Innevarande studie syftar till att utreda nationalekonomisk nyttoforskning med anknytning till sociala medier. Sociala medier ger upphov till en mängd intressant forskning. Lin & Lu (2011) visar att individer som använder sociala medier känner uppskattning och glädje vid interaktioner på sociala medier. Det är roligt och förnöjsamt att vara medlem i ett socialt digitalt nätverk när bekanta bidrar till en positiv stämning. Ellison & Steinfield (2007) visar hur Facebookanvändare har större socialt kapital än icke-användarna – de har kontakt med fler människor. Användandet av sociala medier verkar bidra till att individer bibehåller kontakt med människor de annars hade tappat kontakten med. Fördelen med ökat socialt kapital kan förklaras med att man får tillgång till mer information. Ökat inflöde av information visar Granovetter (2005) är relevant för individens beslutförfattande, personer med mer socialt kapital tar bättre beslut – de ångrar inte besluten i efterhand. Användandet av sociala medier bidrar till nyttofulla saker men som med mycket annat när saker går till överdrift har dem en tendens till att börja påverka en individ negativt. Fischer (1999) visar hur människor gärna nyttomaximerar under restriktionen av den tid varje dygn erbjuder. Det är alltså ett bra val att göra saker vi tycker är roligt då får vi större nytta i livet. Men i samklang med att individer gärna njuter av fritid där vi exempelvis spenderar tid på sociala medier så kan ett fysiskt beroende utveckla sig. Olds & Milner (1954) förklarar hur hjärnan bildar receptorer för lyckohormonet dopamin som vi får ta del utav vid positiva interaktioner på sociala medier. Detta lägger grund för att individen misslyckas med att nyttomaximera och istället spenderar allt för stor del av sitt dygn på sociala medier. Effekterna av det visar Hinsch & Sheldon (2013) - människor som själva uppfattar att de använder för sociala medier för mycket blir mer välmående när de drar ner på användandet. Dessa personer har också lättare för att dra ner på timmarna spenderade framför skärmen. Vittnandes om att det finns en viss nivå av användande som verkar leda till bra saker. Ellison & Steinfield ser exempelvis ingen skillnad på antal kontakter man har band till även om man spenderar 2-4h/dag framför Facebook jämfört med 0-2h. Livet för de flesta har många olika element som alla bidrar med viss nytta – positiv eller negativ. Att arbeta mot mål är bra för den personliga nyttan i livet säger Klug & Maier (2015). Att prokrastinera och välja fritid när man istället bör arbeta emot att slutföra mål är inte nyttofullt menar Fischer (1999). Sammantaget har användandet av sociala medier många bra effekter för individen – med premissen att samma individ kan begränsa sitt användande till en nivå som inte medför att för lite tid disponeras till att arbeta med övergripande mål i livet.

Background: Sweden is one of the largest exporters of military equipment in the world. Despite many restraining laws and guidelines, Sweden export military equipment to dictatorship and non-democracies. It’s of significant importance to examine what it would cost Sweden to abstain from export of military equipment in those cases where arms trade creates a conflict of interest. The dilemma for Sweden is choosing between the benefits of long-term financial interests that arms export provides and the morality issues that they entail. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze and evaluate what it would cost Sweden to refrain from exporting arms to countries where the trade creates conflict of interests between financial gains and the Swedish foreign aid policy along with humanitarian ideals. Method: To analyze and evaluate the cost of reduced arms exports, a quantitative and qualitative literary analysis study is used along with the collection of secondary data. A custom developed index is created in order to estimate each country’s humanitarian ideal. Conclusions: Refraining from the export of arms to countries where conflict of interests are created with the Swedish foreign aid policy and humanitarian ideals would result both in lost income and saved costs for the Swedish arms industry. Swedish exports of military equipment contribute positively to the Swedish economy, international co-operations and technical knowledge. Exports are a necessity for maintaining the competitiveness of the Swedish arms industry. Abstaining the export of arms would result in lost revenue of approximately 4,8 billion Swedish kronas in 2013, 1,4 billion in 2015, 4,6 billion in 2016 and 6,2 billion in 2017. Reduced export would result in varying effects on the industry ́s economic expense, depending on the production costs. Due to confidentiality, the data necessary to estimate the total cost of reduced arms exports to countries where conflict of interests is not available. The study therefore estimates what the total cost would be for Sweden to reduce the arms exports through combined analytical and measurable effects.

Foreign aid’s effect in developing economies has been a discussed topic for decades. Many scholars have been debating on whether foreign aid increases or decreases economic growth in the recipient country. Yet, this debate may never be put to rest as the conclusions may vary depending on the study. There are different types of aid which yields different outcomes depending on the social- economic status of the recipient country. Historically, Tanzania has been under major economic and political reforms since the 1970s which enhanced the country to benefit from foreign aid tremendously on the recent decades. Therefore, this arises the question of how does foreign aid associate to the economic growth in Tanzania? The purpose for this paper is to understand how effective foreign aid is on Tanzania’s economy but also to understand what role aid can have on recipient countries. To be able to analyze this, a cross sectional analysis was done on 6 Sub-Saharan African countries including Tanzania over the time period of 1980-2017. Previous studies discussed the effectiveness of foreign aid on the economy, thereby our theoretical framework suggests foreign aid could be used as tool to increase economic growth through different factors of growth such as investments and capital. Our results conclude that foreign aid have a negative association  on the economic growth in Tanzania. Although other variables such as corruption showed significant association on the economic growth.

This paper studies the difference in number of tourist arrivals between the Olympic games and the Paralympic games in the hosting countries. Using the difference-in-differences method, results show that there is a difference in the number of tourist arrivals between the summer games and winter games, and that hosting the games have a bigger impact on smaller city than on bigger one. They also show that since Vancouver 2010 the Olympic games always attracted more tourists than the Paralympic games. The main conclusion of this paper is that there is definitely a difference in the tourist inflow between the Olympic games and Paralympic games and that the Olympic games attract more tourists than the Paralympic games.

This study aims to find the model which generates the best volatility forecasts of single stock returns on the Swedish Market. The models are estimated using an in-sample dataset of daily observations from 2010.01.01 to 2018.12.31, they produce out-of-sample forecasts during the period 2019.01.01 to 2019.03.31 which are evaluated against a proxy for daily realized volatility using 4 loss functions. The forecasts are also evaluated against daily implied volatilities. The models considered in this study are ARCH(1), GARCH(1,1), EGARCH(1,1) and Implied Volatility measures. The study finds that, in the evaluation against daily realized volatility, the EGARCH(1,1) generates the best forecasts, which is consistent with literature. However, results indicate that the naïve ARCH(1) outperforms the GARCH(1,1) which is not consistent with previous research. In the evaluation against implied volatilities, the ARCH(1) specification performed the best. Although, the differences in the losses of the different ARCH-family models were often very small.

The literature on the relationship between the size of government and the economic growthis full of contradictory findings. There are some scholars that claim to have found a negative relationship whilst others claim that the evidence presents no conclusion on whether the relationship is positive, negative or non-existent. This paper reviews the findings ofprevious research on this relationship and the conclusions that may could be drawn regarding this. Two fixed effects regressions of a panel data set are made in order to see what relationship can be found for the countries of EU, between the years of 2000 to 2017.Since the countries of EU are rich and have an established public sector, the findings of this study cannot be applied on poor countries with a small government size. The results of our regression is a negative effect, but if it works as evidence is still highly debatable. The findings may have been different if other control variables, statistical methods, time-periodor countries were used. The causality still remains highly questionable.

Immigration has been and will continue to be a common occurrence in the world. As a field ofstudy immigration is a controversial subject. In addition, there are many contradictory previous results from studies on the effects of immigration on the native born population. This thesis isa compliment to earlier research on the field with a focus on the effects on the employment rate of natives in Sweden. The aim of the study is to move the field towards coherence. Panel data for the years 2011 to 2017 are used and the observations are the 290 municipalities in Sweden. An econometric approach is conducted where the response variable is the percent of the native born population which is gainfully employed. The thesis shows that there is a small but positive correlation between immigration and the employment rate of natives in Sweden, at least as long as there are not too many people with low economic standard. If too many people have a low economic standard the amount of foreign born who are gainfully employed will have a negative effect on the amount of native born who are gainfully employed.

After the 2008-2009 crisis, many studies have been done to assess the stock market liquidity and what influences this. The monetary policy of a central bank can have a broad impact of a country's economy and is believed to also affect the stock market. In addition, the goal of the central bank differs for every country which may affect the transmission effects seen in previous studies. This study takes a closer look at how monetary policy affect stock market liquidity fora small open economy, Sweden. The method of use includes vector autoregression, Granger tests and impulse response functions. The results show that we cannot distinguish a clear effect on stock market liquidity. However, findings show that there is a disturbance in stock market liquidity after a change in monetary policy. Granger tests also suggest an interesting dual causality. These results are consistent when testing both with monthly and daily data.

The academic literature on finance has since the mid 60’s been largely influenced by the Efficient Market Hypothesis (Fama, 1965, 1970). The Efficient Market Hypothesis has since then been a topic for debate and numerous studies has been conducted with the agenda of testing the Efficient Market Hypothesis and its robustness. The Efficient Market Hypothesis implies that stock prices follow a random walk, hence,predicting future stock returns based on previous stock prices should not earn any success in attempt to consistently beat the market. However,different momentum trading strategies has emerged in academic literature showing evidence of outperforming the financial markets. Using U.S. stock data from the American Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq over the period January 2001 to December 2019, this paper examines returns from trading stocks on momentum with the 52-week high strategy in attempt to test the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Empirical tests in this paper indicate that the strategy of buying U.S.common stocks in the top 52-week high price ratio significantly outperforms the market.

Matchningen på arbetsmarknaden kan mätas med hjälp av Beveridgemodellen. I denna modell är arbetslöshet och vakanser centrala mått för att mäta matchningsgraden. Det är dock möjligt att utöka denna för att ta hänsyn till individsammansättningen i arbetskraften och konjunkturförändringar. I denna studie används data från Sveriges samtliga 21 län under tidsperioden 2006–2018 för att avgöra hur individsammansättningen i arbetskraften kan påverka matchningen. Detta görs med paneldataregressioner där både fixa effekter och tidseffekter används. Fokuset med denna studie ligger på utrikesfödda, dels för att tidigare studier visat att denna grupp har svårt att etablera sig på arbetsmarknaden, men även på grund av den rådande samhällsdebatten kring integration. När hänsyn togs till fixa effekter och multikollinearitetsproblem visar studien att en ökning av utrikesfödda som andel av befolkningen med 1% ökar arbetslösheten med 0,91%. När tidseffekter inkluderas blir dock parameterestimatet ej signifikant, och det går då ej att säga vilken effekt utrikesfödda har på arbetslösheten. Framtida studier skulle kunna göra en omformulering av modellen likt Håkansson (2014) med annat data för att få signifikanta estimat då tidseffekter inkluderas.