Although human capital investment is often proposed as a solution to improve the labour market prospects of individuals who reach adulthood without obtaining a post-secondary credential, little is known about whether skills upgrading actually pays off. Using three national cross-sectional surveys on adult education as well as longitudinal data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (1992-2005), I analyze how returning to school affects the earnings trajectories of men and women who enter the labour force with low levels of initial education. There are two major findings related to the earnings and advancement question. First, although both Canadian and American adults with low levels of initial education are significantly less likely than their more educated counterparts to participate in education and training, when they do participate, they are more likely to report it helped them increase their earnings. Second, these perceived gains are matched by substantial gains in actual earning growth. While the opportunity cost of returning to school is quite high – returnees experience a sharp drop in annual earnings during the years while they are in school – for both women and men, this investment yields a significant increase in earnings in the post schooling period. In addition, I address the question of why – if the earnings gains are so substantial – do so few less educated adults return to school? There are three key findings related to the participation question. First, even after accounting for a rich set of covariates, the effects of family of origin socio-economic status on educational attainment persist over the life course. Second, despite these enduring effects, current family and labour market dynamics matter as well. Consistent with the human capital model, I find evidence that, educationally disadvantaged individuals return to school to improve their labour market prospects. Taken together these results demonstrate that at least for some educationally disadvantaged adults, human capital investment is an effective strategy for labour market advancement. This conclusion challenges the standard ‘cumulative disadvantage’ view of adult education as simply another mechanism that serves to reproduce inequality.

This dissertation explores how different labor market policies implemented following the transition to market system in Eastern Europe affected labor market outcomes. As the result of different policies implemented countries of Eastern Europe that were very similar at the beginning of the transition achieved different economic outcomes. We focus on Lithuania and Ukraine that represent two groups of countries with respect to the broad approach to economic transition. Our analysis explores change in gender wage gap in the two countries as well as evolution in returns to human capital. We compare labor market institutions and composition of the labor force for these two countries. Labor market of the Soviet Union serves as a reference point for this comparison. The data from Household Budget Surveys is utilized for this analysis. Returns to education levels are examined in both countries. We find no evidence of increase in returns to higher education in Ukraine following the decentralization of the wage setting system. However, higher educated workers in Lithuania were able to benefit from the transition. The second part of this dissertation focuses on evolution of the gender wage gap. We decompose gender wage gap using Oaxaca decomposition as well as Juhn, Murphy, and Pierce decomposition. We consistently find that it is the “unexplained” component that is single handedly responsible for the gender wage differential in both countries.

Although human capital investment is often proposed as a solution to improve the labour market prospects of individuals who reach adulthood without obtaining a post-secondary credential, little is known about whether skills upgrading actually pays off. Using three national cross-sectional surveys on adult education as well as longitudinal data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (1992-2005), I analyze how returning to school affects the earnings trajectories of men and women who enter the labour force with low levels of initial education. There are two major findings related to the earnings and advancement question. First, although both Canadian and American adults with low levels of initial education are significantly less likely than their more educated counterparts to participate in education and training, when they do participate, they are more likely to report it helped them increase their earnings. Second, these perceived gains are matched by substantial gains in actual earning growth. While the opportunity cost of returning to school is quite high – returnees experience a sharp drop in annual earnings during the years while they are in school – for both women and men, this investment yields a significant increase in earnings in the post schooling period. In addition, I address the question of why – if the earnings gains are so substantial – do so few less educated adults return to school? There are three key findings related to the participation question. First, even after accounting for a rich set of covariates, the effects of family of origin socio-economic status on educational attainment persist over the life course. Second, despite these enduring effects, current family and labour market dynamics matter as well. Consistent with the human capital model, I find evidence that, educationally disadvantaged individuals return to school to improve their labour market prospects. Taken together these results demonstrate that at least for some educationally disadvantaged adults, human capital investment is an effective strategy for labour market advancement. This conclusion challenges the standard ‘cumulative disadvantage’ view of adult education as simply another mechanism that serves to reproduce inequality.

The Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) argues that all unsystematic risk can be diversified away thus there should be no relationship between idiosyncratic risk and return. Ooi, Wang and Webb (2009) employ the Fama-French (1993) three-factor model (FF3) to estimate the level of nonsystematic return volatility in REITs as a proxy for idiosyncratic risk. They find a significant positive relationship between expected returns and conditionally estimated idiosyncratic risk contrary to the MPT. In this research, I examine other potential sources of systematic risk in REITs which may explain the seeming violation of the MPT found by Ooi et al (2009). I re-examine the proportion of idiosyncratic risk in REITs with Carhart’s (1997) momentum factor, which is largely applied on the FF3 to control for the persistency of stock returns as supplemental risk in the finance literature. Next, I conduct cross-sectional regression and test the significance of the relationship between idiosyncratic risk and expected returns. I further analyze the role of property sector on idiosyncratic risk as well as on its relationship with expected returns. I argue three conclusions. First, momentum has a relatively minor effect on the idiosyncratic risk consistent with the financial literature. Second, the effect of momentum is not strong enough to cause a significant change in the relationship between idiosyncratic risk and expected returns. Third, a REIT portfolio diversified across property sectors neutralizes the relationship between idiosyncratic risk and expected returns, though the contribution of each property sector is not statistically significant.

In the competitive world of manufacturing, companies are often searching for new ways to improve their process, customer satisfaction and stay ahead in the game with their competitors. Reverse logistics has been considered a strategy to bring these things to life for the past decade or so. This thesis work tries to shed some light on the basics of reverse logistics and how reverse logistics can be used as a management strategy. This paper points out the fundamentals of reverse logistics and looks into what kind of decisions today’s logistics managers have to take on a daily basis for the improvement of their logistics model. A growing concern has been developing to control rising global pollution, this paper also brings out some of the effects of reverse logistics decisions on the environment and vice versa. The thesis starts out by compiling the works of researchers and logistics experts in the field of logistics in the theoretical background section. Through a survey conducted in a few manufacturing firms in India, a small picture of the extent to which reverse logistics has penetrated the manufacturing world has been drawn.

This study presents an observation of the impact of Opec announcements on the behavior of sector indexes returns of the Stockholm stock market. It looks at the effects of the announcements on the stock returns of three sectors indices of theStockholm stock market: Energy, Telecommunications and Financial using the general market index return (OMX Stockholm 30) as the explanatory variable. The time period analyzed is limited to the years of 2005 to 2007 when markets worldwide were taken by euphoria and panic caused by the anticipation of the upcoming financial crisis given that it has been well proved that such events do cause a substantial effect on stock prices. In order to estimate the reaction of the sector index returns over Opec announcements, the author uses the event studies and constructs an extended version of the CAPM model by introducing dummy variables for each day of the set of announcements over the event window. It is used stationary time series data and the returns on the three sector indices were subdivided in an event window of 5 days around the announcement dates in continuous intervals of 3 years according to the Stockholm stock market trading days. As to improve the results obtained with the CAPM model, the author uses the Cumulative Abnormal Returns (CAR) which adds all the coefficients of the dummy variables which are the returns in excess of what is expected. The empirical findings for the event study reveal that none of the dummy variable coefficients were significant which indicate that none of the sector indexes is sensitive to the announcements. For the CAR results, the Telecommunication was the only sector that responded to news. Most likely because the general market index OMXST30 has proved to create extra returns around these dates. That is probably the reason that the three sector indexes could not produce significant additional response.

Theoretical studies posit that marketing strategies increases customers’ satisfaction and loyalty and decreases the systematic risk of the company’s stock. Many variables such as size, book-to-market and others, which have no special standing in asset-pricing theory, show reli-able power to explain the cross-section of expected stock’s returns. By adding customers’ sat-isfaction to one of them, this research involves discovering the relationship between custom-ers’ satisfaction and stock’s returns systematic risk, if any, by conducting a panel data analy-sis of seven banks in Sweden, Denmark and Norway through the period of year 2002 – 2011. The results verify a significant negative relationship between customers’ satisfaction and stock’s returns systematic risk.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if real stock returns are related to real GDP growth for the case of Sweden between 1980 and 2008. By using correlation tests, the paper presents evidence that there is almost no correlation between current real stock returns and current real GDP growth. On the other hand, Granger causality tests show that stock returns are related to future production growth for the period 1980-2008. Stock returns therefore indicate real economic activity in the next quarter. Between 1980 and 1992, there is no evidence of Granger causality from stock returns to GDP growth. However, stock returns Granger-cause production growth between 1993 and 2008, which suggests that the market has become better at predicting future economic activity. The paper also documents that GDP growth does not indicate future stock returns.

With the progress of the times, the international financial market link is becoming more and more closely, while the probability of extreme events more and more high, if there are some indicators can be used as a prediction of the crash, as whether to sell the stocks, it can be very useful. The study process for the use of the Fama-French five-factor model, as well as the VaR model, with the cluster analysis method, and clustering for Taiwan 50 constituent stocks in accordance with the five-factor characteristics of the individual stocks, the similar nature of stock into the same group, the establishment of portfolio, the use of portfolio daily returns to calculate the the VaR, and observe the VaR spread before the crash, how the trend, and whether certain characteristics. Comparison of the cluster group for the predictive ability of the collapse events, as well as the relationship between risk factors and predictive ability. The results of VaR spread movements are often subject to fluctuations significantly change the situation before the crash occurs. By intense will be stable or from stable will be severe. Good predictive ability of the cluster, often its constituent stocks and the collapse of the reasons more closely the relationship. Financial stocks sensitive to the financial tsunami; Electronic stocks are subject to exchange rate affect.Overall, the group with the best predictive ability is more sensitive to momentum effects and investor sentiment indicators ,but non-sensitive to book-to-market factor.To use the Var spread as a predictor of reference,choosing to meet the aforementioned conditions of stocks to the portfolio is a nice way.

Due to the financial turmoil in recent years, risk management has become an important issue, investors would like to be fully-prepared to cope with financial crisis before it happen. This research uses the Fama and French three-factor and the U.S. Dollar Index (USDX) as an exchange rate variations indicator to capture the international relations. It constitutes a four-factor model to analyze the S&P100 stock returns changes, and we introduce the skewed-t distribution to simulate the distribution of stock returns and capture the characteristics of skewness and kurtosis. We use cluster analysis to cluster the sample companies by their risk characteristics. And then we observe the explanatory power of each risk factor. The study shows that the S&P100 stocks are subjected to the market premium, and the scale effect is smaller than others. ¡@¡@ At last, in accordance with the GARCH-Skewed-t model to simulate the average, variance, skewness and kurtosis of each cluster. We track the long-term performance of each parameter which are used to observe the unusual changes before financial crisis. The empirical results show that the skewness parameter has perfect warning for financial turmoil. The cluster with warning ability is affected by B/M ratio effect and exchange rate changes. Among the case, the cluster has the best early warning effect when it's influenced by the exchange rate indicator. It displays that by adding an exchange rate risk indicator into the multi-factor model, we will have a better clustering result. It means that the skewness parameter of cluster with influence of exchange rate indicator can be used to observe financial turmoil, which can in turns, be used as an early warning system to determine the occurrence of extreme events.