Huvudpunkten i denna studie tar fasta på föräldrars agerande vid fördelning av sin kvarlåtenskap. Ett nytt svenskt datamaterial har insamlats på avlidna individer inom Stockholm län under året 2004 för att undersöka hur beteendemönstret bland dessa föräldrar förhåller sig. Tonvikt läggs vid förekomsten av en rättvis fördelning eller ett kompensatoriskt beteende. Resultaten indikerar på en väl utbredd lika fördelning mellan arvingarna oavsett kön, åldersspridning eller antal. Något som visar sig ha en negativ inverkan på en rättvis fördelning är storleken på boets behållning.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur ägarstrukturen påverkar budpremien för A respektive B aktierna vid företagsförvärv på Stockholms Fondbörs. Genom regressionsanalyser har jag kommit fram till att ägarstrukturen inte har någon inverkan på Budpremien för A eller B aktien. De enda signifikanta faktorerna var indikator variabeln för kontant bud samt variabeln för företagets andel av A och B aktier, vilka visade ett positivt samband med budpremien för B aktien.

I denna uppsats undersöks räntedifferensens (skillnaden mellan den korta- och den långaräntan) och aktieavkastningars prognosvärde för framtida real BNP tillväxt för 29 OECD länder med en dynamisk icke-linjär paneldatamodell. Denna icke-linjära specifikation tillåter för eventuella asymmetrier beroende på om ekonomin befinner sig i recession eller ej. Resultaten tyder på att både aktieavkastningar och räntedifferensen, mellan tremånaders- och tioårsräntan, har prognosvärde för framtida tillväxttakt. Sambanden är i linje med ekonomisk teori som förutsäger att en minskad räntedifferens och/eller stigande aktieavkastningar signalerar en kommande högkonjunktur. Skattningarna tyder vidare på att aktieavkastningar har högre prognosvärde för framtida tillväxttakt då modellen med denna variabel förklarar mer av variationen i tillväxttakt. Slutligen indikerar resultaten att räntedifferensen och aktieavkastningar till stor del innehåller olika information gällande framtida tillväxttakt.

The present thesis addresses the performance of wildlife management systems in Africa in general and in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem in Tanzania in particular. The essays to be presented were initially motivated by the failure of the traditional management of protected areas and the observed difficulties regarding the design of wildlife management systems based on local participation. The thesis provides, based on economic incentives, an explanation of the failure of the traditional protected area management. In addition, the observed broad range of management systems calls for studies of different property rights regimes. In addition, founded on both theoretical and empirical analyses, three essays discuss under what conditions programmes based on local participation will succeed in promoting wildlife conservation. The methodology of the papers is based on bio-economic modelling and represents all classes of models reviewed in section 4.2. The starting point of every model is a protected area surrounded by a local community. The property rights to wildlife are legally well defined and held by the State or the park manager appointed by the State, i.e. a state property regime. The State offers the local people user rights to wildlife in chapter 2, while, hunting performed by the local people in absence of property rights is considered illegal in chapter 3 to 5. The main contribution of the papers is to explore the incentives of the local people to exploit wildlife, and how these are affected by different policies. Throughout the papers the local people are considered the only active agent, and, hence, the park manager is passive. This means that the implemented policies are treated as exogenous in the models. The effect of the various management strategies is therefore analysed in the framework of partial equilibrium models.

Industrial development at a regional level demands an ability to create productive cross sector collaboration. This thesis is about how such interorganizational collaboration can be constructed. Based on studies of three collaborative efforts taking place in the same region at the same time, I set out to answer the following main research question. How can regional actors collaborate to support development in enterprises? In the theoretical part of the thesis, I address the discourses on industrial development with an emphasis on the collaborative aspects. Three approaches that all heavily influence the current thinking and policymaking in this field are discussed. The first is what may be labeled the regional-development orientation associated with industrial districts and flexible specialization after Piore & Sabel (1984), mainly within the discipline of industrial geography. The second main contribution to the discourse on industrial development is the work of Porter (1990) and his followers. Typical for these two main contributions is that they circle around various collaborative constructs at a systemic or macro level (e.g. networks, industrial clusters) and in essence argue for the centrality of interorganizational collaboration in fostering industrial development. What they both lack, however, is considerations of how the desired collaborations can be created, i.e. they lack a development perspective that addresses the collaborative processes essential to practical development. The third tradition or approach is associated with public planning for development. It takes the public actors as a point of departure in discussing how industrial development may be advanced. Within certain traditions of public planning associated with community development, a much clearer emphasis is put on broad regional participation and concrete means to involve various actors in collaborative planning efforts. I argue that in order to develop industry, a greater emphasis on “how” is needed, and I question the adequacy of a planning logic in this respect. The broad support for collaborative strategies, but inability to contribute beyond declaring its importance, leads me to the main theoretical chapter where I address the issue of collaboration. Collaboration between organizations is viewed as a general approach to addressing shared problems, where industrial development is one such problem-complex. In conceptualizing collaboration, I give special attention to social ecology (e.g. Trist 1983) as a framework for interorganizational development. Organizing collaborative domains and collaborative processes are the two main foci of the chapter. I criticize the linear process models and develop the interactive dimension of collaborative processes as an alternative. This chapter ends in an expansion of the main research question into the following issues. 1) the organizing of collaboration 2) the processes of collaboration 3) the regional dimension of collaboration 4) the role of public actors In part three of the thesis I present the case material covering 5+ years of development trajectories. The Joint Project, the Wood Centre and the Electronics Committee all have central features in common. All the three cases address competence development in enterprises, and they do it through collaboration between enterprises, the educational system and country representatives, however in clearly different ways. Moreover, the cases unfold during the same time period in the same country. Theses similarities give special access to the understanding of collaborative development processes by comparing across the cases. Analysing and discussing the three development trajectories in part four of the thesis lead me to the last chapter, where my conclusions and contributions to the literature are presented. On the issue of organizing, several contributions to collaborative theory have emerged during the research process. I criticize the prevalent sequential and rather mechanistic contributions in the current literature, and I argue for a more dynamic and rather mechanistic contributions in current literature, and I argue for a more dynamic and iterative understanding of organizational issues. In a regional landscape where legitimacy, the building of trust and the development of relationships are at the core of feasible strategies for change, roles, functions and organizational forms need to be understood in a relational and dynamic perspective. This included regarding convening as an ongoing process throughout the lifespan of a collaborative effort, and to understanding the issue of organizing as a process of ongoing reconstruction, rather than a once-and-for-all construction of an organizational unit. As an alternative to the prevailing process models. I have developed principles of interactivity to characterize dynamic and evolving collaborative relationships based on a democratic value stand. I have developed the regional dimension of collaboration by introducing new concepts (partial domain, sub-domain and triple connectedness), as well as developing the meaning of previously introduced concepts (infrastructure for change). I suggest the concept of a regional infrastructure for change as the conceptual bridge between industrial geography, collaborative theory and an action research oriented approach to industrial development. While the study does not fully discuss the role of public actors, it clearly argues the importance of a proactive role, and discusses some dilemmas with such a role. I emphasise the importance of regional autonomy, the recognition of public-public collaboration a part of industrial development, and the challenge for public actors of moving back and forth between the two different logics associated with, respectively, bureaucracy and horizontal collaboration.

Ever since the planning stage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the eighties there has been an incentive to create a free trade agreement with all the American countries. The next natural step for the USA has been the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). This is a very controversial experiment as it is the first free trade agreement of this dignity between countries with such immense economic differences. This thesis will investigate how the CAFTA will affect the different economic sectors of Nicaragua. The studied sectors are the agriculture, the assembly industry and the micro, small, and medium businesses in the informal sector. To answer this question interviews have been made with representatives from the different sectors. The material obtained from the interviews have been than analysed with reference to theories about free trade, specialization, factor mobility and growth, together with information about the experiences from Mexico with the NAFTA. The results show that Nicaragua will have comparative advantages in some products in the agriculture sector but most likely the agricultural sector will decline. The assembly industry will grow as a result of an increase in FDI but there will not be any important technological transfers. The micro, small, and medium businesses are more orientated to the local market and will not be directly affected. The institutions play in important role en process of re-allocating resources from declining sectors to expanding ones and adapting policies to attract FDI. If they are successful than the expanding sectors will absorb the freed labor from the declining ones, this would raise salaries which in turn would raise internal demand positively affecting the micro-, small-, medium businesses. If the institutions fail to help in the re-allocation process than all the freed labor won’t be absorbed by the expanding sectors leaving them with no other option than to migrate to the cities and join the informal sector or to emigrate to Costa Rica or USA. This would leave the country worse off.

No description available.

The main focus of the thesis is on issues concerning production of knowledge. It is a common observation that knowledge activities have a tendency to agglomerate as well as to spill over in space. In order to incorporate geographical proximity, the thesis applies an accessibility approach in which actual travel time distances between locations are used to discount spatial knowledge spillovers. The thesis consists of three individual essays and a joint introduction. The first essay explores to what extent accessibility to R&D conducted at universities and companies can explain the number of patent applications in Swedish municipalities. The second essay analyses the relationship between knowledge accessibility and regional export performance. The knowledge resources used are R&D efforts and university educated labour. Since the distributions of the dependent variables are skewed with a few influential outliers, the estimations are conducted with quantile regressions. The empirical findings indicate that accessibility to university R&D has minor effects on patent production and export performance in Sweden. However, the other used inputs, i.e. accessibility to company R&D and accessibility to university educated labour, are of greater importance. The results also show that knowledge flows transcend municipal borders but that they tend to be bounded within functional regions. The third essay investigates how the inclusion of accessibility variables, i.e. spatially lagged explanatory variables, affects the extent of spatial autocorrelation. The basic proposition is that the inclusion of inputs external to the spatial observation as separate variables reveals spatial dependencies via the parameter estimates. This is confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations. The Monte Carlo Simulations also indicate that problems with spatial autocorrelation and biased parameter estimates are reduced.

Hedgefonder har under det senaste decenniet blivit ett allt mer uppmärksammat inslag på den svenska fondmarknaden och tillväxten har varit stark både till storleken förvaltat kapital och antalet hedgefonder. Själva grundidén för hedgefonder är att de oberoende av marknadsutvecklingen alltid skall generera positiv avkastning. Låg risk samt låg korrelation med aktie- och räntemarknaderna är ytterligare argument vilka bör göra hedgefonderna till intressanta inslag i investerares totala portföljer. Problemområde: Hedgefonder kommer säkerligen att utgöra betydande delar av svenska investerares kapitalplaceringar i framtiden vilket gör dem till intressanta studieobjekt. Intressant ur en investerares perspektiv är att undersöka huruvida hedgefonderna infriar uppställda förvaltningsmål. Syfte: Genom kvantitativ beräkning ämnar vi analysera de svenska hedgefondernas historiska prestationer i form av absolut avkastning, riskjusterad avkastning, volatilitet samt korrelation, i syfte att se om detta motsvarar de förväntningar en investerare bör ha för sitt hedgefondsparande. Metod: Undersökningen baseras på sekundärdata i form av undersökta fonders kurshistorik, samt index- och räntehistorik. Studien är teoretisk i den mening att vi använt oss av vedertagen ekonomisk teori som vi tillämpat, empirisk då vi själva genomfört beräkningar för att sedan kunna analysera resultaten och dra egna slutsatser av dessa. Resultat: Flertalet fonder har svårt att uppfylla målet om ”absolut avkastning”. Hedgefonder som grupp är inte ett placeringsalternativ med låg risk. Hedgefonder uppfyller målet om låg korrelation till marknaden och har således en förhållandevis låg exponering mot marknadsrisken. Slutsatser: Teoretiskt finns goda möjligheter för hedgefonder att prestera absolut avkastning, i praktiken beror emellertid utfallet främst på förvaltarens strategi samt kompetens att förvalta fonden. Hedgefonders förmåga att uppvisa låg korrelation till marknaden kan göra dem till önskvärda allokeringar i diversifieringssyfte dock kan hedgefonder som grupp ej anses utgöra placeringsalternativ förknippade med låg risk.

No description available.