensions, including the implicit and explicit economic importance of social movements and the diffusion of knowledge in society at large for the development of the life insurance industry. The study shows that income and price had limited importance in explaining the demand for life insurance before the 20th century and that this can be attributed to a lack of sufficient knowledge regarding financial issues and to a far too high access cost in acquiring a life insurance for a large part of society. The development of the life insurance industry must therefore be understood through improved knowledge both on the part of the life insurance companies and on part of the consumers. The licentiate further shows how diffusion of knowledge throughout society also was due to a diffusion of democratic ideas and the rise of social movements, movements that life insurance actors were a part of. These actions helped open up the financial market for the masses and probably also strengthened the trust towards the industry. It is however hard to dismiss the life insurance actors’ engagement in women’s movement as a cover-up for other disguised motives not so honourable, while a direct economic gain for the life insurance industry is hard to establish.
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- Petersson, Gustav Jakob, 1981-
(författare)
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Swedish marine insurance between the World Wars
- 2010
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present licentiate thesis analyses developments in Swedish marine insurance during the interwar period, including both direct marine insurance and marine reinsurance. This is done in order to provide insights on how companies of a highly internationalised and vulnerable line of insurance were affected by and responded to new risks during a period of far-reaching international financial and economic crises. Finally, the consequences of new risks and strategies are assessed. This thesis argues that during the interwar period Swedish maritime trade and Swedish marine insurance greatly depended on each other for marine insurance cover and marine insurance premium incomes. The business results in Swedish marine insurance partly depended on the development of Swedish trade. These business results were also vulnerable to currency risks. Swedish marine insurers faced no similar trade or currency risks during the two decades preceding World War I, and accordingly the returns on Swedish marine insurance were lower during the interwar period than during the last two pre-war decades. These factors probably bore their most severe consequences during the early 1920s when Swedish marine insurance on average induced losses to insurers. The remaining years of the period constituted a long-run recovery, and the Great Depression of the early 1930s caused no difficulties of the same order. This thesis also indicates that interwar Swedish marine insurers responded to new risks by increasing the level of cession to reinsurers. Another response was to increase the level of differentiation among insurance lines. This thesis describes the consequences of new risks and strategies in interwar Swedish marine insurance, focusing on the development of the Swedish marine insurance market structure and on the business results of Swedish marine insurers. Though this market shrunk and grew excessively, the relative importance of stock and mutual insurers showed only minor fluctuations. The importance of specialised marine reinsurance companies, however, fluctuated greatly. Also, cooperation between interwar marine insurers and the formation of insurance groups set new trends of concentration for the future. Finally, even though Swedish marine insurance during some years induced losses the Swedish marine insurers never experienced true losses on their total businesses.
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- Arnberg, Klara, 1979-
(författare)
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En ohejdad kommersialism? : Den pornografiska pressen och regleringen av pornografi i Sverige 1950-2000
- 2007
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This licentiate thesis describes the Swedish pornography policy and how this policy affected the pornography industry. The main aim of the study is to survey the development of the Swedish porn industry 1950-2000 and to consider how it was imagined both as an industry, and as a commercialized form of sexuality. The focus is on the relationship between the pornography industry and the state, and to study this relationship, the thesis is divided into three different but related parts. The first part concerns the institutional settings with main focus on the abolition of censorship in 1971. The political debates about legalizing pornography are studied in order to ascertain how industry and its actors are conceptualized in this context. It also draws attention to why regulation of the industry was considered necessary in the first place, as well as the how changes in the legislation affected the economic development of the industry itself. The second part concerns the Swedish pornographic press. My purpose is to map out all publishing houses that produced pornographic magazines from 1950 to 2000, and to chart some aspects of their economic fortunes. The history of pornography and connections to technological change is also studied in terms of estimating the influence of the video breakthrough on sales figures and market strategies for the publishing houses that had to deal with this development. In the third part, I study the regulation in action, i.e. when the publishers of pornographic magazines are prosecuted. I analyze all of the pre-1971 prosecutions – that is, the prosecutions that took place before regulation was removed. Using these records, it is possible to determine how the regulation was implemented, what content was considered harmful, and how that changed over time. This material, that includes the preliminary investigations from the police, also shows how the pornography producers handle the institutional settings to escape responsibilities and punishment. In this thesis, I show that the pornography industry in Sweden has a complex and changing relationship to the state. Although pornography is unwanted by politicians during the period, pornography is allowed to publish pictures without any restriction on sexual content in the 1970s. The argument for the deregulation is that censorship is incompatible with a modern democratic and liberal state. Pornography serves as a modern dilemma when the phenomenon is viewed as incompatible with a modern society, conflicting with the goal of gender equality, and when a regulation is seen as incompatible with the idea of basic liberties in a modern democracy. When it comes to the industry it shows that, quite unexpected, a lot of companies are run by women or as family businesses. There are no empirical grounds for the claim that pornography is an all male industry then, at least not in the Swedish case. The study also shows that the Swedish pornography industry was well established before the law change.
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- Levin, Mikael, 1981-
(författare)
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Energy consumption transition : final household energy consumption in the case of Sweden 1920-2010
- 2012
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This licentiate thesis examines households’ final energy consumption over the long run by measuring their final energy use and examining how structural, institutional and economic factors affected the demand for energy in the residential sector during the period 1920-2010, a period covering the transition from traditional to fossil to renewable energy carriers. I believe that wider understanding of the historical energy transition and energy consumption within the residential sector might help us gain important insights into the long-run development and the factors affecting energy consumption among the households. By providing a new historical record and analysis of final energy consumption, this licentiate thesis extends the mainly supply-driven and aggregated literature on energy in the field of economic history.The empirical account of energy use shows that the households’ final energy use in the residential sector has undergone two large energy transitions during the twentieth century. The first occurred during the period 1930-1950, when households shifted from firewood and coal as their main energy carrier towards oil and electricity. The electric grid, in conjunction with new electrical appliances, changed patterns of consumption, standards of living and domestic work. It also provided a foundation for the later shift from oil to electricity in heating in the 1970s. The transition occurred simultaneously with large investments in residential buildings and with a growing variety of electrical appliances. The energy consumption in the increased rapidly during the period 1950-1973, until the OPEC 1 crisis initiated decreased consumption and the second energy transition.The second transition was characterized by the shift from oil to electricity and district heating. The process was driven by high oil prices and relatively low electricity/district heating prices due to the expansion of nuclear power and new usages of biofuel and wind power. With a higher reliance on electricity, the households received an energy source of higher quality. Since 1979 the residential sector’s energy consumption has declined, and the sector has seen a substantial decline in carbon dioxide emissions. The reduction of energy consumption and the transition to non-fossil fuels contributed to substantial reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. For energy at large, household tended to reduce consumption when real energy prices increases more than real income. For the energy mix, household has tended to shift when relative price changes has affected the utility of consuming different energy carriers. Households shifted from oil when the price on energy services derived from electricity and district heating became relatively lower than oil
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