M.A. / The objective of this study is to examine the economic growth and job creation in relation to macro economic policies in South Africa since 1994 to date. Economic growth theories help to explain the economic growth problem as well as the possibility to create jobs. Since 1994, the government has introduced three economic policy programmes namely the RDP, GEAR and MTEF. However, the unemployment rate is increasing and the economic growth is still low. The aim of this study is to: demonstrate that economic growth is the driving force to job creation; analyse the human resource development; examine the international experience in relation to South Africa; critically analyse labour market development and macro economic policies; provide recommendations to employment creation.

The ultimate objective of the present PhD thesis is to propose effective instructional methods to be employed in teaching macroeconomics as an academic subject, their selection being determined by the personality type recognition of the students of economics-based academic programmes. First, a current state of academic education and an increase in the number of university/college students, schools and faculties are analysed. Within the sector of higher education institutions (HEI) providing academic training in economic sciences, the focus is on the rationale of the inclusion of macroeconomics in their syllabi. Having conducted the quantitative research, the MBTI questionnaire being employed to measure personality types, the composition of academic study groups in the chosen economics-based schools was examined from the viewpoint of the given typology. An analysis of currently applied forms and methods of instruction in macroeconomics at the Private University College of Economic Studies (PUCES) is accompanied by the interpretation of their impact on the academic achievements of particular personality types. Based on the research findings, appropriate teaching methods are matched with respective personality types and subsequently with the entire study group comprising different types of personalities. The present dissertation thesis consists of an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion. The introduction presents the aim of the thesis, an overview of the current state of relevant research on the topic as well as research hypotheses and methodology. Chapter 1 explores the current state of HEI programmes affected by soaring numbers of students, HEIs and their faculties. Chapter 2 focuses on macroeconomics as a scientific discipline and an academic subject incorporated in the syllabuses of the selected HEIs. Chapter 3 concentrates on academic teaching, outlining the philosophies, modes and methods of academic instruction. In chapter 4, personality typologies are exposed, focusing selectively on their development, emphasising those with significant social influence. The MBTI personality typology is given special attention, corresponding basic personality dimensions, dispositions and study successfulness being considered. Chapter 5 describes the results of the research of the student groups' structure according to MBTI typology in five chosen HEIs, summarizing the outcomes from the schools being tested. In chapter 6, macroeconomics examination results achieved by PUCES students are displayed, being related to respective personality categories in compliance with the above typology. In the last chapter, optimal methods and instructional approaches are suggested for teaching particular personality types of students, the heterogeneous composition of the study groups being taken into consideration.

Cette thèse porte sur l’étude des inégalités dans un cadre macroéconomique, d’un point de vue théorique ainsi qu’empirique. Dans un premier chapitre, j’écris et simule un modèle basé-agents capable de répliquer les distributions fat-tailed des richesses observées empiriquement dans les économies développées. Dans un second chapitre, je prolonge ce modèle théorique pour étudier l’impact économique des discriminations interpersonnelles et institutionnelles. Lorsque les discriminations institutionnelles cessent, l’état final des inégalités dépend de l’économie au moment de la fin de ces discriminations : plus l’économie est organisée, plus le temps nécessaire à une égalisation des revenus et richesses entre ethnies est long, voire infini. Dans un troisième chapitre empirique, j’étudie l’évolution des inégalités de salaire entre Noirs et Blancs aux États-Unis entre 1960 et 2015, en me concentrant sur la période 2000-2015. Je traite les biais de sélection liés à l’asymétrie raciale envers l’emprisonnement, et montre que l’écart - en conditionnant par l'âge et les diplômes - entre salaires médians des Noirs et des Blancs atteint un maximum en 2012. En utilisant la méthode de régression quantiles non-conditionnelles conjointement avec la décomposition de Blinder-Oaxaca, j’établis que la part non-expliquée de cet écart reste stable durant la Grande Récession. Enfin, dans une post-face, en utilisant les métadonnées de RePEC, j’établis que la part des articles scientifiques consacrés à l’étude des crises augmente significativement après 2008 pour 13 des 30 « top journals » en économie. / This PhD dissertation focuses on wealth and wage inequality, and the macro-economy. In a first chapter, I write and run a small macro agent-based model (M-ABM) in which I study the resultant distribution of wealth among households. I show that this model generates fat- tailed distributions of wealth in the household sector, as empirically observed in advanced economies. In a second chapter, I extend this model to study the macroeconomics of interpersonal and institutional discriminations against racial minorities. When discrimination is at work, racial disparities in income and wealth arise. The effect of the abolition of institutional discrimination is path-dependant: the more the economy is organized when this institutional change occurs, the more time it takes to get back to the counter-factual situation where no institutional discrimination was set up in the first place. In a third chapter, I study the evolution of the difference of median log-annual earnings between Blacks and Whites in the US between 1960 and 2015, focusing on the 2008 crisis. I control for selection arising from racial differentials in institutionalised population, and find that the unconditional racial wage gap attains a maximum in 2012. Controlling for age and education, I obtain the same result. Using unconditional quantile regressions, I show that the unexplained part of the unconditional racial wage gap has not increased during the crisis. Finally, in an afterword, I use metadata from RePEC to show that the share of economics papers published in the 13 of the 30 "top" journals containing "crisis" in their titles and/or abstracts has significantly increased in 2008.

Master’s thesis focuses on the topic "Evaluation of Key Risks of Supply Chains". The thesis links the field of supply chain management with the field of risk management. In the first part of the thesis, the basic concepts of these fields are defined, which are then linked and narrowed down to the specialization of supply chain risk management. Subsequently, the problems of inadequate supply chain structure, configuration and resilience are formulated and argued. Macroeconomic MRA is applied against these problems and its applicability and usefulness in a supply chain environment is tested. Subsequently, its ability to predict future developments is also tested to provide a basis for building long-term sustainable chains that are able to cope with the pitfalls and uncertainties in the current highly dynamic environment.

Nous démontrons qu’il existe une récurrence dans la pensée de Keynes en matière de fluctuations, à savoir que l’investissement est le facteur majeur guidant les fluctuations économiques. La première partie explore les écrits datant d’avant 1925 environ, en analysant les thématiques et problèmes qui en émergent et qui anticipent ceux du Treatise on Money (1930). La seconde partie se focalise sur le Treatise à proprement parler, ainsi que la transition de cet ouvrage à la Théorie Générale de l’Emploi, de l’Intérêt et de la Monnaie (1936) suite à la crise économique du début des années 1930. La troisième et dernière partie aborde ainsi la réponse apportée par la Théorie Générale à ce problème, en démontrant que la théorie de l’investissement qui y est développée est au coeur de son analyse des fluctuations et cycles économiques. / The dissertation argues that there is a recurrence in Keynes’s thought as regards economic fluctuations: investment is considered as the primary factor driving these fluctuations. The first part explains how, in the author’s early writings, some topics and problems that would be discussed in the Treatise on Money (1930) would emerge out of an interest for monetary instability. The second part focuses on the Treatise as such, but also on the transition between this book and the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) following the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Finally the third part discusses the answer given by the General Theory to this problem, by showing that investment as understood and explained in this book is at the center of an analysis of economic fluctuations and business cycles.

In the years immediately following the so-called “refugee crisis”, Swedish municipalities that had received many refugees improved their financial position in a quite remarkable way. Overall, 2016 might have been the best financial year ever for the municipal sector. In sharp contrast to this, 2019 saw an estimated third of all municipalities run deficits. In the public debate, this has generally been explained as a result of refugee reception and integration, which are seen as major cost factors draining the municipalities of funds. Other issues which have seen less prominence in the public debate include ongoing demographic challenges stemming from birth deficits, emigration and the continued ageing of the population. These are particularly sensitive areas in the case of smaller, rural municipalities, which generally have smaller populations than the major towns and cities. The purpose of this thesis is thus to examine how municipalities within this category have experienced refugee reception and the integration process during and in the aftermath of the refugee crisis. This has been achieved through a qualitative approach centred around thematic and qualitative content analysis frameworks. Theoretical concepts based around citizenship, integration, welfare studies and macroeconomics have been consulted. The macroeconomic framework employed stems from the heterodox school of economics, primarily centred around the school of thought known as Modern Monetary Theory. The empirical material consists of various documents published by the central government, government agencies and municipalities in order to frame what has turned out to be a contradictory and conflict-ridden account of refugee reception. During the crisis, an overwhelming majority of the Swedish municipalities saw unprecedented economic growth as a result of government spending, which has since stagnated as a result of the central government returning to its pre-crisis fiscal policy framework. In 2015, the Swedish central government turned from a relatively open asylum policy towards a very restrictive one, a shift primarily motivated with reference to financial concerns. However, this turn resulted in decreased opportunities for rural municipalities to benefit from increased migration inflows, which has turned out to be a decisive factor for economic growth and demographic sustainability. The results show that municipalities that have worked actively with integration have not only managed to accommodate the sudden needs of refugees, but actively benefitted from population growth and increased tax revenue. While the ensuing result does not necessarily advocate for increased immigration, it challenges established macroeconomic principles and the presumption that a stricter migration regime would mend the financial woes of all Swedish municipalities.

The focus of this study is to map, classify and analyse how different risk premia strategies that are fully implementable, perform and are affected by different economic environments. The results are of interest for practitioners who currently invest in or are thinking about investing in risk premia strategies. The study also makes a theoretical contribution since there currently is a lack of publicised work on this subject. A combination of the statistical methods cluster tree, spanning tree and principal component analysis are used to first categorise the investigated risk premia strategies into different clusters based on their correlation characteristics and secondly to find the strategies’ most important return drivers. Lastly, an analysis of how the clusters of strategies perform in different macroeconomic environments, here represented by inflation and growth, is conducted. The results show that the three most important drivers for the investigated risk premia strategies are a crisis factor, an equity directional factor and an interest rate factor. These three components explained about 18 percent, 14 percent and 10 percent of the variation in the data, respectively. The results also show that all four clusters, despite containing different types of risk premia strategies, experienced positive total returns during all macroeconomic phases sampled in this study. These results can be seen as indicative of a lower macroeconomic sensitivity among the risk premia strategies and more of an “alpha-like” behaviour. / Denna studie fokuserar på att kartlägga, klassificera och analysera hur riskpremie-strategier, som är fullt implementerbara, presterar och påverkas av olika makroekonomiska miljöer. Studiens resultat är av intresse för investerare som antingen redan investerar i riskpremiestrategier eller som funderar på att investera. Studien lämnar även ett teoretiskt bidrag eftersom det i dagsläget finns få publicerade verk som behandlar detta ämne. För att analysera strategierna har en kombination av de statistiska metoderna cluster tree, spanning  tree  och  principal  component  analysis  använts.  Detta  för  att  dels  kategorisera riskpremie-strategierna i olika kluster, baserat på deras inbördes korrelation, men också för att finna de faktorer som driver riskpremiestrategiernas avkastning. Slutligen har också en analys över hur de olika strategierna presterar under olika makroekonomiska miljöer genomförts där de makroekonomiska miljöerna representeras av inflation- och tillväxtindikatorer. Resultaten  visar  att  de  tre  viktigaste  faktorerna  som  driver  riskpremiestrategiernas avkastning  är  en  krisfaktor,  en  aktiemarknadsfaktor och  en  räntefaktor.  Dessa  tre  faktorer förklarar ungefär 18 procent, 14 procent och 10 procent av den undersökta datans totala varians. Resultaten  visar  också  att  alla  fyra  kluster,  trots  att  de  innehåller  olika  typer  av riskpremiestrategier,  genererade  positiv  avkastning  under  alla  makroekonmiska  faser  som studerades. Detta resultat ses som ett tecken på en lägre makroekonomisk känslighet bland riskpremiestrategier och mer av ett alfabeteende.

The thesis tries to shed light on mechanisms that endanger the macro-financial stability of economies. For that purpose a modeling framework is set-up which allows for cyclical behavior on the macro level and does not automatically enforce monotonic convergence of the dynamics to a stable equilibrium. Thus, the assumption of rational expectation must be replaced by alternative expectation formation schemes which are more relevant from an empirical point of view. We start to put forth a modeling approach of a partial, but crucially important market for the whole economy. As we could learn from the great recession, activities in the housing market can trigger economy-wide crises when financial markets are highly interconnected and exert a lasting impact on real markets. The next step is to construct an integrated macro model which captures the interaction of real and financial markets with respect to possible destabilizing linkages. Policy instruments can work then as remedies as long as they are designed in a manner that takes account of the underlying feedback structure. Step by step the models are extended throughout the chapters by refinement of the macro-financial structure. A banking sector is introduced and many issues arising with this addition are discussed. After having addressed several configurations of the banking sector, the focus is shifted to the expectation formation of agents. Behavioral traders on the micro level then drive complex dynamics on the macro level, which eventually feedback on the distribution of different types of trading strategies. We also investigate the implications of such behavioral expectation formations for open economies. Finally, we look at potential instabilities that arise from the supply side of macroeconomies in the long run. A model with a differentiated labor market structure and an accumulation mechanism is used to display distributive cycle dynamics and their stability implications.

This study examines the impact of risk premium factors on cap rates within Sweden's largest office markets. The research questions address the significance of various micro- and macroeconomic variables on cap rates, as well as the extent of this impact and how it varies across different locations. The study employed a quantitative approach, specifically regression analyses, to examine three different localizations from the years 2003 to 2022. The dataset used included information from JLL and large institutions. The study found that the top three optimized models could explain 80-90% of the fluctuations in office cap rates in the CBD of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. To sum up, the 10-year treasury bill and the spread between Baa and Aaa corporate bond yields are the main variables that have the largest impact on cap rates across all locations. The 10-year treasury bill serves as a proxy for the risk-free rate. Nonetheless, the risk-free rate had a relatively lower impact in Malmö compared to Stockholm and Gothenburg's CBD. / Denna studie undersöker effekterna av riskpremiefaktorer på cap rates för Sveriges största kontorsmarknader. Forskningsfrågorna behandlar betydelsen av olika mikro- och makroekonomiska variabler på cap rates, samt omfattningen av påverkan och hur den varierar mellan olika städer. Studien använde ett kvantitativt förhållningssätt, specifikt regressionsanalyser, för att undersöka tre olika områden från åren 2003 till 2022. Datamängden som användes innehöll information från JLL och stora institutioner. Studien fann att de tre mest optimerade modellerna kunde förklara 80-90% av fluktuationerna i cap rate för kontorsmarknaden i Stockholm, Göteborg och Malmö CBD. Sammanfattningsvis är den 10-åriga statsobligationen och spreaden mellan Baa- och Aaa-företagsobligationsräntorna de variablerna som har störst inverkan på cap rates för de tre städerna. Den 10-åriga statsobligationen fungerar som en proxy för den riskfria räntan. Dock har den riskfria räntan en relativt lägre påverkan i Malmö jämfört med Stockholm och Göteborg CBD.

This paper examines the impact of several macroeconomic variables on property prices in Sweden. Linear regression is used to construct severalmathematical models relating the macroeconomic variables to property prices. Using methods of variables selection and goodness of fit measures,two final models are selected and subsequently compared, resulting in one final model. From this model, we conclude that GDP per capita, unemployment rate, inflation and repo interest rate have a significant relationship with property price changes in Sweden. Unemployment, GDPper capita, and inflation have positive relationships with property price changes, while repo interest rate has a negative relationship with propertyprice changes. However, as to what extent these variables affect property prices, no certain conclusions can be drawn from this study. / Följande studie undersöker inverkan av sex makroekonomiska variabler på bostadspriser i Sverige. Linjär regressionsanalys används för att skapaflera matematiska modeller som relaterar makroekonomiska variabler till bostadspriser. Vidare används variabelselektion och statistikor för modellevaluering för att välja ut två slutgiltiga modeller. Dessa två modeller jämförs och en slutgiltig modell väljs ut. Studiens slutsatser dras fråndenna modell. BNP per capita, arbetslöshetsgrad, inflationstakt, och reporänta har enligt den slutgiltiga modellen signifikanta förhållandentill bostadspriser i Sverige. Vidare har arbetslöshet, BNP per capita, och inflation positiva förhållanden till bostadsprisförändringar, medan reporänta har ett negativt förhållande. Studien kan inte dra några slutsatser om till vilken grad dessa variabler påverkar bostadspriser i Sverige.