| 1. |
- Gunnarsson, Claes, 1967-
(författare)
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Value creation and loyalty in exchange relationships : a dynamic perspective
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt)abstract
- This marketing dissertation focuses on the troublesome aspects of value creation in dynamic business relations including in relation to internal and external customers. The research field points out that relationship-mediated value creation emerges in various forms of organizational arrangements, inter-organizational settings, service systems and networks.The aim of this dissertation is to describe and analyze how loyalty and value creation shortfalls influence business relationship dynamics. It is claimed that shortfalls in value creation reflect a discrepancy between anticipated or present performance compared with business partners’ expectations.In this dissertation, a dynamic perspective is applied to substantiate how critical episodes influence the continuity of relationships taking a progressive or regressive course of development. The study focuses on shortfalls in value creation and indicates troublesome aspects in term of the dimensions of customer satisfaction, trust and commitment. Accordingly, it directs attention towards the heterogeneous influence of business relationship dynamics which is caused by loyalty antecedents in specific episodes of value creation shortfalls.The main contribution of this dissertation is a portrayal of 11 different episodes of shortfalls in value creation, which indicates the stabilizing role of loyalty antecedents in different dynamic business relations.In essence, the findings specify that perceived or anticipated shortfalls in value creation imply an increased awareness among managers to account for loyalty antecedents in dynamic relationships. First, shortfalls in value creation are related to discrepancies between value proposition and value change. Second, stability can be achieved by substitution between trust and commitment (i.e. formalization) when there is a lack of value realization or value capture. Third, the formation of managerial commitment in goal congruence is crucial for stability when shortfalls relate to contingencies in the managerial system of control and coordination. The conclusions in this dissertation signify how loyalty antecedents may not be sequentially connected or activated along the relationship development process. In addition, these loyalty antecedents are occasionally inherently inconsistent in continuous and dynamic relationships.This dissertation consists of an extended summary and seven research papers. The applied method is characterized by both multiple and single case study approaches. Furthermore, the qualitative and multidimensional approach used is pertinent to the discussion of value creation and loyalty in contrast to employing a single theory framework.
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| 2. |
- Andersson, Camilla, 1979-
(författare)
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Changing the risk at the margin
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of a summary and four self-contained papers.Paper [I] examines whether the implementation of a social safety net programme in Ethiopia has affected the value, risk and composition of farmers‟ crop portfolios. The empirical analysis suggests that the value and risk of the crop portfolio have not been altered due to the programme. However, the programme seems to have brought about some changes in the land allocated to different crops.Paper [II] studies how a social safety net affects farmers‟ (dis)investments in productive assets. More specifically, it studies how the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia has changed livestock and tree holdings. The results indicate no significant effect on livestock holdings, but a significant increase in tree holdings.Paper [III] investigates if there is a problem of adverse selection in formal microlending in rural Bangladesh. The results indicate that farmers who only borrow formally have a shadow price of capital that is substantially higher than the average informal interest rate. This suggests that farmers that only borrow formally are perceived as poor credit risks by informal lenders.Paper [IV] explores the economic incentives surrounding the cultivation of opium poppy in Afghanistan. Specifically, it examines the impact of eradication policies when opium is used as a means of obtaining credit, and when the crops are produced in sharecropping arrangements. The results indicate that both these features are likely to affect the outcome of eradication policies.
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| 3. |
- Enström Öst, Cecilia, 1971-
(författare)
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Housing policy and family formation
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt)abstract
- Essay 1: This paper addresses the impact on housing consumption of a decrease in housing allowance among single recipient parents living in rental apartments. We take advantage of an imposed limit on the recipients’ dwelling size in the Swedish housing allowance reform in 1996-1997 that can be argued to be close to a natural experiment. The focus is on overcrowding. The data for this study has been extracted from the Swedish National Insurance Board’s databank on housing allowance recipients, which is data that has not previously been available for research. The result suggests that the benefit cut has increased the propensity for a housing adjustment into overcrowding. Furthermore, it gives some support to the view that housing allowance has some real effects on recipients’ housing consumption, an effect that has been regarded as close to negligible in previous literature. Essay 2: This paper investigates whether there is a cohort effect to be found in the tenure decision of young adults and whether parental wealth seems to have any influence on first-time homeownership. Recent studies have indicated that young adults’ chances on the housing market have deteriorated; it has become more difficult to become established on the housing market and such situations may increase the importance of parental wealth. In this study, parental wealth is not only estimated as family background information on parents’ homeownership, which earlier studies on first-time homeownership have emphasizes the importance of, but also as the father’s socioeconomic status and single parenting. Very unique cohort data with information on three birth cohorts who entered the housing market during different periods in the Swedish housing policy suggests there to be a significant and large cohort effect in the tenure decision of young adults. Furthermore, the results imply that parental wealth, as well as young adults’ earnings capacity, are more important predictors of the transition to first-time tenant-ownership comparing young adults facing increasing problems on the housing market with those who did not. Essay 3: This study contributes to earlier research on homeownership and childbearing by taking into account the potential simultaneity between these two life events. A very unique and recent data set comprising three different Swedish birth cohorts that entered the housing market during different time periods in the Swedish housing policy suggests that these are events that are indeed simultaneous. Different tests indicate that taking this simultaneity into account gives an overall statistically significant improvement of the model fit. However, this result is most obvious for those young adults who faced increasing problems on the housing market. The childbearing decision of these cohorts also seems to be more sensitive to changes in the user cost, i.e., the potential cost of being a homeowner. This may indicate that the housing market could have repercussions on the childbearing pattern; however, to draw more clear conclusions from this result, the relationship between housing and childbearing needs to be further explored since changes in the Swedish housing market also coincided with economic recession, increased unemployment rates and changes in the educational system.
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| 4. |
- Pham Khanh, Nam, 1975-
(författare)
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Prosocial Behavior, Social Interaction and Development: Experimental Evidence from Vietnam
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt)abstract
- Paper 1. Funding a New Bridge in Rural Vietnam: A Field Experiment on Conditional Cooperation and Default Contributions The ability to provide public goods is essential for economic and social development, yet there is very limited empirical evidence regarding contributions to a real local public good in developing countries. This paper analyzes a field experiment where 200 households in rural Vietnam could make real contributions to an archetypical public good, a bridge. In particular, we study the role of two kinds of social influence: i) conditional cooperation, i.e., that people may be more willing to cooperate if others do, and ii) the effects of the default alternative, i.e., that people are influenced by the default alternative presented to them in the choice situation. We find significant and substantial effects of both kinds of influence. For example, by either giving the subjects the additional information that one of the most common contributions by others is 100,000 dong (a relatively low contribution) or introducing a zero-contribution default alternative, the average contribution decreases by about 20% compared to the baseline case. Paper 2. Are Social Preferences Stable over Time? We use a combination of two natural experiments and one field experiment to measure people’s prosocial behavior in terms of voluntary money and labor time contributions to an archetypical public good – a bridge – in rural Vietnam, at three different points in time from 2005 to 2010. Since the experiments are far apart in time, potentially confounding effects of moral licensing and moral cleansing are presumably small, if at all existent. We find a strong positive and statistically significant correlation between voluntary contributions in these experiments, whether correcting for other covariates or not. This result suggests that prosocial preferences are at least partly stable over long periods of time. Paper 3. Conditional Cooperation and Disclosure in Developing Countries Understanding the patterns behind people’s voluntary contributions to public goods is crucial for the broader issues of economic and social development. By using the experimental design by Fischbacher et al. (2001), we investigate distributions of contribution types in developing countries (Colombia and Vietnam) and compare our findings with those previously found in developed countries. We also investigate the effect of introducing disclosure of contribution. Our experiments show that, on average, the distributions of contribution types are similar both in the two countries and compared to previous findings, except for free-riders, and overall remain unaffected by disclosure of contributions. Paper 4. Social Capital and Private Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam Farmers in developing countries often face capital constraints in adapting to climate change. Can farmers’ own social capital be utilized to facilitate the adaptation? This study uses four components of social capital – formal institutions, informal institutions, trust, and cooperativeness – to examine whether social capital is systematically linked to adaptation to climate change. The results suggest, in general, that social capital at the individual level does not affect farmers’ private adaptation to climate change. Yet, some forms of social capital are significantly associated with the choice of some particular adaptation measures. Paper 5. Are Vietnamese Farmers Concerned with their Relative Position in Society? This paper examines the attitude towards relative position or status among rural households in Vietnam. On average, respondents show rather weak preferences for relative position. Possible explanations are the emphasis on the importance of equality and that villagers are very concerned with how the local community perceives their actions. We also investigate what influences the concern for relative position and find, among other things, that if anyone from the household is a member of the Peoples Committee then the respondent is more concerned with the relative position.
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| 5. |
- Hirvonen, Lalaina, 1974-
(författare)
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Essays in Empirical Labour Economics
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt)abstract
- All three essays in this thesis are concerned with the interrelation of family, gender and labour market outcomes.The first paper investigates family earnings mobility between parents and sons, and parents and daughters, highlighting the role of assortative mating. The results suggest that daughters are more mobile than sons. I also find that Sweden has a higher degree of mobility compared to the U.S., and that assortative mating is an important underlying channel for earnings transmission. The difference in mobility between the two countries does not inherently depend on factors affecting the marriage match. Moreover, adult economic outcomes are more dependent on family background for those at the lower end of the earnings distribution.The second study analyses the long-run effects of an increase in family size on the 1980-2005 labour market outcomes of Swedish men and women. The decision to have (more) children is dependent on current and future labour market prospects. I use the exogenous variations in the sex composition of the first two children to overcome this endogeneity problem. My findings suggest that having an additional child has a stronger negative impact on earnings than on participation. However, mothers experience a substantial but not complete long-term recovery in earnings.The third paper illustrates the difficulty in disentangling the underlying channels of intergenerational earnings persistence using a path analysis model. On closer examination, such a model has a potential shortcoming since the covariates are correlated to other unobserved factors. The results suggest that education is the most influential mechanism in the earnings transmission process, while IQ, mental ability and BMI are of secondary importance. However, education is sensitive to the inclusion of other covariates and the order in which these are entered into the equation.
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| 6. |
- Ntiyakunze, Stanslaus Karoli
(författare)
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Conflicts in Building Projets in Tanzania
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt)abstract
- The prime objective of a client in a building project is to attain a successful project, a project that has been properly planned, designed and constructed in accordance with plans and specifications, and completed within time and cost originally anticipated. However the success of a building project depends on a number of variables one of them is the way the building team approach conflicts facing the project. This study examines the causes and management approaches of conflicts in building projects in Tanzania. The main objective of the study is to identify issues/areas on which conflicts occur, factors causing them and how conflicts are managed in building projects in Tanzania.As a means to achieve the above objective, the study was structured into two main parts; the first part aimed at mapping up the nature of conflicts in building projects in Tanzania by establishing critical symptoms of conflicts, factors causing them and the approaches used in resolving the conflicts. This was done through literature review, interviews and questionnaire survey. The second part aimed at in-depth study of conflicts from their root cause, how they develop/progress and how they are managed in a real building project setting. Four case studies of building projects were studied for this part.The study found that factors causing conflicts are in several forms. There are those related to the nature of contracts, where the contracts are unclear and ambiguous they give room for contracting parties to develop opportunistic behaviour when post adjustments are needed. There are those factors which are related to role functions when the parties fail to perform as expected. As such the study confirmed that contractual incompleteness and consequent post contract adjustments and opportunistic behaviour of some project participants are root causes of conflicts in building projects in Tanzania. However, the study established that there are sufficient mechanisms to deal with conflicts in the standard forms of building contracts used and when the provisions are against the interests of the parties, the parties resort to amicable resolution approaches. Notwithstanding the availability of mechanisms in the standard forms of contracts to deal with conflicts, the study proposes the framework as a strategy that could reduce effectively the occurrences of conflicts in building projects.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Hensvik, Lena, 1981-
(författare)
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The effects of markets, managers and peers on worker outcomes
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt)abstract
- Essay 1: This essay exploits the entry of private independent high schools in Sweden to examine how local school competition affects the wages and the mobility of teachers in a market with individual wage bargaining. Using rich matched employer-employee panel data covering all high school teachers over a period of 16 years, I show that the entry of private schools is associated with higher teacher salaries, including higher salaries for teachers in public schools. The wage returns from competition are highest for teachers entering the profession and for teachers trained in math and science. Private school entry has also increased wage dispersion between high- and low-skilled teachers within the same field. Several robustness checks support a causal interpretation of the results, which draw attention to the potential effects of school competition on teacher supply, through the more differentiated wage setting of teachers.Essay 2: (with Olof Åslund and Oskar Nordström Skans) We investigate how manager origin affects hiring patterns, job separations, and entry wages. The analysis, draws on a longitudinal matched employer-employee data including more than 100,000 workplaces during a nine year period. Immigrant managers are substantially more likely to hire immigrants, a result robust to comparisons within 5-digit industry and location as well as within firms across establishments. The finding holds also when we follow establishments that change management over time, even accounting for trends. Origin dissimilarity increases separations within the first year of employment, but there is no impact on entry wages. Several results point to information asymmetries as an important explanation to the patterns.Essay 3: The third essay examines whether women benefit from working under female management. I use matched employer-employee panel data for Sweden, which enables me to account for unobserved heterogeneity among both workers and firms. In line with existing work, I document a substantial negative correlation between the proportion of female managers and the establishment’s gender wage gap. However, most of this relationship reflects worker heterogeneity, suggesting that sorting is an important explanation for the lower gender wage difference in female-led firms. Further analysis supports this conclusion by showing that while female managers are not more likely to hire same-sex workers per se, they do indeed hire women with higher portable earnings capacity.Essay 4: (with Peter Nilsson) We analyze how peer effects among co‑workers affect fertility using population‑wide matched employer-employee panel data. We provide evidence on if, when, why and for whom co‑workers’ fertility decisions matter. Overall the impact of co-workers on own fertility is of the same magnitude as the effect of being one year older in the age span 20 to 30. “Same-type” co‑workers are particularly influential, although social status and own previous childbearing experiences modify the influence of peers in distinct ways. Peers’ fertility decisions matter most when the uncertainty about job-related costs of childbearing is low. The results provide insights to the sharp fluctuations in fertility rates observed in many countries, and give an indication of how social interactions affect important career related decisions.
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| 9. |
- Kim, Jaewon, 1978-
(författare)
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Trade, Unemployment and Labour Market Institutions
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt)abstract
- The thesis consists of three papers, summarized as follows. "The Determinants of Labour Market Institutions: A Panel Data Study" This paper analyses the argument that labour market institutions can be thought of as devices for social insurance. It investigates the hypotheses that a country's exposure to external risk and ethnic fractionalisation are correlated with labor market institutions. Extreme bounds analysis with panel data of fourty years indicates that countries that are more open to international trade have stricter employment protection, strong unions, and a more coordinated wage bargaining process. Moreover, there is evidence that union density is negatively associated with the degree of ethnic fracationalisation. "Why do Some Studies Show that Generous Unemployment Benefits Increase Unemployment Rates? A Meta-Analysis of Cross-Country Studies" This paper investigates the hypothesis that generous unemployment benefits give rise to high levels of unemployment by systematically reviewing 34 cross-country studies. In contrast to conventional literature surveys, I perform a meta-analysis which applies regression techniques to a set of results taken from the existing literature. The main finding is that the choice of the primary data and estimation method matter for the final outcome. The control variables in the primary studies also affect the results."The Effects of Trade on Unemployment: Evidence from 20 OECD countries" This study empirically investigates if international trade has an impact on aggregate unemployment in the presence of labour market institutions. Using data for twenty OECD countries for the years 1961-2008, this study finds that an increase in trade leads to higher aggregate unemployment as it interacts with rigid labour market institutions, whereas it may reduce aggregate unemployment if the labour market is characterised by flexibility. In a country with the average degree of the labour market rigidities, an increase in trade has no significant effect on unemployment rates.
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| 10. |
- Lundqvist, Heléne, 1982-
(författare)
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Empirical Essays in Political and Public Economics
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained essays.Essay 1: Despite the key role played by political payoffs in theory, very little is known empirically about the types of payoffs that motivate politicians. The purpose of this paper is to bring light onto this. I estimate causal effects of being elected in a local election on monetary returns. The claim for causality, I argue, can be made thanks to a research design where the income of some candidate who just barely won a seat is compared to that of some other candidate who was close to winning a seat for the same party, but ultimately did not. This research design is made possible thanks to a comprehensive, detailed data set covering all Swedish politicians who have run for office in the period 1991—2006. I establish that monetary returns are absent both in the short and long run. In stead, politicians seem to be motivated by non-monetary payoffs that can be realized with a successful political career.Essay 2 (with Matz Dahlberg and Karin Edmark): In recent decades, the immigration of workers and refugees toEurope has increased substantially, and the composition of the population in many countries has consequently become much more heterogeneous in terms of ethnic background. If people exhibit in-group bias in the sense of being more altruistic to one's own kind, such increased heterogeneity will lead to reduced support for redistribution among natives. This paper exploits a nationwide program placing refugees in municipalities throughoutSweden during the period 1985—94 to isolate exogenous variation in immigrant shares. We match data on refugee placement to panel survey data on inhabitants of the receiving municipalities to estimate the causal effects of increased immigrant shares on preferences for redistribution. The results show that a larger immigrant population leads to less support for redistribution in the form of preferred social benefit levels. This reduction in support is especially pronounced for respondents with high income and wealth. We also establish that OLS estimators that do not properly deal with endogeneity problems – as in earlier studies – are likely to yield positively biased (i.e., less negative) effects of ethnic heterogeneity on preferences for redistribution.Essay 3: While the literature on how intergovernmental grants affect the budget of receiving jurisdictions is numerous, the very few studies that explicitly deal with likely endogeneity problems focus on grants targeted towards specific sectors or specific type of recipients. The results from these studies are mixed and make it clear that the knowledge about grants effects is to this date still insufficient. This paper contributes to this literature by estimating causal effects on local expenditures and income tax rates of general, non-targeted grants. This is done in a difference-in-difference model utilizing policy-induced increases in grants to a group of remotely populated municipalities inFinland. The robust finding is that increased grants have a negligible effect on local income tax rates, but that there is a substantial positive immediate response in local expenditures. Furthermore, there is no evidence of dynamic crowding-out – i.e., that the immediate response in expenditures is reversed in later years. The flypaper behavior displayed by the treatment group can potentially be explained by “separate mental accounting” – i.e., voters treating the government budget constraint separately from their own.Essay 4 (with Matz Dahlberg and Eva Mörk): Public employment plays an important role in most countries, as it is closely linked to both the quality of publicly provided welfare services and total employment. Large parts of those employed by the public sector are typically employed by lower-level governments, and one potential instrument with which central decision-makers can affect public employment is thus grants to lower-level governments. This paper investigates the effects of general grants on local public employment. Applying the regression kink design to the Swedish grant system, we are able to estimate causal effects of intergovernmental grants on personnel in different local government sectors. Our robust conclusion is that there was a substantial increase in personnel in the central administration after a marginal increase in grants, but that such an effect was lacking both for total personnel and personnel in child care, schools, elderly care, social welfare and technical services. We suggest several potential reasons for these results, such as heterogeneous treatment effects and bureaucratic influence in the local decision-making process.
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