Like any other company, life insurance companies maintain a combination of debt and equity for their long-term financing, which forms their capital structure. Many theories have been developed in the literature to focus upon the determinants that are likely to affect leverage decisions of the life insurance firms in the post life Risk-Based Capital (RBC) regulation era. This report documents the application of multiple regression techniques to derive and analyze a Capital Asset Ratio (CAP) model based on the data pertaining to a large number of life insurance companies during 2000 to 2004. The data set is organized as panel data. Model coefficients, together with the error structure, are analyzed using SAS software to develop a valid model that tries to explain the Capital to Asset Ratio (CAP) for life insurers in terms of various variables of interest. The latter include return on capital, total assets, and two measures of risk: asset risk and product risk, etc. A balanced panel dataset was extracted from the given unbalanced input dataset containing missing entries. In addition, a selected few of the explanatory variables were chosen from a large group present in the input dataset based on previous work on relations among asset risk, product risk and capital in the life insurance industry by Etti G. Baranoff and Thomas W. Sager (2002). Fixed Effects model was chosen based on the assumption that the firm-specific effects were correlated to the explanatory variables. Differencing method was employed so that OLS estimator could safely be used for the coefficients in the regression model. Based on the proposed model, it is found that Capital to Asset Ratio has positive relationships with product risk and return on capital, with the corporate form of organization, and with membership in an affiliated group of companies. On the other hand, it has a negative relationship with company’s size and the ratio of life premiums or annuity premiums to the total premiums generated. / text

Variation in health care, whether it be in terms of the utilisation of resources, observed health outcomes, costs, quality or access to health care is a well recognised and ever present feature of the modern day health care system. Health care variations challenge basic assumptions about the nature of the health care economy and raise questions about efficiency, equity and where best to direct policy instruments in health care markets. Despite the vast literature documenting variation, and the many discussions around ways to reduce variations in health care markets, the field of dental care has received little interest, in comparison to that of general medical care. This thesis will address this gap and will analyse the variation observed in a specific dental care treatment (dental radiographs) within NHS Scotland, with particular emphasis on the contribution of both dentist and patient unobserved heterogeneity. The thesis takes its focus from two strands of the literature; the underlying theoretical aspect draws on the literature concerning the theory of incentives and physician agency, whilst the empirical component makes use of recent advances in micro-econometric methods, documented in the labour economics literature. Although the thesis is predominantly an empirical analysis, the estimation strategy combines ideas from both the theoretical and empirical literature. A matched patient provider dataset from NHS Scotland is used to conduct an analysis of the variation in dental radiographs, in the presence of, and controlling for unobserved dentist and patient heterogeneity. The results indicate that the remuneration structure alone has little or no impact on the treatment decision to provide a radiograph. When a dentist changes from being on a fixed salary contract to being paid on a fee-for-service basis, they are in fact less likely to provide a radiograph. This result changes in the presence of insurance (identified as being when patients are exempt from the patient charge) and indicates that when the self employed dentist can identify the patient as being exempt, they are more likely to provide a radiograph. This result provides some support for the theory that in the presence of insurance, financial incentives do influence the treatment decision. A final result of the study highlights the importance of accounting for unobserved patient and provider heterogeneity, a factor that has had little attention in the healthcare literature. The results suggest that patient variation, as opposed to the variation across dentists, is much more important in explaining total variation. This is a similar result to that found in both the labour and education literatures.

This thesis analyze the impact on recycling from the increase in the deposit on metal cans that took place in Sweden, September 2010. This is done by using a fixed effects model, fixed on municipality, month, and year. Additionally, the thesis investigates the response of different socioeconomic groups to this change by investigating the interaction between deposit and variables for the socioeconomic factors of interest. Interactions for income, education, immigration, environmental awareness, and population density are investigated. The results show that, on avarage, the recycling in each of the Swedish municipalities have increased by 24.739 units per month, this represents an elasticity of recycling with respect to container deposit of 0.04. The results further indicate that there is strong negative interaction between deposit and income, suggesting that as income increases, the individual will be less responsive to a change in deposit. Contrary to theory, the results indicate positive interaction between deposit and education, indicating that, as education increases the individual becomes more responsive to a change in deposit.

Performance of stock markets is determined by three classes of variables: macroeconomic indicators, industry & firm heterogeneity and third country effects. When assessing performance of a stock market index, impact of industry & firm heterogeneity is marginal as it is already embedded in the index through its constituent companies. This paper will therefore focus on the other two. Chinese stock market was selected as an application as their performance compared to other domestic indicators (mainly GDP growth) is considered inferior by many researchers. Using econometric framework for panel data and a Bayesian extension, the paper estimates multiple models of Chinese stock market performance examining individual determinants of it. Subsequently, it predicts development of theoretical prices of two main Chinese stock indices on two time samples until 2013. The paper then demonstrates underperformance of Chinese stock market by comparing the modeled prices to actual prices realized on the market. JEL Classification C23, C51, C53, G15, G17 Keywords underperformance, panel data, fixed effects model, Bayesian Model Averaging Author's e-mail roman_kovac@ymail.com Supervisor's e-mail karel.bata@seznam.cz

<p>I study local shocks to consumer credit supply arising from the opening</p><p>of bank-related retail stores. Bank-related store openings coincide with</p><p>sharp increases in credit card placements in the neighborhood of the</p><p>store, in the months surrounding the store opening, and with the bank</p><p>that owns the store. I exploit this relationship to instrument for new</p><p>credit cards at the individual level, and find that obtaining a new</p><p>credit card sharply increases total borrowing as well as default risk,</p><p>particularly for risky and opaque borrowers. In line with theories of</p><p>default externality, I observe that existing lenders react to the</p><p>increased consumer borrowing and associated riskiness by contracting</p><p>their own supply. In particular, in the year following the issuance of a</p><p>new credit card, banks without links to stores reduce credit card limits</p><p>by 24-51%, offsetting most of the initial increase in total credit</p><p>limits.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om de som är sjukskrivna med diagnosen psykisk sjukdom reagerar annorlunda vid ersättningsförändringen i sjukförsäkringen år 1998 jämfört med övriga sjukskrivna. I detta syfte har vi tillämpat två Fixed effects modeller på paneldata över en fyraårsperiod, 1996 till 1999, som innefattar Sveriges län. Som approximation på andelen med psykisk sjukdom bland de sjukskrivna har vi använt Apotekets statistik över konsumtionen av antidepressiva medel och sömn- och lugnande medel. Under förutsättning att läkemedelskonsumtion är en god approximation för andelen med psykisk sjukdom i länen. Får vi ett statistisk signifikant resultat som tyder på att andelen med psykisk sjukdom bland de sjukskrivna reagerar mindre positivt på ersättningsförändringen år 1998 jämfört med övriga sjukskrivna.</p>

Agency theories suggest that governance matters more when agency conflicts are potentially more severe. However, empirical studies often do not control for the potential severity of agency conflicts. I show that the marginal benefit of governance varies with the free cash flow level, a proxy for the potential severity of agency conflicts. As the free cash flow level increases, higher governance quality becomes incrementally more value-enhancing, and lower governance quality becomes incrementally more value-destroying. This is consistent with the hypothesis that better governance helps resolve the agency conflicts in investment decisions when a firm has more free cash flows (Jensen, 1986). This study highlights the importance of controlling for the potential severity of agency conflicts in governance studies and provides an improved method to estimate the marginal benefit of a governance mechanism.

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This thesis uses a panel of Swedish counties over the years 1976-2007 to investigate the relationship between suicide and a range of socio-economic determinants. Moreover, the thesis is combining sociology and economics in order to understand the part of suicide that can be considered as rational. In addition, suicide is studied separately for total, male and female suicide rates. Contrary to prior research in the field of suicide, this study formally tests for gender differences. Applying a fixed effect model, we managed to uncover a statistically significant gender difference for female labor force participation relation to suicide. When applying fixed effect models most of our results were in accordance with the socio-economic theory of suicide. We found a significant u-shaped relationship between suicide and the level of alcohol sales (consumption). We also found a statistically significant positive relationship between the total suicide rate and female labor force participation. Moreover, we found that higher population density significantly leads to fewer suicides in the total and male model. Furthermore, we found that unemployment increases the male suicide rate. In some cases, however our results contradicted the theory. Our results give evidence that divorce has a negative and significant effect on total and male suicide rate. These findings are not only violating the theoretical framework but previous research as well. We can thus conclude that the socio-economic theory of suicide, in most cases, assistances us to understand suicide.

No description available.