Mergers and acquisitions are one of the most researched topics in the financial literature and many research has been done. This thesis aims to analyse the impact of mergers and acquisitions on firms’ performance for the acquired firms and uses the difference-in-differences  (DID) estimation method with variation in treatment timing to achieve the objective. The dataused in this thesis are collected from database of Institute for Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances (IMAA) for 25 companies that merged between 2005 and 2019 and from the database of Indonesia Stock Exchange for 25 firms that did not undertake the mergers and acquisitions in the same period. The findings of this study indicate that there are statistically not significant effects on Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Equity (ROE). This suggests that the mergers and acquisitions do not affect the company's financial performance in terms of profitability.

Local governments are often willing to offer companies generous tax incentives to attract businesses to their region. In the United States, many states have tried to attract film productions and establish local film industries by offering different forms of state film tax incentives. As a prominent example of this, the state of Georgia offers a film tax credit which has no annual maximum compensation cap, creating an attractive tax environment for large film productions. The purpose of this study is to investigate if the Georgia state “Film, Television and Digital Entertainment Tax Credit” significantly affected film jobs in the state, and if any other industries were also affected through cross-industry employment spillovers. A difference in differences approach was used by way of the synthetic control case study method. This method estimates the counterfactual development of the outcome variable by creating a synthetic Georgia consisting of a weighted combination of untreated states. The results show a large and highly significant effect of the tax credit on film production jobs. However, little evidence of employment spillovers from the film industry is found, with only a select few affected industries being insurance and interior design. These results imply that tax incentives can establish a local film industry, but likely only if the annual maximum compensation is high or uncapped, making for a significantly more generous incentive than the average.

Thesis advisor: Ina V. S. Mullis / TIMSS and PIRLS assess representative samples of students at regular intervals, measuring trends in student achievement and student contexts for learning. Because individual students are not tracked over time, analysis of international large-scale assessment data is usually conducted cross-sectionally. Gustafsson (2007) proposed examining the data longitudinally by analyzing relationships between country-level trends in background constructs and trends in student achievement. Through longitudinal analysis of international large-scale assessment data, it becomes possible to mitigate some of the confounding factors in the analysis. This dissertation extends this country-level approach to subpopulations within countries. Adapting a pseudo-panel approach from the econometrics literature (Deaton, 1985), the proposed approach creates subpopulations by grouping students based on demographic characteristics, such as gender or parental education. Following grouping, the subpopulations with the same demographic characteristics are linked across cycles and the aggregated subpopulation means are treated as panel data and analyzed through longitudinal data analysis techniques. As demonstrated herein the primary advantages of the subpopulation approach are that it allows for analysis of subgroup differences, and it captures within-country relationships in the data that are not possible to analyze at country level. Illustrative analysis examines the relationship between early literacy activities and PIRLS reading achievement using PIRLS 2001 and PIRLS 2011 data. Results from the subpopulation approach are compared with student-level and country-level cross-sectional results as well as country-level longitudinal results. In addition, within-country analysis examines the subpopulation-level relationship between early literacy activities and PIRLS reading achievement, multiple group analysis compares regression coefficient estimates between boys and girls and across parental education subgroups, and mediation analysis examines the extent that partaking in early literacy activities can explain differences between boys and girls in PIRLS reading achievement. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Research, Measurement and Evaluation.

Exhaustible resource rents are an important taxable base in many countries, with revenue sharing often part of the scheme. In some cases large shares are retained for the central government. Generally, the discussions of exhaustible resource taxation consider assignment of resource rent tax base and revenue sharing from the limited perspectives of efficiency and stability. Tax assignment and sharing arrangements are assumed to have a neutral effect on investment of resource rents in long-lived public goods. We attempt to demonstrate that this may not be the case, specifically looking at the question of whether rent assignment is neutral to effects on investment of rents in long-lived public goods, a normative policy objective, and under what conditions it occurs. We test the theoretical propositions with data from the Russian Federation to derive empirical results. The results from the Russian Federation point toward an important dimension of rent tax assignment in a federation. They results show that ceteris paribus, higher share of rent for the federation may lead to lower investment in long-lived public goods and may be constrained by stability. Another argument has been made for reconsidering rent tax assignment using assertive ethnic identity as a manifestation strong ownership claims. Communities with strongly valued identities value ownership over land and exhaustible resource endowments in their areas. This may be the case especially if ethnic identity is important to the resource owning community. The empirical results show that a decrease in the regional share of rent resulted in a fall in investments in the republics and regions with strong ethnic identity. Republics among the producing regions have historical claims to a distinct identity and may have a preference for preserving their identity. This preference is manifested as higher levels of rent investment. Following this line of argument, it can be concluded that rent assignment, through rent tax or revenue assignment, should favor producing regions within the range of stability in a federation, if the objective is achieving higher investment in long-lived public goods.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T13:53:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 FernandaJSS_DISSERT.pdf: 1158719 bytes, checksum: 9400317640017498a51eda87632dedbf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-09-07 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / In Brazil, the selection of school principals is set in a decentralized manner by each state and city, such that processes may vary with time for a specific locality. In the state of Bahia, school principals were appointed by a higher political hierarchy until 2008, when schools under state administration started selecting principals by elections. The main goal of this work is to evaluate whether changing this specific rule affected students proficiency levels. This is achieved by using a panel data and difference-in-differences approachs that compares state schools (treatment group) to city schools (control group) that did not face a selection rule change and thus kept having their principals politically appointed. The databases used are Prova Brasil 2007, 2009 and 2011, the first one prior and the other two former to the policy change. Our results suggest that students attending schools with principals that are selected and elected have slightly lower mean proficiency levels both in mathematics and in portuguese exams than those attending schools with appointed principals. This result, according to the literature, could be related to perverse effects of selecting school administrators by vote, such as corporatism, clientelism and politicization of the school environment / No Brasil, a escolha dos diretores escolares ? formulada de maneira descentralizada por estados e munic?pios, com processos que podem variar ao longo do tempo para uma mesma localidade. No estado da Bahia, os diretores das escolas estaduais eram indicados politicamente at? 2008, quando a escolha passou a ser por elei??es. O objetivo deste artigo ? analisar os efeitos de tal mudan?a no rendimento escolar dos alunos. Para tanto, s?o usados os m?todos de dados em painel e de diferen?a em diferen?as que compara as escolas estaduais (grupo de tratamento) ?s escolas municipais (grupo de controle) que n?o foram afetadas pela mudan?a na pol?tica e, portanto, continuaram selecionando os diretores por indica??o. S?o utilizadas as bases de dados da Prova Brasil de 2007, 2009 e de 2011, a primeira anterior e as outras duas posteriores ? pol?tica de sele??o adotada pelas escolas estaduais. Os resultados mostram que, tanto para a profici?ncia em L?ngua portuguesa quanto em Matem?tica, o desempenho m?dio dos alunos das escolas em que os diretores s?o selecionados e posteriormente eleitos ? um pouco menor do que o desempenho m?dio de alunos que frequentam escolas em que os diretores s?o apenas indicados. Este resultado pode estar relacionado, segundo a literatura, a efeitos perversos da pol?tica de escolha do gestor por voto, tais como o clientelismo, o corporativismo e a politiza??o do ambiente escolar

Despite global progress on gender equality, women continue to be underrepresented in politics and business. One widely debated policy measure aimed at tackling this issue is statutory gender quotas for the boards of directors of listed companies – so-called corporate quotas – which have been adopted in more than a dozen countries worldwide, yet remain understudied in the gender and politics literature. This thesis addresses that research gap and explores the broader impacts of corporate quota policies, in particular whether a quota law increases companies’ attention to gender equality and women-friendly workplace policies in areas beyond the boardroom. Focusing on the case of Germany, which adopted a corporate quota law in 2015, I use companies’ annual and sustainability reports to measure corporate attention to gender equality over a period of ten years (2011–2020). I exploit variation in the scope of the German law by employing a difference-in-differences method to compare outcomes for companies targeted by the quota law and companies that fell outside of the law’s reach, before and after quota adoption. Contrary to theoretical expectations and earlier research, no significant effects are found, indicating that German companies’ inclination to work with gender equality and women-friendly workplace policies remains largely unaffected by the quota policy. This suggests that although gender quotas may enhance women’s numerical representation by increasing the share of female members on corporate boards, they make little difference for firms’ broader gender equality work.

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Vilka är effekterna av klassrummens digitala anpassningar i händelserna av en pandemi? Covid-19 har globalt sedan slutet av 2019 i olika omfattning och takt påverkat världsekonomin, den sociala mobiliteten och för Sverige likt många andra länder även skolbänken. Som ett led i stegen av Folkhälsomyndighetens rekommendationer som syftar till att motverka smittspridningen har klassrumsundervisning på riksnivå avlösts av olika hybrider av distansundervisning. Hur distansundervisningen påverkat Sveriges elever har varit ett föremål för debatt i de politiska rummen såväl som vid zoom-möten. Denna uppsats syftar till att undersöka sambandet mellan utvecklingen av flickors och pojkars betygspoäng på de obligatoriska nationella proven i ämnet engelska, matematik och svenska och etableringen av distansundervisningen i Sverige. Studien grundas på en Difference-in-Difference-in-Differences, en metod vars design utgår från inducerad slumpmässig variation. Nollhypotesen motsvarande att den logaritmerade genomsnittliga betygspoängen bland flickor och pojkar är likadan kommer via Welchs approximation testas för att se om utrymme finns för tolkningen att distansundervisningen kan ha påverkat trenden mellan betygspoängen och könstillhörigheten. Resultaten visar på att det inte går att avvisa att variationen i betygspoäng är orsakad av slump i engelska och matematik, men att skillnaden i genomsnittlig betygspoäng är statistiskt signifikant i svenska och har minskat mellan flickor och pojkar. Tre kompletterande hypotesprövningar görs på om andelen elever som fått underkänt betyg bland flickor och pojkar är signifikant lika i syfte att nyansera eventuella effekter av distansundervisningen, och för att undersöka om “Boys Will Be Boys” stämmer på de obligatoriska nationella proven. Resultaten på de kompletterande hypotesprövningarna är statistiskt signifikanta i respektive ämne och indikerar att skillnaderna minskat mellan flickor och pojkar. Modellen tar inte hänsyn till andra förklarande variabler än kön, varpå det uppmuntras till att tolka resultaten i ljuset av en inledande debatt kring könssegregationen i skolan.

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Förvaltningsfastigheter värderas ofta till verkligt värde. Under en lång tid har värdering till verkligt värde varit något svårdefinierat, där begreppet haft olika betydelse i olika sammanhang. IFRS 13 uppkom till viss del med anledning av detta. Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om IFRS 13 har påverkat underprissättningen för fastighetsföretag vid börsintroduktioner. Genom en Difference-in-Differences metod baserad på en uni- och en multivariat modell mäter vi det statistiska sambandet mellan IFRS 13 och underprissättning mellan åren 2005-2022 vid börsnotering av företag i fastighetsbranchen. Behandlingsgruppen består av länder inom Europeiska Unionen samt Norge, då dessa efterföljer IFRS som redovisningsstandard. Kontrollgruppen består av nio länder som inte har IFRS som obligatorisk redovisningsstandard. Resultatet visar på en negativ trend mellan underprissättningen och införandet av IFRS 13, men kan inte på ett statistiskt signifikant sätt fastställas. Resultatet visar dock ett negativt statistiskt signifikant samband på 0.1 procent mellan kapitalintäkten från börsintroduktionen och underprissättning samt ett statistiskt signifikant samband på 0.1 procent mellan Post och underprissättning för två av våra regressioner.