The thesis investigates the role of structural rigidities in recent labour market performances in Europe through various and complementary angles in five essays. By structural rigidities, we mean a lasting feature caused by a set of institutions, which prevents a market from operating efficiently. The approach is essentially empirical and macro-economic, while the scope of the analysis is definitely European, which is technically reflected in the use of either euro area aggregates or panels and cross-sections of European countries.

<p>Traditionally, research on cross‐country skiing biomechanics is based mainly on experimental testing alone. Trying a different approach, this thesis explores the possibilities of using computational musculoskeletal biomechanics for cross‐country skiing. As far as the author knows, this has not been done before.</p><p>Cross‐country skiing is both fast and powerful, and the whole body is used to generate movement. Consequently, the computational method used needs to be able to handle a full‐body model with lots of muscles. This thesis presents several simulation models created in the AnyBody Modeling System, which is based on inverse dynamics and static optimization. This method allows for measurementdriven full‐body models with hundreds of muscles and rigid body segments of all major body parts.</p><p>A major result shown in the thesis is that with a good simulation model it is possible to predict muscle activation. Even though there is no claim of full validity of the simulation models, this result opens up a wide range of possibilities for computational musculoskeletal biomechanics in cross‐country skiing. Two example of new possibilities are shown in the thesis, finding antagonistic muscle pairs and muscle load distribution differences in different skiing styles. Being able to perform optimization studies and asking and answering “what if”‐questions really gives computational methods an edge compared to traditional testing.</p><p>To conclude, a combination of computational and experimental methods seems to be the next logical step to increase the understanding of the biomechanics of crosscountry skiing.</p> / <p>Traditionellt har biomekaniska forskningsstudier av längdskidåkning baserats helt och hållet på experimentella metoder. För att prova ett annat angreppssätt undersöks i denna avhandling vilka möjligheter som beräkningsbaserad biomekanik kan ge för längdskidåkning. Så vida författaren vet, har detta inte gjorts tidigare.</p><p>Längdskidåkning innehåller snabba och kraftfulla helkroppsrörelser och därför behövs en beräkningsmetod som kan hantera helkroppsmodeller med många muskler. Avhandlingen presenterar flera simuleringsmodeller skapade i AnyBody Modeling System, som baseras på inversdynamik och statisk optimering. Denna metod tillåter helkroppsmodeller med hundratals muskler och stelkroppssegment av de flesta kroppsdelarna.</p><p>Ett resultat som avhandlingen visar är att med en bra simuleringsmodell är det möjligt att förutsäga muskelaktiviteten för en viss rörelse och belastning på kroppen. Även om ingen validering av simuleringsmodellen ges, så visar ändå resultatet att beräkningsbaserad biomekanik ger många nya möjligheter till forskningsstudier av längdskidåkning. Två exempel visas, hur muskelantagonister kan hittas samt hur lastfördelningen mellan musklerna förändras då skidåkaren förändrar stilen. Att kunna genomföra optimeringsstudier samt fråga och svara på ”vad händer om”‐ frågor ger beräkningsbaserad biomekanik en fördel i jämförelse med traditionell testning.</p><p>Slutsatsen är att en kombination av beräkningsbaserade och experimentella metoder borde vara nästa steg för att addera insikt om längdskidåkningens biomekanik.</p> / Report code: LIU‐TEK‐LIC‐2008:4. On the day of the defence date the status of article V was: Submitted.

Why do we observe such dramatic differences in labour productivity across countries in the macro data? This thesis argues that the growth empirics literature oversimplifies the complexity of the production process across countries and neglects data cross-section and time-series properties, leading to bias in the empirical estimates. Chapter 1 presents two general empirical frameworks for cross-country productivity analysis and demonstrates that they encompass the growth empirics literature of the past decades. We introduce our central argument of cross-country heterogeneity in the impact of observables and unobservables on output and develop this against the background of the pertinent time-series and cross-section properties of macro panel data. Chapter 2 uses data from 48 countries to estimate manufacturing production functions. We discuss standard and novel estimators, focusing on their treatment of parameter heterogeneity and data time-series and cross-section properties. We develop the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator and show its similarity to the Pesaran (2006) Common Correlated Effects (CCE) approach. Our results confirm parameter heterogeneity across countries in the impact of observable inputs on output. We check the robustness of this finding and highlight its implications for empirical measures of TFP. Chapter 3 investigates the heterogeneity of agricultural production technology using data for 128 countries. We develop an extension to the CCE estimators which allows us to suggest that TFP is structured such that countries with similar agro-climatic environment are influenced by the same unobserved factors. This finding offers a possible explanation for the failure of technology-transfer from advanced countries of the temperate 'North' to developing countries of the arid/equatorial 'South'. Our Monte Carlo simulations in Chapter 4 investigate the performance of the AMG, CCE and standard (micro-)panel estimators. Failure to account for cross-section dependence is shown to result in serious distortion of the empirical estimates. We highlight scenarios in which the AMG is biased and offer simple remedies.

This thesis is devoted to the analysis and optimization of pacing strategies in cross-country skiing and time-trial road cycling. In locomotive sports, it is well known that variable pacing strategies using changes in the distribution of power output are beneficial when external forces vary along the way. However, there is a lack of research that more in detail investigates the magnitude of power output alteration necessary to optimize performance.A numerical program has been developed in the MATLAB software to simulate cross-country skiing and time-trial road cycling, as well as pacing strategy optimization in these two locomotive sports. The simulations in this thesis are performed by solving equations of motion, where all the main forces acting on the athlete are considered. The motion equations also depend on the course profile, which is expressed as a connected chain of cubical splines.The simulation process is linked to an optimization routine called the Method of Moving Asymptotes (MMA), which strives to minimize the finishing time while altering the power output along the course. To mimic the human energetic system, the optimization is restricted by behavioural and side constraints.Simple constraints like maximum average power output are used for cross-country skiing in Papers I and II. In Paper III a more sophisticated and realistic constraint is used for the power output in time-trial road cycling. It is named the concept of critical power for intermittent exercise and combines the aerobic and anaerobic contributions to power output.In conclusion, this thesis has demonstrated the feasibility of using numerical simulation and optimization in order to optimize pacing strategies in two locomotive sports. The results are clearly showing that these optimized pacing strategies are more beneficial to performance than an even distribution of power output. / Denna avhandling är dedikerad att analysera och optimera farthållningsstrategier i längdskidåkning och tempocykling på landsväg. I idrotter som bygger på kontinuerlig framåtdrivning är det väl känt att farthållningsstrategier med variabel effekt är fördelaktiga om de yttre krafterna varierar längs banan. Ändå saknas forskning som mer i detalj utreder hur mycket effekten ska variera för att optimera prestationen.Ett numeriskt program har utvecklats i programvaran MATLAB för att simulera längdskidåkning och tempocykling samt optimera farthållningsstrategin i dessa idrotter. Simuleringarna använder sig av rörelseekvationer som består av de huvudsakliga krafter som verkar på idrottsutövaren under färd. Rörelseekvationerna påverkas också av banprofilen, som är uppbyggd av en sammankopplad kedja av tredjegradspolynom.Simuleringsprogrammet är kopplat till en optimeringsalgoritm med namnet Method of Moving Asyptotes (MMA), som strävar efter att minimera tiden mellan start och mål genom att ändra effekten längs med banan. Optimeringen begränsas av bivillkor i ett försök att efterlikna den mänskliga kroppens fysiologiska begränsningar.Enkla begränsningar såsom maximal medeleffekt används för längdskidåkningen i artikel I och II. I artikel III används mer sofistikerade och realistiska bivillkor för att begränsa uteffekten vid landsvägscykling. Här används modellen för kritisk effekt vid intervallträning, som kombinerar aerobt och anaerobt arbete.Sammanfattningsvis har denna avhandling visat på möjligheterna med att använda numerisk simulering och optimering för att optimera farthållningsstrategin i två idrotter. Resultaten visar tydligt att dessa optimerade farthållningsstrategier med varierande effekt är mer fördelaktiga för prestationen jämfört med en farthållningsstrategi med helt jämn effektfördelning.

Investigating how lending programs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) affect poverty and inequality, we explicitly address model uncertainty. We control for endogenous selection into IMF programs using data on 86 low- and middle income countries for the 1982-2009 period and analyze program effects on various poverty and inequality measures. The results rely on averaging over 90 specifications of treatment effect models and indicate adverse short-run effects of IMF agreements on poverty and inequality for the whole sample, while for a 2000-2009 subsample the results are reversed. There is evidence that significant short-run effects might disappear in the long-run. (author's abstract)

This thesis presents three essays, each seeking to deepen our understanding of labour markets. The first essay studies the response of real wages and hours of new hires to the business cycle during the UK’s Great Recession. The second essay analysis in how far the assumption of rational expectations in the Mortensen-Pissarides model is required for the economy to converge to an equilibrium. In particular, it asks if it is possible for economic agents to use simple linear forecast rules and still ensure convergence to the rational expectations equilibrium. The final essay seeks to determine whether labour income shares at the sectoral level are constant across countries, as is usually assumed in the literature, and whether this assumption quantitatively matters. Therefore, it takes the input-output structures across countries into account, and conducts a development accounting exercise. Real wages and hours in the Great Recession: Evidence from firms and their entry-level jobs Using employer-employee panel data, I provide novel facts on how real wages and working hours within jobs responded to the UK’s Great Recession. In contrast to previous studies, my data enables me to address the cyclical composition of jobs. I show that firms were able to respond to the Great Recession with substantial real wage cuts and by recruiting more part-time workers. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate led to an average decline in real hourly wages of 2.8 per cent for new hires and 2.6 per cent for job stayers. Hours of new hires in entry-level jobs were also substantially procyclical, while job-stayer hours were nearly constant. My findings suggest that models assuming rigid labour costs of new hires are not helpful for understanding the behaviour of unemployment over the business cycle. Unemployment and econometric learning I apply well-known results of the econometric learning literature to the Mortensen-Pissarides real business cycle model. Agents can always learn the unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE), for all possible well-defined sets of parameter values, by using the minimum-state-variable solution to the model and decreasing gain learning. From this perspective, the assumption of rational expectations in the model could be seen as reasonable. But using a parametrisation with UK data, simulations show that the speed of convergence to the REE is slow. This type of learning dampens the cyclical response of unemployment to small structural shocks. Measuring sectoral income shares: Accounting for input-output structures across countries I use input-output tables to measure the labour income shares of the goods and the services sector for a large cross-section of mostly developed countries. I present two novel findings: sectoral labour income shares significantly increase with the level of development, and within-country differences between these income shares are uncorrelated with the level of development. These cross-country differences are not caused by variation in the input-output structure or final demand, but originate at the production-side of the economy. I measure sectoral total factor productivity using a development accounting framework to assess the quantitative importance of my findings. The goods sector of less developed countries is relatively less productive than the services sector; assuming that the values of the sectoral labour income shares across countries are identical to their corresponding U.S. values leads to an underestimation of productivity differences across countries. All findings are robust to different adjustments for the labour income of the self-employed.

Submitted by Moritz Gorny (mgorny@online.de) on 2017-10-23T17:41:35Z No. of bitstreams: 1 FGV_WORKPROJECT_FINAL.pdf: 9639847 bytes, checksum: f844e7eb2597f24be32d35574b55e41d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Josineide da Silva Santos Locatelli (josineide.locatelli@fgv.br) on 2017-10-23T18:02:34Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 FGV_WORKPROJECT_FINAL.pdf: 9639847 bytes, checksum: f844e7eb2597f24be32d35574b55e41d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-10-24T12:05:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 FGV_WORKPROJECT_FINAL.pdf: 9639847 bytes, checksum: f844e7eb2597f24be32d35574b55e41d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-09-25 / The thesis uses return data on equities, bonds, commodities and real estate for the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America to examine diversification potentials. The analysis focuses on benefits of cross-asset and cross-region diversification as well as the impact of financial distress on those strategies and portfolio performances. It concludes that diversification benefits vary over time and decrease in bear markets due to higher correlation. Investmentgrade bonds and gold have shown the highest diversification benefits for equity investors during financial distress. Assets from emerging markets seem to be less sensitive to global market drops and show more constant performances. / A tese utiliza dados de retorno sobre ações, títulos, commodities e imóveis para os EUA, Europa, Ásia e América Latina para examinar os potenciais de diversificação. A análise centra-se nos benefícios da diversificação entre ativos e entre regiões, bem como o impacto do sofrimento financeiro nessas estratégias e desempenhos da carteira. Conclui que os benefícios da diversificação variam ao longo do tempo e diminuem nos mercados ostentosos devido à maior correlação. Os títulos de grau de investimento e o ouro mostraram os maiores benefícios de diversificação para os investidores de capital durante o sofrimento financeiro. Os ativos dos mercados emergentes parecem ser menos sensíveis às quedas do mercado global e mostram performances mais constantes.

This thesis adopts a new operational method to measure and investigate the relationship among cost efficiency, market competition and profitability in major Asian economies by using an unbalanced panel data sample of 278 commercial banks during the financial upheaval period of 2005-2012 before and after the global financial crisis. Firstly, we estimate the cost efficiency by employing different stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) models, which include the equity capital to indicate loss-absorbing capacity and risk preference and cross-country differences to be additional environmental variables. It is generally agreed that cross-country differences influence the frontier technology in the international comparison of banks performance. In this case, we implement the international comparison under SFA models with and without incorporating these cross-country heterogeneities. And the empirical results suggest that cross-country differences are significant sources to measure banks cost efficiency and evaluate banks performance. Secondly, we measure the market competition by investigating a range of approaches: the traditional Structure-Conduct-Performance approach, Lerner index, and new empirical industrial organization Panzar-Rosse approach. And we find that the SCP-Lerner approach may fail to identify the strength of competition and may not always unambiguously distinguish between the market power and the efficiency explanations of market concentration. Finally, following the approach of Boone, we measure the intensity of competition in two ways: the profit elasticity and the relative profit difference (calculated by cost efficiency score and shadow return on equity capital). Then we implement a quadratic quantile regression to compute the integral areas and standard errors for the Boone visual test and Wald test to reflect the relative intensity of competition for different competitive regimes over time. Our findings show that competition of banking industries become more intense in 9 Asian economies in the wake of the financial crisis and that two advanced economies (Singapore and Taiwan Province of China) and two remarkable emerging economies (China and India) play the significantly leading role in this intensifying competition process.

Since 2008 Europe has been in crisis, a financial and debt crisis that spread from the U.S. to all European countries. This thesis aims to provide evidence on the consequences of the crisis for individuals’ labour market outcomes across different countries and regions of Europe and to analyse how the recession has differentially affected sub-groups of the European population. Through the analysis of the longitudinal component of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) dataset, the project sheds light on the labour market trajectories of more than 20,000 Europeans across 11 European countries and 41 regions, before and during the 2008 financial crisis (2005-2012). Sequence and cluster analysis are used to investigate the heterogeneity of individual labour market trajectories across countries and time, while multilevel models are used to study regional labour markets during the years in crisis. The concept of transitional labour markets, as well as theories of labour market segmentation, job competition and job mobility, provide the theoretical framework for this research. The empirical findings show that during the financial crisis, labour market trajectories appear more turbulent and fragmented for the already disadvantaged sub-groups, namely women, younger workers and low educated workers. Furthermore, during the Great recession, an increase in unemployment among men confirms the sectoral profile of the crisis, which hit harder the male-dominated sectors of construction and industry. At the same time, a decrease in inactivity among women is consistent with the added worker effect, according to which women in periods of economic hardship are pushed towards labour market activity in order to contribute to the household income. Countries with weak economies and underperforming labour markets prior to the crisis, such as Greece and Italy, unsurprisingly experienced a deep and persistent crisis, while countries with stronger economies and more inclusive labour markets, such as Denmark and Sweden, managed to survive the crisis with less social harm. The institutional context of the countries offering high chances of employment even during the financial crisis, such as the Nordic countries, lies on the flexicurity of their labour markets. Indeed, flexible labour markets with the use of reduced working-time schemes, i.e. part-time forms of employment, contained unemployment during the financial shock. However, we need to be cautious about flexibility without security or partial deregulation of the markets, implemented in southern European countries, because during the crisis such policies led to further labour market segmentation and thus an increase in employment inequalities. Finally, the region of residence matters in employment outcomes, almost as much as the country of residence. In fact, from the regional analysis of individual employment outcomes during the years of the crisis, an uneven distribution of labour is detected even within the national borders. Summing up, the European crisis should be considered as the sum of national and regional crises.

Längdskidåkning är en av de mest krävande uthållighetsidrotterna där tävlingstiderna kan variera mellan tre minuter till närmare fyra timmar. Om en idrottsutövare ska nå toppen av sin förmåga krävs det vanligtvis att denne avsätter 20 till 30 timmar per vecka åt träning och tävling under flera års tid. Inom skidskytte behöver utövarna, utöver att vara duktiga längdskidåkare, dessutom bära ett gevär på ryggen och skjuta på måltavlor under högintensiv belastning. Syftet med studien var att kartlägga utövares upplevelser av avgörande och betydelsefulla faktorer för långa framgångsrika idrottskarriärer inom längdskidåkning och skidskytte. I studien användes en kvalitativ metod med semistrukturerade intervjuer, där totalt nio individer deltog. Deltagarna hade tävlat på nationell eller internationell nivå inom längdskidåkning eller skidskytte under minst en tio årsperiod som seniorer. Ett antal övergripande betydelsefulla och avgörande faktorer för framgångsrika idrottskarriärer inom längdskidåkning kunde identifieras. Dessa var: träning och organisation, socioekonomiska faktorer, talang och genetisk potential samt återhämtning. För att nå nationella och internationella framgångar och bedriva en elitsatsning krävs inte bara många års träning, utan även stöd från omgivning i form av familj, tillgång till rätt kompetens och ekonomiskt bidrag eller lön. / Cross country skiing is one of the most demanding endurance sports where the duration of physical effort during a competitive event usually lasts from three minutes up to four hours, or sometimes even longer. To reach national or international elite level, an athlete generally needs to invest 20 to 30 hours of training a week over many years. In biathlon, an athlete not only has to be a good skier, but also be able to carry a rifle and shoot on targets during high intense work load. The aim of this study was to identify athletes' own experiences of the crucial factors that allow for long and successful sport careers in cross country skiing. The study was qualitatively orientated, where semi-structured interviews were used to collect the athlete's perceptions. In total, nine individuals with at least 10 years of competitive cross country skiing or biathlon experience as adults at national or internationallevel participated. The interviews revealed several factors that athletes believe are crucial for achieving long and successful careers. These factors were: 1. Training and organization, 2. Socioeconomic factors, 3. Talent and genetic potential and 4. Recovery. To maintain long and successful careers in cross country skiing, athletes perceive that in addition to factors associated with the training process, support from family, their team and sponsors play important roles.