| 1. |
- Habte, Osmis Areda
(författare)
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Essays on competition and consumer choice
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis makes a contribution to the areas of deregulation, competition and consumer choice. It consists of three self-contained papers. All the research questions are examined in the context of the Swedish motor vehicle inspection market.The first paper, Competition Makes Inspectors More Lenient: Evidence from the Motor Vehicle Inspection Market, investigates whether increased competition motivates monitoring firms to relax the standards of the inspection to their customers. We hypothesized that the fear of loosing customers to competitors may incentivize firms to provide a biased inspection services. We employed fixed effects and fixed effects 2SLS analyses to identify the relationship between competition and the probability of passing mandatory car inspection. The results show that firms become more lenient to their customers when they face increased competition from their rivals.The second paper, Opening Hours and Competition: Evidence from the Motor Vehicle Inspection Market, examines the effect of competition on an inspection firm's incentive to provide longer opening hours. This paper uses a unique station-level panel dataset and addresses the potential endogeneity of market entry decisions using 2SLS analyses. I find that increased competition between providers leads to expanded service opening hours.The third paper, Deregulation, Choice and Competition in the Motor Vehicle Inspection Market, estimates a model of demand for car inspection services to investigate car owners' station choice behavior and its implications for competition. The paper further evaluates the effect on consumer welfare of removing the state monopoly on inspection services. The results indicate that distance is an important determinant of station choice. I also find that consumers respond to price, opening hours and station size. The improvement in spatial accessibility following the deregulation increased the welfare to the average consumer by around SEK 100.
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| 2. |
- Ericsson, Sanna
(författare)
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Reaching For Equality : Essays in Education and Gender Economics
- 2020. - 1
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained papers that all relate to the understanding of equality. The first chapter investigates the effects of preschool attendance on children in Kenya and Tanzania. We use a within-household estimator and data from nationally representative surveys of school-age children's literacy and numeracy skills, which include retrospective information on preschool attendance. In both countries, school entry rules are not strictly enforced, and children who attend preschool often start primary school late. At ages 7-9, these children have thus attended fewer school grades than their same-aged peers without pre-primary education. However, they catch up over time: at ages 13-16, children who went to preschool have attended about the same number of school grades and score about 0.10 standard deviations higher on standardized tests in both countries. They are also 3 (5) percentage points more likely to achieve basic literacy and numeracy in Kenya (Tanzania).The second chapter investigates the interaction between cultural norms and neighbourhood characteristics. I estimate the effect of cultural gender norms on the gender gap in math, and explore whether this effect is mitigated by municipality gender equality. I use high-quality Swedish administrative data on the results of national standardised math tests. To separate the effect of cultural gender norms from formal institutions, I estimate the effect of mothers' source-country gender norms on the gender gap in math for second-generation immigrants. By contrasting the outcomes of opposite-sex siblings, I control for everything that correlates with the source country but that is unrelated to gender. I show that the sibling gender gap in math increases with mothers' adherence to traditional gender norms, such that girls with more gender-traditional mothers perform worse relative to their brothers. To investigate whether the cultural gender norm effect can be mitigated by municipality gender equality, I exploit a refugee placement policy to obtain random variation in municipality characteristics. I show that municipality gender equality can almost completely mitigate the negative cultural norm effect. Taken together, my results imply that while cultural gender norms play an important role for the gender gap in math, they are not immune to the effects of neighbourhood exposure.The third chapter estimates the effect of female economic empowerment on domestic violence. I use individual level data from high-quality Swedish administrative registers on hospital visits relating to assault. I proxy female economic empowerment with a measure of women's potential earnings, caused by local changes in female-specific labour demand. I show that the causal effect of increasing women's potential earnings on domestic violence is positive and substantial. In addition, I show that increasing women's potential earnings increase the husbands' risk of destructive behaviour, such as stress, anxiety, substance abuse and assault. Taken together, these results indicate that improving women's financial independence triggers a male backlash response, even in a gender-equal country like Sweden.
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| 3. |
- Grenestam, Erik
(författare)
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Essays in Applied Microeconomics
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of four self-contained papers in applied microeconomics. The first paper asks how a neighbors purchase of a specific good affects a households likelihood of purchase. I use an image classification algorithm to process a large set of aerial photos in order to infer household ownership of a visible durable good, specifically a trampoline. To estimate the neighborhood effect, I use a fixed effects approach together with exogenous variation stemming from new neighbors moving in. I find that neighborhood effects are present, but only over short distances.The second paper documents how the financial portfolios of parents change in response to the birth of a child. To identify dynamic effects around child birth, we use an event study approach with a matched treatment and control sample and a novel implementation of the same sex instrument. We find that parents reduce their financial risk by a reduced propensity to participate in risky financial markets. Our findings are consistent with a consumption smoothing response as effects seem to be driven by a need for liquidity caused by lower earnings and increased consumption and housing costs. We find little evidence suggesting that parents actively adjust the composition of their risky financial portfolio in response to child birth.The third paper examines the effects of super-fast internet connections on the academic achievement of students in upper secondary school. We link detailed register data on around 250,000 students to local levels of access to optic fiber broadband to estimate the effect of broadband on student GPA using within-student variation in a difference-in-differences setup. We show that reaching full coverage in the student’s parish of residence causes a GPA reduction of about 4 percent of a standard deviation in our preferred specification.The fourth paper estimates the effect of Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) on nutrient runoff using farm level abatement data and water samples. A combination of data sources identifies all farms located upstream from a given water quality sampling site. We estimate whether within-watershed variation in AES payments affects nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in water samples. The study finds that higher uptake of some, but not all, AES were in fact associated with reduced nutrient runoff.
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| 4. |
- Kaya, Mehmet Caglar
(författare)
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Essays on Corporate Growth and Corporate Credit Risk
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This doctoral dissertation contributes to research on financial economics. It consists of an overall introduction and three independent papers. The first paper, “A Theory of Gazelle Growth: Competition, Venture Capital Finance, and Policy,” examines how young fast-growing small firms, called gazelles, develop. The paper investigates under which circumstances gazelles grow by establishing a new facility organically or by acquiring another firm. The paper proposes a theoretical model in which a gazelle firm competes against an incumbent firm that is a market leader in an oligopolistic market. The paper shows that a lower cost of organic growth can increase the gazelles’ incentives for acquisition growth. This is because the incumbent cannot in this situation protect its market from the gazelle’s entry and therefore does not acquire the target firm for entry-deterring purposes. Therefore, the gazelle firm can acquire the target firm at such a low price that it prefers growth by acquisition over organic growth. This effect implies that regulators’ financial policies customized to support the gazelles’ organic growth may, instead, spur gazelles to grow through acquisitions. The second paper, “Tracing Credit Risk in the Equity Market,” analyzes empirically how the illiquidity of a firm’s stock in the equity market affects the firm’s credit risk in the debt market. The paper measures credit risk via credit default swap (CDS) spreads. According to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, the stock price should reflect all available information. Similar to stock return or stock return volatility, stock liquidity is another aspect of stock price that provides information to the market about a firm’s value and future performance. This paper hypothesizes that stronger information asymmetry about the firm’s value will manifest itself as a higher illiquidity of the firm’s stock in the equity market. The CDS market will interpret higher illiquidity as a higher credit risk of the firm, and this will increase the CDS spread for the firm. The paper uses a sample of publicly owned large North American non-financial firms and shows that the higher the illiquidity of a firm’s stock, the higher the CDS spread of the firm in the next fiscal quarter. The third paper, “How Does Debt Composition Influence Credit Risk?,” investigates how different types of debt in a firm’s capital structure affect its credit risk. This paper uses CDS spreads to measure firms’ credit risk and decomposes debt according to two classifications: account type and debt maturity. Every debt type has its characteristics and implies a different level of information asymmetry in the credit relationship between the firm and its lender. Therefore, this paper hypothesizes that the CDS market attributes a different level of credit risk to each debt type. Empirically, the study finds that debt to financial markets is the most influential in terms of economic magnitude on next quarter’s CDS spread among all debt types by account type classification. Regarding debt maturity classification, the paper concludes that the CDS market attributes more credit risk to long-term than short-term debt.
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| 5. |
- Persson, Kristoffer
(författare)
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Essays on Expectations : Information, Formation and Outcomes
- 2020. - 219
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The first chapter investigates the relationship between economic media sentiment and individuals’ expectations and perceptions about economic conditions. We test if economic media sentiment Granger-causes individuals’ expectations and opinions concerning economic conditions, controlling for macroeconomic variables. We develop a measure of economic media sentiment using a supervised machine learning method on a data set of Swedish economic media during the period 1993–2017. We classify the sentiment of 179,846 media items, stemming from 1,071 unique media outlets, and use the number of news items with positive and negative sentiment to construct a time series index of economic media sentiment. Our results show that thisindex Granger-causes individuals’ perception of macroeconomic conditions. This indicates that the way the economic media selects and frames macroeconomic news matters for individuals’ aggregate perception of macroeconomic reality. The second chapter investigates if individuals experiencing different socio-economic environments during their formative years have different expectations about future economic conditions. We analyse differences in expectations across five generations of consumers by testing if they have different levels of confidence. The chapter focuses on all the different generations of the 1900s as defined by Howe and Strauss (1997, 2000). In our econometric model, we use the Millennial Generation as a baseline, as this generation is about to make up the largest fraction of consumers in the economy. Contrary to the theory developed by the literature on generations, such as Howe and Strauss, our results show that confidence increases gradually across generations. We find that the Millennials are more confident than generations born in the first half of the 1900s, but similar in confidence to other generations born in the second half of the 1900s.The third chapter test whether there is an interaction effect between expectations and policy shocks, that is, whether the effect of monetary policy depends on household’s expectations of the future state of the nationwide economy and their own personal economy. We find that a positive monetary policy shock increases household savings, but the effect is weak when households are more optimistic about their own future household finances and stronger when households are more pessimistic. Households’ expectations of the Swedish economy have no impact on their savings decisions or their response to monetary policy shocks.
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| 6. |
- Spika, Devon
(författare)
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Gender, health, the decisions we make and the actions we take
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis comprises of four self-contained papers that use both experimental and applied micro-econometric methods to explore different aspects of gender, health, the decisions we make, and the actions we take. In the first paper we investigate changes in psychiatric diagnoses and their income-related inequalities over time in Sweden and attempt to disentangle the development by decomposing changes over time in terms of population-level changes in education and migration background. Using Swedish administrative data we find that income-related inequalities in mental ill health increased dramatically between 1994 and 2011, but changes in education and migration background were not important drivers of these increases.The second paper aims to improve our understanding of the use of commitment contracts to help individuals achieve their physical activity goals. We experimentally compare the success of commitment contracts with and without financial stakes attached, and find a significant positive impact of being offered a hard contract. Importantly, we find that the effects are strongest among participants who reported exercising the least at baseline.In the third paper we seek to establish the effect of access to universal primary school-based health services in Sweden on long-term health and socioeconomic outcomes, using historical data on the timing of implementation of school health services in school districts in Sweden combined with administrative data. This paper helps shed light on the importance of interventions occurring during childhood on later life outcomes. Overall, we find little evidence that access to universal primary school-based health services leads to improved outcomes either during school ages or in later life.In the fourth paper, I conduct a pilot study to experimentally investigate the role of children’s books in the early internalisation of norms regarding gender, family, and careers. The motivation for this study was the fact that when women have children, they tend to make labour market decisions that result in substantial and persistent losses in earnings. The study was under-powered to draw strong conclusions, but results suggest exposure to a book that communicates a strong, positive message about mothers in both career and family roles may lead to reductions in implicit and explicit biases about gender, family and careers.
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| 7. |
- Ali Akbari, Danial
(författare)
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Das Human-Kapital : Emerging Patterns in the Class Structure
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three self-contained papers in theoretical and computational macroeconomics and growth theory with income inequality and human capital accumulation as common themes. The first paper investigates what level of income tax progressivity is welfare-optimal given modern patterns of income inequality in the US. The paper develops a model for endogenous income inequality that fits US evidence while comparing popular income processes. It also permits discussing the welfare effects and trade-offs of tax reforms as individuals adjust their labor supply and human capital accumulation. We extend it in an incomplete market setup solved numerically, in which individuals can both form precautionary savings and adjust their labor supply. A calibrated version suggests that the progressivity of US income taxes is below its welfare optimum by around six percentage points. The second paper develops a theoretical framework that explains the increasing and convex pattern of skill premia through diminishing aversion towards the ambiguous possibility of skill obsolescence. High-income workers are shown to invest more in education as their concern with forgone income is progressively lower than their less credentialed counterparts. As a result, high-skill (low-skill) individuals invest in their stock of human capital beyond (below) what is optimal if the true obsolescence frequency was known to them. This learning glut (deficit) subsequently pays large dividends (losses) during unexpected episodes that exhibit increased ambiguity. A calibration of the model is able to match the skill premium curve in the US economy. The third paper develops a task-based framework which incorporates decisions on human capital investment based on the concepts of the psychometric literature on skill formation. The model predicts that labor immiseration -- i.e. full automation of the economy -- is inevitable unless learning efficiency is improved through capital taxation. While such a scheme can hinder labor immiseration, job polarization, however, is shown to be perpetual and exacerbating as low-index workers are more adversely affected by automation of routine tasks. The main mechanism for these results are shown to be differences in skill profiles, cross-productivity of skills and the faster accumulation rate of physical vis-à-vis human capital due to advanced skills being more difficult to master.
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| 8. |
- Amilon, Anna
(författare)
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Studies on the Swedish Parental Insurance
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis contains an introductory chapter and three essays, all considering different aspects of the Swedish parental insurance. In the first two essays, different aspects of temporary parental leave (leave from work to take care of a sick child) are investigated, whereas the third essay considers parental leave (leave from work to take care of a new-born child). In the first essay, On the Sharing of Temporary Parental Leave, we study what determines the intra household sharing of temporary parental leave. We find that the sharing of temporary parental leave can be explained by a Stackelberg model with male dominance, indicating that the man first gets to choose his contribution to temporary parental leave. However, we also find that bargaining power influences sharing, and that the stronger the bargaining power, the smaller the individual's share of temporary parental leave. Thus, the inequality regarding the sharing of temporary parental leave works through two channels: firstly, due to men's positions as Stackelberg leaders and secondly, through men, in general, having stronger bargaining power than women. In the second essay, A Comparison of Single and Cohabiting Mothers? Utilization of Temporary Parental Leave, we investigate what influences the utilization of temporary parental leave by single and cohabiting women. We find that single women take more temporary parental leave than cohabiting women, ceteris paribus. We also find that single women with higher educations and incomes take less temporary parental leave than single women with lower educations and incomes, indicating that taking temporary parental leave induces signaling costs, and that single women respond to such costs by taking less temporary parental leave. In the third essay, Satisfaction and ?Comparison Sharing? ? What influences parents? satisfaction with the sharing of parental leave?, we study what induces parents to, ex post, be satisfied with the intra household sharing of parental leave. In particular, we investigate if the probability of satisfaction is influenced by how other similar couples shared parental leave, i.e. if ?comparison sharing? influences satisfaction. We find that parents are more likely to be satisfied with the sharing of parental leave if they shared more equally than similar couples. Thus, we conclude that parents? preferences are interdependent in this respect. In addition, the labor market situation of the parents and/or their financial situation largely influence the sharing of parental leave, and when it does, parents are significantly less likely to be satisfied with sharing.
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| 9. |
- Amilon, Henrik
(författare)
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Essays on Financial Models
- 2000
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of five essays exploring the validity of some extensively used financial models with a focus on the Swedish equity and derivative markets. The essays are of both an empirical and a theoretical nature. In the first paper, The Search for Chaos and Nonlinearities in Swedish Stock Index Returns, an investigation of the presence of nonlinearities in general and chaos in particular on the Swedish stock market is performed. Some properties of stock returns are hard to grasp with linear models. Nonlinearities must be introduced and can be of both a stochastic and a deterministic nature. In the former case, the movements are generated by external shocks, although these shocks may exhibit complicated interdependences. In the latter case, the movements are self-generating due to the nonlinear dynamics of the system, but still behave in a way seemingly indistinguishable from pure randomness. This is called chaotic motion, or chaos. Since the stock market crash of 1987 in particular, much effort has been made, trying to uncover the existence of different types of nonlinearities in financial and economic time series. Using the BDS test, we examine whether the rejection of the null hypothesis of IID stock returns arises from nonlinear or linear dependences in the conditional mean process, chaos, nonstationarities, or autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH). The results indicate that ARCH-effects are responsible for the rejections of IID. The second paper, The Compass Rose Pattern of the Stock Market: How Does it Affect Parameter Estimates, Forecasts, and Statistical Tests?, deals with the discrete nature of stock returns, imposed by the fact that stock prices move in discrete steps, or ticks. Recently, a geometrical pattern in a scatter plot of stock returns versus lagged stock returns, has been found. We believe that the effects of discreteness need a closer examination and, in this paper, we do Monte Carlo simulations on artificial stock prices with different degrees of rounding. We find AR-GARCH parameter estimates to be affected by the discreteness imposed by rounding. On basis of the compass rose and the discreteness we investigate different possibilities of improving predictions of stock returns, theoretically and empirically. The distributions of some correlation integral statistics, that is, the BDS test and Savit and Green's dependability index, are also influenced by the compass rose pattern. However, throughout the paper, we must impose heavy rounding of the stock prices to find significant effects on our estimates, forecasts, and statistical tests. Discreteness in stock returns is also the issue in the third paper, GARCH Estimation and Discrete Stock Prices. The results from the previous paper indicate the break-down of statistical models and tests based on state-continuity as the tick size to price ratio increases. Still, modeling such low-price stocks might be desirable in many situations. The continuous-state GARCH model is often used in modeling financial asset returns, but is misspecified if applied to returns calculated from discrete price series. I propose a modification of the above model for handling such cases, by modeling the dependent variable as an unobserved stochastic variable. The focus is on the GARCH framework, but the same ideas could also be used for other stochastic processes. Using Swedish stock price data and a stochastic optimization algorithm, that is, simulated annealing, I compare the parameter estimates and asymptotic standard errors from the approximative and the extended model. I find small deviations between the two models for longer time series, but larger differences for shorter series, mainly in the conditional variance parameters. None of the models provide continuous residuals. By constructing generalized residuals, I show how valid residual diagnostic and specification tests can be performed. The fourth paper, A Neural Network Versus Black-Scholes: A Comparison of Pricing and Hedging Performances, studies option pricing. The Black-Scholes formula is a well-known model for pricing and hedging derivative securities. It relies, however, on several highly questionable assumptions. This paper examines whether a neural network (MLP) can be used to find a call option pricing formula better corresponding to market prices and the properties of the underlying asset than the Black-Scholes formula. The neural network model is applied to out-of-sample pricing and delta-hedging of daily Swedish stock index call options from the period 1997-1999. The relevance of a hedge-analysis stressed in this paper. The Black-Scholes model with historical and implicit volatility estimates is used as benchmarks. Comparisons reveal that the neural network models outperform the benchmarks both in pricing and hedging performances. The moving block bootstrap procedure is used to test the statistical significance of the results. Although the neural networks are superior, the results are often insignificant at the 5% level. In the fifth paper, Comparison of Mean-Variance and Exact Utility Maximization in Stock Portfolio Selection, portfolio optimization is considered. The mean-variance approximation to expected utility maximization has been subject to much controversy ever since introduced by Markowitz. Given different correlated assets, how shall an investor create a portfolio maximizing his expected utility? The validity of the mean-variance approximation has been verified, but only in the limited case of choosing among 10-20 securities. This paper examines how well the approximation works in a larger allocation problem. The effects of limited short selling of the risky assets, as well as including synthetic options, that is, assets with high levels of skewness and kurtosis, in the security set is also explored. The results show that the mean-variance approximative portfolios have less skewness than the exact solution portfolios, but welfare losses, measured as the reduction in the certainty equivalent, are still small.
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| 10. |
- Anderberg, Dan
(författare)
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Essays on Pensions and Information
- 1998
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The first essay examines the outcome in a competitive private pension market characterised by adverse selection. In addition to using the private pension market, the consumers can save in a bequeathable asset. Assuming two types of agents and using the Coalition Proof Equilibrium with Private Information we show that the outcome in the private pension market may be separating or pooling. A separating equilibrium may be associated with profits. A pooling equilibrium is associated with supplementary savings in the bequeathable asset. It is argued that the option of saving in a second bequeathable asset generally does not benefit any consumer since its dominating effect is to aggravate the incentive compatibility problem. The second essay uses a simple two period model to examine the outcome of voting over a fully funded public pension system by a single cohort of consumers. Public pensions are interpreted as public provision of a private good. In addition to the public pension system the consumers have a supplementary private pension market available. The private market is characterised by adverse selection. The return in the private market is negatively related to size of the public system, which causes some consumers to have nonsingle-peaked preferences. Necessary conditions for public system to be a majority voting equilibrium are given. Numerical examples reveal that a political equilibrium is likely to be associated with supplementary savings in the private market by only a small fraction of the population. There typically also exists a local political equilibrium with a small public pension system and a large private market. This means that reaching the global political equilibrium often requires a vote over a discrete increase in the size of the public system. In the third essay a two-sector model with sector-dependent disability risks is presented. Working in the low-risk sector requires skills that can be obtained by investments in education. Moral hazard precludes full insurance. The labour force allocation is responsive to the incentives created by a social insurance system. The rationale for intervention lies in the government's power to cross-subsidise between the sectors, and it is demonstrated how the responsiveness of the labour force allocation limits the optimal extent of cross-subsidisation. The second-best policy is, however, time-inconsistent. The time-consistent equilibrium is explored and is argued to provide weak incentives to acquire risk reducing skills. The fourth essay continues to explore the design of optimal public disability insurance in a two-sector economy. Focusing on time-consistent outcomes the essay asks if there is a rationale for supplementing a public disability system with an intervention in the education market. The answer is affirmative; since the disability insurance system will subsidise the high-risk/low-skill sector, a worker who acquires skills does not capture the full social benefit of the investment. The education policy forestalls the time-consistency problem, and the conclusion is argued to carry over to a situation where the government can commit to a disability insurance system.
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