Bakgrund: Läkemedelsbranschen är idag en av de mest reglerade branscherna på marknaden. Forskning och utveckling har en stor betydelse för läkemedelsföretagen. För att lansera ett läkemedel krävs det att företagen genomför kliniska prövningar, deras utfall kan mycket väl avgöra företagens framtid. Problemformulering: hur stor inverkan har de olika faserna inom produktutvecklingen på aktiekurserna för företag i läkemedelsbranschen. Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka hur marknaden reagerar när läkemedel som är under utveckling går in i de tre olika kliniska faserna.Metod: Studien baseras på kvantitativ data där ett bekvämlighetsval gjorts på sju stycken läkemedelsföretag. PR meddelanden där läkemedel i utveckling går in i fas-1, fas-2 och fas-3 kliniska prövningar har valts ut som enskilda händelsen i eventstudien som genomförts. Vi har studerat vad som händer 5 dagar före och 5 dagar efter att händelsen utspelar sig. Därefter har vi mätt marknadens reaktion genom beräkning av den anormala avkastningen. Slutsatser: Studien visar på att aktiemarknaden reagerar positivt på alla de tre kliniska faserna. Marknaden har en förmåga att övervärdera fas-1 studiers betydelse. Det finns tecken på att marknaden har svårt att värdera forskningen och utvecklingens riktiga värde. / Background: The pharmaceutical industry is a heavily regulated market. Costs for research and development are of utmost importance for the industry. To successfully launch a new drug requires clinical trials, and their outcomes could well determine the future of the company’s business. Problem formulation: how much influence do the various stages of product development have on the stock prices for companies in the pharmaceutical industry. Purpose: How does the market react when a drug under development undergoes the three different clinical phases. Method: The study is based on quantitative data. Seven pharmaceutical companies have been selected for this study. PR messages for when drugs in development go into phase-1, phase-2 and phase-3 clinical trials, have been selected as the event in focus for our study. We have studied what occurs five days before and five days after an event takes place. Next we measure the markets reaction by calculating the abnormal return. Conclusion: The study shows that the stock market reacts positively to all three clinical phases. The market has a way to overestimate phase-1 studies importance. There are signs that the market has difficulties evaluating R&Ds real value.

Hydropower is the most important domestic energy source of Turkey. Thus, wise planning and development of the unused hydropower potential of the country is vital. There are many hydroelectric power plants under planning stage in our country. Altiparmak HEPP is one of them. General Directorate of Electrical Power Resources Survey and Development Administration (EIE) and ANC Enerji conducted two separate feasibility studies for Altiparmak HEPP in 2001 and 2009, respectively. Traditionally, the energy income calculations for HEPPs are based on DSI or EIE Methods in Turkey. Both of these methods evaluate the firm and the secondary energy generations separately. Besides they use fixed prices for these two types of energies. However, hourly electricity prices are used for electricity trading in Turkey. A detailed economic analysis of Altiparmak HEPP is conducted in this study. The economic analysis included various factors, such as tailwater level change, varying operating levels for different seasons and precipitation and evaporation amounts which are not conventionally included in feasibility studies. Moreover, the energy income calculations are conducted with four different methods, the DSI Method, the EIE Method, the ANC Method and the Variable Price Method (VPM). The VPM is developed in this study and it allows utilization of hourly electricity prices in calculating energy income of the HEPP. To shed some light on how hourly electricity prices develop, this thesis includes a chapter on the electricity market which explains the details of electricity trading in our country after the Electricity Market Balancing and Settlement Regulation became active in 2009.

This dissertation examines several issues regarding the congestion on the Upper Mississippi River and Illinois Waterway. Chapter II identifies and measures the impact of lock congestion on grain barge rates on these waterways. Results indicate grain barge rates on both rivers are not affected by lagged lock congestion. In present time, however, lock congestion in the lower reaches of the upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers are found to increase barge rates that link the north central United States to the lower Mississippi Gulf port area. The findings suggest the impact of lock congestion on grain barge rates is moderate. Chapter III explores the interaction between grain prices in export and domestic markets and transportation rates linking these markets over time. Three model frameworks were evaluated and some consistent results are observed. In general, shocks in transportation rates (barge, rail, and ocean) explain a great proportion of the variation in corn and soybean market prices in the long run, suggesting the importance of transportation in grain price determination. The volatile ocean freight rates are the mostimportant transportation rates contributing to the variation in grain prices, while shocks in barge rates on the Upper Mississippi River and Illinois Waterway generally explain less than 15 percent of the variation in grain prices. The dynamic interrelationships among the six evaluated transportation rates are also found. In addition, the north central corn markets likely have the most influence over other markets while soybean export price dominates the soybean market in the long run. Chapter IV estimates the structural demand for grain barge transportation on both the upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. Results suggest foreign grain demand is the most influential force affecting grain barge demand on both rivers. Also, results indicate an inelastic demand for grain barge transportation on the Upper Mississippi in the short run; demand is price elastic in the long run. The price elasticity for grain barge demand on the Illinois River is consistently inelastic. Additionally, the winter season and floods affect demand on the Upper Mississippi negatively, while barge demand increases on the Illinois River in winter.

Most papers in empirical finance implicitly or explicitly assume the same price of risk, for each priced systematic risk factor, across all risky assets within a given domestic market. In doing so, they rely on the assumption that markets are domestically integrated and, as such, that the price of risk is determined independently of individual investors attitude towards risk. This is true in frictionless markets where investors have complete information, homogenous beliefs, and hold the mean-variance efficient combination of the market portfolio and a risk-free asset. However, investors might not hold the market portfolio because of exogenous reasons. In fact, several recent papers have provided evidence that US investors do not, holding instead vastly undiversified portfolios. There are two main implications to the above. First, if one group of investors does not hold the market portfolio, then the remaining set of investors will also not be able to hold the market portfolio and will rationally expect to be compensated for bearing idiosyncratic risk. Therefore, idiosyncratic risk will be priced in expected returns. Second, the price of risk need not be the same across all assets in which case domestic markets are not integrated. In the first essay titled "Is Idiosyncratic Volatility Really priced?" I show that the positive relation between idiosyncratic volatility (IV) and returns found by Fu (2009) only exists for firms that are difficult to arbitrage. The relation between IV and returns is strong for small and illiquid stocks, but decreases with size and liquidity and becomes non-existent for the largest and most liquid firms. Furthermore, zero-cost portfolios based on IV and size do not yield positive returns when conservative trading costs are considered. This evidence is consistent with an efficient market, in which arbitragers exploit profitable investment opportunities and by doing so they prevent systematic mispricing in financial markets. In the second essay titled "Are the U.S. Equity Markets Domestically Integrated?" I investigate whether the three main U.S. equity markets are domestically integrated by comparing the price of commonly used risk factors across the NYSE, Amex, and Nasdaq. I find that the markets have significantly different prices of risks for several risk factors, indicating that the markets are segmented. The magnitude of the difference is both statistically and economically significant, and is not due to arbitrage constraints or model misspecification. Instead, I find evidence consistent with the investor-segmentation hypothesis, in which different investors choose to hold different subsets of firms and demand different prices of risk among the different groups of securities. I do not find that segmentation is restricted to a specific time period. On the contrary, it is present in all sub-periods. In contrast to the results regarding the pricing of idiosyncratic volatility, these results highlight the value of diversification and suggest that domestic equity markets are not fully efficient.

As medical care becomes an increasingly large share of Gross Domestic Product, understanding the mechanisms for how and why medical care spending is rising becomes increasingly important. Such an evaluation should consider the productivity relationship between medical care and health. An evaluation of medical productivity involves the measurement of medical care input prices, disease treatment output prices, and the productive relationship between medical care inputs and disease treatment health outcomes. Medical care price measurement is complicated by the heterogeneity of services, the role of insurance in negotiating prices, rapid technological advancements in medical care and limited availability of transaction price data. Health outcome prices are difficult to construct because of the difficulty in measuring health outcomes, the heterogeneity of health outcomes, and the messy relationship between consumption goods and health. Finally, in addition to accurate input and output price measurement, a productivity assessment requires a measurable causal relationship between medical care services and health outcomes. To date, all of these requirements have been insurmountable hurdles to assessing the productivity of medical care for the entire United States economy. This dissertation uses the Medical care Expenditure Panel Survey to address the necessary requirements for evaluating the productivity of medical care. The second chapter constructs regional medical care price indices using transaction prices that control for service type heterogeneity. The data employed in the analysis associates the observed medical care spending with the diseases the spending is used to treat. This association is exploited in the third chapter, which constructs medical care treatment prices for twelve of the major health conditions in the United States. The fourth chapter compares the productivity of medical care services used to produce disease treatment health outcomes across insurance types. / text

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This thesis presents an econometric methodology for analyzing the impact of market concentration (HHI) on the day rate prices paid by E&P operators for the lease of drilling rigs. It is an extension of the work of Lee (2008), ‘Measuring the Impact of Concentration in the Drilling Rig Market’. Specifically, the work entailed using a more detailed time series data than was initially used (quarterly), analyzing impact of concentration on day rate prices by water depth specification of drilling rigs, and accounting for the impact of autocorrelation on the analysis. The results for jack-ups, without adjustment for autocorrelation, supported the results of the prior study i.e. showing that increase in HHI causes rig day rate price increase. However, the results for semi-submersibles was inconclusive as it varied from region to region and also was contrary to the assumptions of positive relationships between HHI and day rate prices made in this study. These results imply that market concentration caused both price increase and decrease within the industry depending on whether it increased market power or increased cost efficiency and technological ability. / text

Nuclear power plants across the United States are reaching the end of their current operating licenses, forcing decision makers to think about the way forward. As they consider the best alternatives for dealing with aging nuclear plants, it is becoming increasingly important to have an accurate method for calculating the long-term costs of nuclear power plants. This report begins by investigating the methodologies currently used in these calculations. They focus on the uncertainty associated with deregulated electricity markets and can be broken down into two main categories: discounted cash flow and real options analysis. Next the report discusses the limitations of the current methodologies, focusing specifically on those aspects of evaluation that are currently eclipsed by electricity market uncertainty. Finally the report offers recommendations for addressing these limitations and creating a stronger analytical framework for calculating the lifetime cost of nuclear power plants. / text

published_or_final_version / Statistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

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