The purpose of this study is to estimate the relationship between income inequality and immigration in Sweden. To do so, data from the data base Kolada with observations from all 290 municipalities in Sweden is used. As a proxy for income distribution the Gini coefficient is used and as a proxy for immigration the share of foreign born of working age is used. The model also controls for income tax, education level and unemployment level. The dependent variable the Gini coefficient is bounded by a unit interval and it is therefore not possible to simply run a linear regression. Such a model could potentially predict outside the interval. To properly estimate the relationship two approaches are made. Firstly a model is estimated with Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) after the dependent variable is transformed on to the real line through log-odds. Then a model is estimated using beta regression. The study concludes that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between income inequality and immigration in Sweden. The OLS estimated model shows that a 1 unit increase in immigration, on average increases the log-odds of 0.28336 units, ceteris paribus. Beta regression provides perhaps more intuitive results. If immigration increases with 1% the income inequality increases with on average 0.1046%, ceteris paribus. Because of the easier interpretation, among other things, beta regression is determined to be a better estimation method in this study.

The essential cornerstone of society and the state is political support. Studying political support is therefore very important in political sciences. The purpose of this study was to research political support and its interrelation with the economic indicators of unemployment and relative income inequality. The study built on previous research. Using social data from the ESS, the results from 15 European countries were in line with previous findings in the field. Decreased unemployment is at all times found interrelated and increases political support. Income inequality is likewise found interrelated to a great extent with political support. When one of the two economic conditions notably decreases while the other increases, unemployment weighs heavier on citizens’ political support. Unemployment may have more direct effects on individuals' lives, life satisfaction and personal well-being. Income inequality has solid results of interrelation to political support when looking at the longest 12 year period. This may be due to income inequality not being as directly discernible for citizens as unemployment. Income inequality may need more time to result in negative effects and eroded political support.

本文主要的研究目的，在於衡量與分析外來投資在中國大陸各地區及各產業間分佈不均的程度。研究的資料主要是《中國統計年鑑》、《中國對外經貿統計年鑑》、與中國大陸商務部所提供的外來投資的中國大陸官方資料，並採取Mookherjee and Shorrocks（1982）修改後的吉尼係數（Gini coefficient），做為衡量外資分佈不均的方法。本文主要的研究發現為，在1985∼2002年間，外資在中國大陸各地區的分佈有著相當不均衡的狀況。並且，外資在中國大陸的地區分佈高度不均的情況，主要來自於外資在中國大陸七大經濟區域間的分佈不均。此外，1997∼2002年間外資在產業分佈不均衡的程度比地區分佈更為嚴重。中國大陸目前外資投資在各地區及各產業存在「雙重不均衡」的問題。 / This paper aims to measure and analyze the unequal distribution of foreign investment among regions in China. Using official data from China Statistical Yearbook, Almanac of China's Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, and website of Ministry of Commerce of PRC, and modified Gini coefficient, a measurement of inequality proposed by Mookherjee and Shorrocks (1982), the primary finding of this study is that foreign investment has been quite unequally distributed among regions of China during 1985~2002. In addition, this inequality is primarily from the unequal distribution among seven economics areas, which is so called between-area difference. Like geographical distribution, the unequal distribution of FDI among China’s industries was quite serious during 1997~2002.

本文研究目的旨在探討所得不均度對自殺率之影響，採用臺灣2004年至2010年23個縣市的追蹤資料（panel data），使用行政院主計處家庭收支調查報告之年度原始資料，計算自2004年至2010年台灣地區23縣市之吉尼係數作為所得不均度代理變數。 實證結果顯示吉尼係數對總自殺率、男性與25至44歲年齡組自殺率的效果是不顯著的正相關。本文認為，2004至2010年吉尼係數均維持在0.34左右，而且變化不大，以及樣本年度不足，可能是實證結果不顯著的原因之一。此外，由於用以計算吉尼係數之可支配所得並未納入資本利得，導致吉尼係數偏低亦可能是實證結果不顯著的另一個原因。 然而，吉尼係數對於男性自殺率及25至44歲自殺率估計係數的大小卻是值得注意，隱含這二個族群非常關注所得分配的公平性，建議政府在短期政策上可就獨厚富人之賦稅不公平現況加以改善，以達杜漸防微之效。 / This study investigates the impact of income inequality on suicide rate in Taiwan. Using panel data of 23 countries for the period 2004-2010, As a proxy for income inequality, Gini coefficients based on the Survey of Family Income and Expenditure, compiled by the Department of Government of Budget. Empirical results show Gini coefficient has a positive but statistically insignificant effect on total, male and aged 25-44 suicide rates. This paper argues that the Gini coefficient remain around 0.34 for the period of 2004-2010 without significant change, and only 7 years of data may be part of the reason why empirical result is not significant, another reason that might cause Gini coefficient lower is one of the element "disposable income" it did not included capital gain. However, the most noteworthy feature is the magnitude of the Gini coefficients for male and aged 45-64. In other words, these two groups are concerned on the fairness of income distribution. In order to prevent the suicide rate goes higher, government should change the unfair taxes that benefit the riches right away.

本文主要研究臺灣23縣市的絕對所得（平均所得）及相對所得（所得分配）對縣市間人口遷移的影響，並進一步分別探討對男性、女性遷移的影響。影響因素除了絕對所得及相對所得外，也參考其他文獻加入失業率、犯罪人口率、平均每人享有政府公共支出淨額及就業者之行業結構等變數，探討其對縣市間人口遷移的影響。 本研究人口遷移資料採用內政部戶政司網站公布之縣市遷入及遷出資料；平均所得、失業率、犯罪人口率、公共支出及行業結構等採用行政院主計總處之《中華民國統計資訊網》縣市重要統計指標查詢系統；所得不均度使用行政院主計總處「臺灣地區家庭收支調查報告」之原始家戶所得資料計算出縣市別的家戶吉尼係數來代表各縣市的所得分配程度；本研究使用1999年至2010年之資料。實證結果顯示，代表絕對所得的平均每戶可支配所得對總遷移率、男性遷移率、女性遷移率均呈現顯著正相關，且由絕對所得平方的係數均為顯著負相關，顯示縣市平均所得影響遷移是正向的，而其影響強度是遞減的，即邊際效果遞減，表示所得影響遷移的效果會漸漸達到一最高點後緩降；代表相對所得的所得分配吉尼係數對總遷移率、男性遷移率、女性遷移率均呈現不顯著正相關，表示所得分配程度對遷移決策的影響並未達統計顯著水準 / This study investigates the impact of absolute income and relative income on migration rates in Taiwan using the panel data of 23 counties for the period 1999-2010. In addition to the absolute income and relative income, the unemployment rate, criminal rate, public expenditure per citizen and industry structure are also included in the estimation models. The empirical results demonstrate that the average household income as a proxy for absolute income has a significantly positive effect on total, male and female migration rates. Besides, the coefficient of the square of absolute income is significantly negative, indicating that there is an inverse U-shape relationship between absolute income and migration rate in Taiwan. However, our estimation results show that the income inequality does not have a significant influence on migration decisions in Taiwan.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / South Africa

The thesis is devoted to an analysis of ice hockey matches results in the highest Czech league competition in seasons 1999/2000 to 2014/2015 and to prediction of the following matches. We describe and apply Kalman filter theory where forms of teams represent an unobservable state vector and results of matches serve as measurements. Goal differences are identified as a suitable transformation of a match result. They are used as a dependent variable in a linear regression to find significant predictors. For a prediction of a match result we construct an ordinal model with those predictors. By using generalized Gini coefficient, we compare a diversifica- tion power of this model with betting odds, which are offered by betting companies. At the end, we combine knowledge of odds before a match with other predictors to make a prediction model. This model is used to identify profitable bets. 1

O dilema do prisioneiro (DP) é um dos principais jogos da teoria dos jogos. No dilema do prisioneiro discreto (DPD), dois prisioneiros têm as opções de cooperar ou desertar. Um jogador cooperador não delata seu comparsa, já um desertor delata. Se um cooperar e o outro desertar, o cooperador fica preso por cinco anos e o desertor fica livre. Se ambos cooperarem, ficam presos por um ano e, se ambos desertarem, ficam presos por três anos. Quando o DP é repetido, a cooperação pode emergir entre agentes egoístas. Realizamos um estudo analítico para o DPD, que produziu uma formulação da evolução do nível médio de cooperação e da tentação crítica (valor de tentação que causa mudança abrupta do nível de cooperação). No dilema do prisioneiro contínuo (DPC), cada jogador apresenta um nível de cooperação que define o grau de cooperação. Utilizamos o DPC para estudar o efeito da personalidade dos jogadores sobre a emergência da cooperação. Para isso, propusemos novas estratégias: uma baseada na personalidade dos jogadores e outras duas baseadas na comparação entre o ganho obtido e a aspiração do jogador. Todas as estratégias apresentavam algum mecanismo de cópia do estado do vizinho com maior ganho na vizinhança, mecanismo este, herdado da estratégia darwiniana. Os resultados mostraram que o DPC aumenta o nível médio de cooperação do sistema, quando comparado ao DPD. No entanto, as diferentes estratégias não aumentaram a cooperação comparado à cooperação obtida com a estratégia darwiniana. Então propusemos o uso do coeficiente de agrupamentos, coeficiente de Gini e entropias de Shannon, Tsallis e Kullback-Leibler para classificar os sistemas, em que os agentes jogam o DPD com a estratégia darwiniana, quanto ao nível de cooperação. Como analisamos valores de médias configuracionais, tais classificadores não foram eficientes ao classificar os sistemas. Isso é consequência da existência de distribuições de extremos nos resultados que compõem as médias. As distribuições de extremos suscitaram uma discussão acerca da definição do regime de cooperação no dilema do prisioneiro. Discutimos também as consequências de utilizar apenas valores médios nos resultados ignorando seus desvios e as distribuições. / Prisoner\'s dilemma (PD) is one of the main games of game theory. In discrete prisoner\'s dilemma (DPD), two prisoners have the options to cooperate or to defect. A cooperator player does not defect his accomplice, while a defector does. If one player cooperates and the other defects, the cooperator gets jailed for five years and the defector goes free. If both cooperate, they get jailed during one year and if both defect, they get jailed during three years. When this game is repeated, cooperation may emerge among selfish individuals. We perform an analytical study for the DPD, that produced a formulation for the evolution of the mean cooperation level and for the critical temptation values (temptation values that promote abrupt modifications in the cooperation level). In continuous prisoner\'s dilemma (CPD), each player has a level of cooperation that defines his/her degree of cooperation. We used the CPD to study the effect of the players\' personality on the emergence of cooperation. For this, we propose new strategies: one based on the players\' personality and two others based on the comparison between the player\'s obtained payoff and the desire one. All strategies present some mechanism that copies the state of the neighbor with the highest payoff in the neighborhood, mechanism inherited from the Darwinian strategy. The results showed that the CPD increases the average cooperation level of the system when compared to DPD. However, different strategies do not increased the cooperation compared to cooperation obtained with the Darwinian strategy. So, we propose the use of cluster coefficient, Gini coefficient and entropy of Shannon, Tsallis and Kullback-Leibler as classifiers to classify systems, in which the individuals play DPD with Darwinian strategy, by the cooperation level. As configurational averages were analyzed, such classifiers were not efficient in classifying the systems. This is due to the existence of distributions with extreme values of the results that compose the means. Distributions with extremes values emerged a discussion about the definition of the cooperation state in the prisoner\'s dilemma. We also discussed the consequences of using only average results in the analysis ignoring their deviations and distributions.

Predictive power of classification models can be evaluated by various measures. The most popular measures in data mining (DM) are Gini coefficient, Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic and lift. These measures are each based on a completely different way of calculation. If an analyst is used to one of these measures it can be difficult for him to asses the predictive power of a model evaluated by another measure. The aim of this thesis is to develop a method how to convert one performance measure into another. Even though this thesis focuses mainly on the above-mentioned measures, it deals also with other measures like sensitivity, specificity, total accuracy and area under ROC curve. During development of DM models you may need to work with a sample that is stratified by values of the target variable Y instead of working with the whole population containing millions of observations. If you evaluate a model developed on a stratified data you may need to convert these measures to the whole population. This thesis describes a way, how to carry out this conversion. A software application (CPM) enabling all these conversions makes part of this thesis. With this application you can not only convert one performance measure to another, but you can also convert measures calculated on a stratified sample to the whole population. Besides the above mentioned performance measures (sensitivity, specificity, total accuracy, Gini coefficient, Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic), CPM will also generate confusion matrix and performance charts (lift chart, gains chart, ROC chart and KS chart). This thesis comprises the user manual to this application as well as the web address where the application can be downloaded. The theory described in this thesis was verified on the real data.

O objetivo primordial deste trabalho é analisar se a democracia é uma instituição política que produz resultados econômicos menos desiguais do que os regimes autoritários. A importância deste tema reside no fato que a própria promoção da democracia na agenda da política internacional tornou-se fundamental por inúmeras razões entre as quais sua suposta propensão em reduzir estas disparidades econômicas. Em primeiro lugar apresentamos no Capítulo 1 um balanço da discussão teórica e empírica a partir da qual constatamos que, a despeito do senso comum de que a democracia está relacionada a uma cidadania mais igualitária, os seus efeitos sobre a desigualdade ainda são discutíveis. Mesmo existindo um razoável consenso teórico de que os regimes democráticos devem, de alguma forma, produzir uma melhor distribuição de bens, os resultados empíricos são inconclusivos e contraditórios. Em seguida, diante de tal impasse empírico, propomos no Capítulo 2 uma reformulação da argumentação na qual entendemos que os efeitos da democracia sobre a desigualdade devem ser reinterpretados. A principal contribuição da tese reside na constatação, tanto teórica quanto empírica, de que estes efeitos são heterogêneos e interagem com o próprio nível de desigualdade, e, por conseguinte, é equivocado o suposto de que esses efeitos são homogêneos e independentes do contexto sócio-econômico da desigualdade. No Capítulo 3 apresentamos os dados e os conceitos de democracia e desigualdade. Assumimos que democracia se caracteriza como o regime político no qual os líderes competem entre si por meio de eleições e verificamos se os seus efeitos variam ao longo da própria distribuição de desigualdade econômica mensurada pelo coeficiente de GINI. Para tal análise, realizamos uma série de modelos de regressão quantílica, a metodologia adequada para avaliar o debate sobre a heterogeneidade versus homogeneidade dos efeitos. O argumento teórico, a partir do qual elabora-se a hipótese dos efeitos heterogêneos, refere-se à necessidade de uma convergência entre os interesses eleitorais dos partidos o lado da oferta e as clivagens sobre as quais uma potencial maioria dos eleitores tem interesse em ser atendido o lado da demanda por políticas públicas e plataformas. Isto posto, é 9 necessário discutir as condições que estimulam as lideranças políticas a utilizarem o problema da desigualdade econômica como argumento eleitoral e as condições nas quais surge uma demanda dos cidadãos por redistribuição via ação estatal. Somente nas sociedades mais desiguais tanto os partidos políticos têm interesse em ofertar políticas redistributivas, quanto tende a surgir no seio da cidadania uma demanda por redistribuição por parte de uma maioria de eleitores. No Capítulo 4 comprovamos empiricamente que os efeitos da competição democrática em sociedades mais desiguais são diferentes seus efeitos em sociedades mais iguais; e estes efeitos estão em direção à maior redução da desigualdade apenas nas sociedades mais desiguais. Os resultados são robustos às mais diferentes especificações dos modelos estatísticos, dados e formas de mensuração, tanto de democracia quanto de desigualdade, em diferentes cortes temporais e horizontes históricos de análise. Inclusive quando estendemos o recorte temporal para antes do pós-2ª Guerra Mundial utilizando dados que abrangem o período de surgimento dos primeiros regimes representativos democráticos no século XIX, a veracidade das hipóteses dos efeitos heterogêneos e de que há maior contundência da democracia em direção à redução da desigualdade nas sociedades mais desiguais permanece. Por fim, além deste problema teórico e empírico de crucial importância, também controlamos a análise para a potencial relação recíproca entre democracia e desigualdade. Enquanto parte da literatura discute os potenciais efeitos igualitários da democracia, outra importante literatura debate se o aumento da desigualdade aumenta ou reduz a probabilidade de um país tornar-se ou manter-se democrático. Posto isto, apresentamos uma lista de variáveis instrumentais para estimar validamente os efeitos da democracia sobre a desigualdade independente da relação entre desigualdade e democracia / The primary aim of this study is to analyze whether democracy is a political institution that produces less unequal economic outcomes than authoritarian regimes. The importance of this issue lies in the fact that the very promotion of democracy in the international political agenda has become essential for many reasons, including its supposed propensity to reduce economic disparities. First, at Chapter 1 we overview the theoretical and empirical discussion from which we find that despite the common sense that democracy must be related to a more egalitarian citizenship, its effects on inequality is still debatable. Even with a reasonable theoretical consensus that democracies must somehow produce a better distribution of goods; the empirical results are inconclusive and contradictory. After that, facing such empirical impasse, we propose at Chapter 2 a reformulation about the rationale to explain and analyze the effects of democracy on inequality. The main contribution of this thesis lies in both the theoretical and the empirical claim that these effects are heterogeneous and should interact with the level of inequality and, therefore, the assumption that these effects are homogeneous and independent of the socio-economic context of inequality is wrong. In Chapter 3, we present the data and concepts of democracy and inequality. We assume that democracy is characterized as a political regime in which leaders compete through elections and we test whether the effects vary along the distribution of economic inequality measured by the Gini coefficient. To do that, we conducted a series of quantile regression models, appropriate to evaluate the alternative hypothesis whether the effects are heterogeneous or homogenous. The theoretical argument, from which we elaborate the hypothesis of heterogeneous effects, refers to the need for a convergence between the electoral interests of the parties - the supply side - and the political cleavages on which a majority of voters have potential interest being played - the demand side for other public policies and platforms. Hence, it is necessary to discuss the conditions that lead the political leadership to use the problem of economic 11 inequality as an electoral argument and the conditions under which a demand by citizens for redistribution via state action rises. Only at the most unequal societies the political parties have an interest in offering redistributive policies, as well as there is a higher propensity for a redistribution demand by a majority of voters. In Chapter 4, we proved empirically that the effects of democratic competition at more unequal societies are different from the effects of democracy in more equal societies; and these effects tend to be greater toward inequality reduction only at more unequal societies. These results are robust to different statistical model specifications, data and measurement methods, about both democracy and inequality, and to the use of different time horizons. Even when we extend the time frame of the analysis to the period before World War II - using new data that covers XIX century, the veracity of the hypotheses about the heterogeneous effects and that these effects of democracy toward the reduction of inequality are larger at the most unequal societies remains intact. Finally, beyond this theoretical and empirical issue of crucial importance, we also control the analysis for potential reciprocal relationship between democracy and inequality. This is because while much of the literature discusses the potential effects of egalitarian democracy, another important literature debate discusses whether greater inequality increases or reduces the probability of a country become or remain democratic. Hence, we present a list of valid instrumental variables to estimate the effects of democracy on inequality independent of the relationship between inequality and democracy