This research was conducted to determine whether the intrinsic share values that are obtained using the EVA valuation model are an indicator of share prices as quoted on the JSE Securities Exchange. The research did not differentiated between companies that have implemented EVA in South Africa and those that have not. The research was conducted by performing EVA intrinsic share price calculations for 43 companies listed on the JSE Securities Exchange. These EVA share prices were correlated to the actual share price as quoted on the JSE Securities Exchange, for the current and lagged periods of one and two years. The resultant correlation coefficients were tested for significance at the 5% level. The results show that there is no statistically significant correlation between the EVA intrinsic share values and the share price as quoted on the JSE in both the same and lagged periods. Hence we cannot conclude that EVA is an indicator of share price. / Thesis(MBA)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.

Pharmaceuticals are a crucial component of delivering healthcare, hence regulating pharmaceutical markets is a complex issue involving dynamic interplay of multiple actors. The South African healthcare industry is plagued with past problems and new ones created by cumbersome legislation, changing economic conditions and rapid cost escalation. The core objectives of the 2004 medicines pricing legislation were; effective care and use of resources; high quality services and responsiveness; accessibility and affordability of medicines for consumers. This study explores the impact of the new medicine pricing regulations on independent community pharmacies in KwaZulu-Natal, wherein 115 out of a total of 364 independent pharmacies participated. The main aim was to determine the number of pharmacies that closed and the emerging trends in this sector by qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing the legislation, policy implementation and its impact on various stakeholders. Data was collected via semi-structured interviews; a survey questionnaire and document analysis. The study revealed that, more consultation was needed for a sustainable dispensing fee since between 72 and 83 pharmacies had closed in KZN from 2003 to 2009; due to them being uneconomical. Tools used to illustrate legislative impact were Porter’s value chain, Force-Field analysis and the Fish-Bone diagram. The emerging trends underscored government’s need to provide a democratic environment conducive to small business growth, with the recommendation that policy makers strategically respond to the real world in which health sector reforms must be implemented. / Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2009.

The market structure of the food retailing industry has evolved to one which is comprised of numerous types of outlets, each using different basic strategies for doing business. A field experiment was implemented in stores which were assumed to operate with strategically opposite marketing philosophies. Results demonstrate that when prices were either raised or lowered, the sales in the stores that use "low pricing" as a core strategy were affected more than the stores which use a strategy other than low price. A survey conducted in the test stores shows that the shopping profiles of the customers in both store types differ. Statistically significant differences between the two customer groups as to ideal store attributes desired, lifestyles (A.I.O.'s) and demographics were determined. The results yield important implications for theory, methodology and for managers in all levels of the distribution channel.

I use data from the National Football League (NFL) to analyze the impact of minimum salaries on an employee’s firm tenure, an employee’s career length, and an employer’s distribution of employee experience. The NFL has a salary structure in which the minimum salary a player can receive increases with the player’s years of experience. Salary schedules similar to the NFL’s exist in public education, Secret Service, Internal Revenue Service, other federal government agencies, the Episcopalian church, and unionized industries. Even though the magnitude of the salaries in the NFL differs from other industries, this study provides insight to the impact of this type of salary structure firm tenure, career length, and the experience distribution. In the first essay, I analyze the impact of minimum salaries on firm tenure and career length for six positional groups in the NFL, defensive backs, defensive linemen, linebackers, running backs, tight ends, and wide receivers. A major advantage of using NFL data is that I am able to control for a player’s productivity. I find statistically significant evidence that minimum salaries shorten firm tenure and career length when they require teams to increase a player’s base salary from year t to year t+1 or a player’s total compensation from year t to year t+1. In the second essay, I analyze the impact of minimum salaries on the experience distribution. I exploit the fact that the NFL’s minimum salary schedule causes the relative minimum price between two experience levels to change over time. This provides teams with an incentive to substitute away from the experience level whose relative minimum price becomes more expensive. I find evidence that when relative minimum prices change, the experience distribution changes.

This thesis first develops a range of wholesale water market design options, based on an optimisation approach to market-clearing, as in electricity markets, focusing on the extent to which uncertainty is accounted for in bidding, market-clearing and contract formation. We conclude that the most promising option is bidding for, and trading, a combination of fixed and proportionally scaled contract volumes, which are based on optimised outputs. Other options include those which are based on a post-clearing fit (e.g. regression) to the natural optimised outputs, or constraining the optimisation such that cleared allocations are in the contractual form required by participants. Alternatively, participants could rely on financial markets to trade instruments, but informed by a centralised market-clearing simulation. We then describe a computational modelling system, using Stochastic Constructive Dynamic Programming (CDDP), and use it to assess the importance of modelling uncertainty, and correlations, in reservoir optimisation and/or market-clearing, under a wide range of physical and economic assumptions, with or without a market. We discuss a number of bases of comparison, but focus on the benefit gain achieved as a proportion of the perfectly competitive market value (price times quantity), calculated using the market clearing price from Markov Chain optimisation. With inflow and demand completely out of phase, high inflow seasonality and volatility, and a constant elasticity of -0.5, the greatest contribution of stochastic (Markov) optimisation, as a proportion of market value was 29%, when storage capacity was only 25% of mean monthly inflow, and with effectively unlimited release capacity. This proportional gain fell only slowly for higher storage capacities, but nearly halved for lower release capacities, around the mean monthly inflow, mainly because highly constrained systems produce high prices, and hence raise market value. The highest absolute gain was actually when release capacity was only 75% of mean monthly inflow. On average, over a storage capacity range from 2% to 1200%, and release capacity range from 100% to 400%, times the mean monthly inflow, the gains from using Markov Chain and Stochastic Independent optimisation, rather than deterministic optimisation, were 18% and 13% of market value, respectively. As expected, the gains from stochastic optimisation rose rapidly for lower elasticities, and when vertical steps were added to the demand curve. But they became nearly negligible when (the absolute value of) elasticity rose to 0.75 and beyond, inflow was in-phase with demand, or the range of either seasonal variation or intra-month variability reduced to ±50% of the mean monthly inflow. Still, our results indicate that there are a wide range of reservoir and economic systems where accounting for uncertainty directly in the water allocation process could result in significant gains, whether in a centrally controlled or market context. Price and price risk, which affect individual participants, were significantly more sensitive. Our hope is that this work helps inform parties who are considering enhancing their water allocation practices with improved stochastic optimisation, and potentially market based mechanisms.

This dissertation thesis address how aggregate shocks affect insurance firms' risk management and asset investment decisions as well as the impact of these decisions on insurance prices and regulation. The first chapter develops a signaling model to examine how insurance firms choose among retention, reinsurance and securitization especially for catastrophe risks. The second chapter examines the determination of insurance prices in an integrated equilibrium framework where insurers' assets may be subject to both idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks. The third chapter presents an empirical analysis of the hypothesized impacts of internal capital and asset risk on insurance prices as predicted by the results of the second chapter. The last chapter investigates the optimal design of insurance regulation to achieve the Pareto optimal asset and liquidity management by insurers as well as risk sharing between insurers and insurees. Chapter 1 provides a novel explanation for the predominance of retention and reinsurance relative to securitization in catastrophe risk transfer using a signaling model. An insurer's risk transfer choice trades off the lower signaling costs of reinsurance against the additional costs of reinsurance stemming from sources such as their market power, higher cost of capital relative to capital markets, and compensation for their monitoring costs. In equilibrium, the lowest risk insurers choose reinsurance, while intermediate and high risk insurance choose partial and full securitization, respectively. An increase in the loss size increases the average risk of insurers who choose securitization. Consequently, catastrophe risks, which are characterized by low frequency-high severity losses, are only securitized by very high risk insurers. Chapter 2 develops a unified equilibrium model of competitive insurance markets where insurers' assets may be exposed to idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks. We endogenize the relationship between insurance prices and insurers internal capital that potentially reconcile the conflicting predictions of previous theories that investigate the relation using partial equilibrium frameworks. Equilibrium effects lead to a non-monotonic U-shaped relation between insurance price and internal capital. Specifically, the equilibrium insurance price first decreases with a positive shock to the internal capital when it is below certain threshold level, and then increases with a positive shock the internal capital when it is above the threshold level. Further, we also derive another testable implication that an increase in the asset default risk increases the insurance price and decrease the insurance coverage. Chapter 3 studies the property and casualty insurance industry in periods from 1992 to 2012 based on the aggregate level of NAIC data. We show that the insurance price decreases with an increase in the surplus of insurance firms at the end of the previous year when the surplus is lower than 8.5 billion, and then increase when the surplus is higher than 8.5 billion. Our results provide support for the hypothesis of a U-shaped relationship between internal capital and insurance price. Our results also provide evidence for the positive relationship between asset portfolio risk and insurance price. Chapter 4 studies the effects of aggregate risk on the Pareto optimal asset and liquidity management by insurers as well as risk-sharing between insurers and insurers. When aggregate risk is low, both insurers and insurers hold no liquidity reserves, insurees are fully insured, and insurers bear all aggregate risk. When aggregate risk takes intermediate values, both insurees and insurers still hold no liquidity reserves, but insurers partially share aggregate risk with insurers. When aggregate risk is high, however, it is optimal to hold nonzero liquidity reserves, and insurees partially share aggregate risk with insurers. The efficient asset and liquidity management policies as well as the aggregate risk allocation can be implemented through a regulatory intervention policy that combines a minimum liquidity requirement when aggregate risk is high, "ex post" contingent on the aggregate state, comprehensive insurance policies, and reinsurance.

Bostadsmarknaden är en av de största tillgångsmarknaderna i ett land varpå förändringar i bostadspriserna får långt gångna konsekvenser för det enskilda hushållet, det finansiella systemet och samhällsekonomin i stort. Flertalet tidigare studier har analyserat den svenska bostadsmarknaden utifrån ett storstadsperspektiv alternativt jämfört Sveriges bostadsmarknad mot andra länder. Vi har identifierat att studiet kring vad som bestämmer prisnivån på regionala bostadsmarknader i Sverige är tämligen oexploaterat varför avsikten med den här studien är att analysera bestämningsfaktorer till de svenska bostadspriserna på länsnivå. Sålunda är ett bidragande mål med denna studie att tillföra en bättre förståelse för dynamiken på den svenska bostadsmarknaden. I studien använder vi multipel regression där vi bearbetar paneldata med en Fixed Effect Model. Ett flertal förtester har gjorts för att få fram den mest tillförlitliga modellen i vilken vi skattat bostadspriserna utifrån teoretiskt belagda förklaringsvariabler. De slutsatser vi har dragit är att disponibel inkomst, befolkningstäthet och sysselsättningsgrad kan förklara bostadspriserna på länsnivå med en procents signifikansnivå. Skillnaden i bostadspriserna mellan länen har relativt sett ökat över tidsperioden för studien. Avslutningsvis diskuteras uppvisade avvikelser mellan de verkliga bostadspriserna och de skattade bostadspriserna vilka kan förklaras av att bostadsmarknaden är känslostyrd med inslag av spekulationer. / The housing market is one of the greatest assets markets in a given country. Therefore, changes in housing prices have a big impact on the single household, the financial system and the economic system as a whole. Due to the housing markets vital role in the society, many scientific studies have been done with the purpose of enlighten and discover the dynamics of the Swedish housing market. The focuses in these earlier studies have more than often taken a metropolitan perspective or compared the Swedish housing market with other countries. However, this study divides the Swedish housing market into regional county level with the purpose of analyzing determinants of housing prices due to county specific variables. By analyzing the housing prices due to county specific factors a contributing goal with this study is to deepen the understanding about the dynamics in the Swedish housing market. In this study we have used multiple regressions in order to work with panel data. The Fixed Effect Model fitted our purpose well which is why that kind of model was used in order to estimate the housing prices for every single Swedish county. The conclusions drawn in this study are that disposable income, people density and employment rate are all statistically significant on one percent level in order to explain the housing price at state level. We have also discovered that, during the observed period, the relative differences in housing prices between the different states have increased. Finally, the differences found between the real housing prices and the estimated housing prices, can be explained by the assumption that the housing market is driven by emotions and speculations.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att utreda vilka faktorer som påverkar de svenska småhuspriserna, och i så fall hur och i vilken utsträckning. Med stöd av tidigare studier som enhetlig pekar ut bolåneräntan och disponibel inkomst som de faktorer vilka har tydligast inverkan på fastighetspriserna i Sverige, utökas de förklarande variablerna i denna studie med hjälp av en stock-flow modell. Tidsseriedata från 1993-2013 behandlas för enhetsrötter och kointegration för att skattas i en regressionsanalys i form en "Error Correction Model", med avsikten att utreda både ett kort- och långsiktigt samband. Resultatet bekräftar reporäntan och disponibel inkomst som två viktiga faktorer för att förklara det långsiktiga sambandet med priserna på småhus i Sverige, tillsammans med ytterligare faktorer såsom BNP, hushållens skuldsättning och arbetslösheten. På kort sikt är dels den historiska utvecklingen av huspriserna en nyckelfaktor, men faktorer som disponibel inkomst, ränta, BNP och hushållens skuldsättning är också viktiga krafter för att förklara småhuspriserna. En slutsats som kan dras är att hushållens förmåga till ökad konsumtion, när inkomsterna ökar, avspeglas i småhuspriserna. En låg ränta gör samtidigt att fler än någonsin har råd att låna på en marknad med ett redan mycket begränsat bostadsutbud / The purpose of this study is to investigate which factors affect the Swedish real estate prices of small house dwellings, and if so, how and to what extent. With the use of earlier studies, that coherently claims mortgage rate and household disposable income to be the most valuable factors to explain the Swedish real estate prices, this study will consider additional determinant factors with the respect to a stock-flow model. 1993-2013 time series data will be tested for unit roots and cointegration before its run in a regression as an "Error Correction Model", which considers both long- and short run equilibrium. The result confirms the short run rate and disposable income as two determinant key factors when it comes to explaining the long run Swedish housing prices, together with other factors such as GDP, household debt and unemployment rate. In the short run, the historical development of housing prices act as a key determinant, but disposable income, short term rate, GDP and household debt are also important explanatory factors. The study shows that the increased income, and the ability to increase household spending, will be reflected in the housing prices. A low loan rate will concurrently make it possible for more households than ever to loan at a market with an already very restricted housing supply

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

Šiame darbe atliekami elektros energijos kainų analizė ir modeliavimas. Elektros kainų kitimui ir tokioms jų charakteringoms savybėms, kaip sezoniškumas, vidurkio reversija, darbo dienų, savaitgalio ir švenčių efektas, kintamumo klasterizacija, aprašyti taikomi SARIMA-TGARCH ir SARFIMA-TGARCH modeliai. Tyrimui naudojami kasvalandiniai Prancūzijos elektros energijos biržos kainų stebėjimai. Darbą sudaro dvi dalys – bendroji (teorinė) ir tiriamoji dalys. Pirmoje dalyje apžvelgiama literatūra bei aptariami teoriniai modelių aspektai: aprašomi ilgos atminties modeliai. Antroje dalyje pristatomi modelių empiriniai rezultatai: SARIMA-TGARCH ir SARFIMA-TGARCH modelių taikymas ir adekvatumo tikrinimas. / In this paper an econometric modelling and forecasting of electricity spot prices is presented. The aim of this work is to examine SARIMA-TGARCH and SARFIMA-TGARCH models for describing volatility of electricity spot prices and their characteristics such as season, mean reversion, volatility cauterization, and effects of workdays, weekends or holidays. The data of France electricity stock prices are used for analysis. This paper contains two parts – theoretical and empirical. In the first part the short review of literature is presented. Moreover, the theoretical aspects of long memory models are discussed. In the following part the empirical results are presented: application and adequacy examination of SARIMA-TGARCH and SARFIMA-TGARCH models.