Bakgrund: Aktierekommendationer är vanligt förekommande i finansiell media samtidigt som teorier säger att man inte systematiskt kan över- eller undervärdera en aktie. Trots detta visar studier att finansmarknaden influeras av aktierekommendationer då handeln ökar efter en annonsering, vilket innebär att de finansiella kunskaperna en student har lärt sig under sin utbildning inte påverkar lika starkt när den sedan väljer att följa en aktierekommendation. Syfte: Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka vilka faktorer som påverkar ekonomistudenters uppfattning av aktierekommendationer och hur stor påverkan valet av utbildningslinje har för hur studenten bedömer aktierekommendationer. Referensram: Referensramen kommer ge en förförståelse samt behandla de teorier som är väsentliga för att utreda studien. Referensramen innefattar prisbildning, EMH, behavioural finance, risk, kulturella influenser, utbildningens influenser och skolornas bakgrund. Metod: För att bäst kunna besvara och undersöka syftet genomförs studien som en förklarande surveyundersökning med en kvantitativ ansats. Undersökningen utförs genom en elektronisk enkät som skickas ut till studenter. Empiri: Det empiriska materialet består av enkätsvar från studenter från fyra olika ekonomiska utbildningslinjer som bearbetats med stistiska metoder. Slutsats: Valet av utbildningslinje påverkar studentens uppfattning om aktierekommendationer. De faktorer som påverkar är tron på den effektiva marknadshypotesen, studentens finansiella intresse, kön, riskbenägenhet, teoretisk kunskap samt kultur. Dessa faktorer påverkar utbildningslinjerna olika starkt. / Background: Share price recommendations are a common feature in the financial media. At the same time the financial theories argue that an asset can't systematically be over- or under valued. In spite of this, former studies show that share price recommendations do influence the financial market since the trade increases after an announcement. This means that the financial knowledge the student obtain during its education won’t matter when he or she chooses to follow a share price recommendation. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate which factors influence students’ opinions about share price recommendations, and how big effect the students’ business education has on that opinion. Theory: The frame of reference will give the reader a deeper knowledge beyond the theory and also theoretical perspectives essential for analysing the study. The frame of reference will consist of asset pricing, the effective market hypothesis, behavioural finance, cultural influences, educational influences as well as the schools backgrounds. Methodology: For best being able to answer to the purpose of this study, an explanatory survey investigation with a quantitative method is being made. The study will be investigated through an electronic questionnaire that will be sent to students. Empirical findings: The empirical material consits of the answers of students from four different business educations. Conclusions: The business educations affect the students’ opinion about share price recommendations in differing ways. The influencing factors are whether the student believes in effective market hypothesis, the students’ personal interest in finance, gender, risk appetite, theoretical knowledge, and culture.

This volume is a collection of three essays relating to the pricing of securities in financial markets, such as stock markets, where a large number of individual securities are traded. Lead-Lag Effects in a Competitive REE MarketThis essay introduces a model of cross-security information aggregation. The model is essentially an extension of Chan (Journal of Finance, 1993) to the case of simultaneous auction markets where revealed information is correlated across securities.The model provides clear predictions of lead-lag effects between securities returns. Several of the model's predictions are confirmed empirically using data from the Paris Bourse. Other models of price formation, including the basic Chan model and nonsynchronous trading, are rejected as they cannot account for observed return patterns. Learning the True Index LevelThis essay extends the model of cross-security information aggregation by deriving implications for autocorrelation in index returns. Both time series and cross-sectional predictions are confirmed by empirical evidence from the Paris Bourse. In addition, the time series predictions are consistent with earlier, partly unexplained, empirical evidence from the US market. An Empirical Study of Index Return AutocorrelationThis essay studies return autocorrelation on the Stockholm Stock Exchange focusing on the relation between index returns and indvidual stock returns. It is demonstrated that the two return types have similar time series properties, and it is concluded that the causes of autocorrelation are the same in both cases. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 1997</p>

This thesis consists of five separate papers, broadly within the field of International Finance. The first paper, An Empirical Analysis of the Currency Denomination in International Trade, investigates the choice of currency in international trade transactions by Swedish exporting firms. It uses an extensive dataset on payment transactions between foreign importers and Swedish exporting firms. It is the first paper to examine currency invoicing at such a disaggregated level. The main findings are that high exchange rate volatility reduces the likelihood of using the importers currency while high GDP and GDP per capita in the importing country increases the likelihood. A large market share of a third country increases the likelihood of using the third country's currency. A further finding is a decreased use of Swedish krona and a rise in the use of the euro as a vehicle currency. State Dependent Pricing, Invoicing Currency and Exchange Rate Pass-Through, written jointly with Martin Flodén, analyzes exchange rate pass-through in a dynamic model with menu costs. In the paper, we provide a link between the fixed and flexible price analyses by specifying a dynamic framework with exogenous choice of exporting currency, but with endogenous pricing decisions. We consider the pricing strategies of firms that produce in a home country, sell on a foreign market, and can change the price in response to exchange rate fluctuations, while being subject to menu costs. Our main finding is that when the exporter prefers to set price in the importer’s currency, the exporter also changes prices less frequently than if price was set in the exporter’s home currency. The intuition is that in this setting, the optimal currency choice is the one that on average minimizes the difference between fixed and flexible price profits, and thereby the frequency of price updates. When the importer’s currency is preferred it leads to limited pass-through and a low correlation between exchange rate movements and import prices. The third paper, Demand and Distance: Evidence of Cross Border Shopping , written jointly with Marcus Asplund and Richard Friberg, uses data from 287 Swedish municipalities to estimate how responsive alcohol sales are to foreign prices, and relate the sensitivity to the location's distance to the border. Typical results suggest that the elasticity with respect to the foreign price is around 0.4 in the border region; moving 200 (400) kilometers inland reduces it to 0.2 (0.1).  For example, a 10 percent reduction in the Danish price of spirits causes a fall in per capita sales of roughly 4 percent at the border (Malmö). This large cross price elasticity is almost half the own price elasticity. The effect diminishes gradually as one moves further from the border, but fall in sales is estimated to drop below 1 percent only at 460 kilometer from the border. Not until we reach 1000 kilometers can we reject that the effect is zero. Common Currencies and Equity Prices: Evidence from a Political Event, uses a political event, the Swedish referendum on whether or not to join the European Monetary Union (EMU), as a natural experiment to examine the relationship between common currencies and the market value of exporting firms. If Sweden would have voted to join the EMU, exchange rate uncertainty as well as transaction costs would have been greatly reduced for many exporting companies. Prior to the referendum, these potential gains (adjusted for the probability of joining) should have been included in equity prices. The day after the referendum that probability of was zero and one would expect a decline in equity prices of exporting firms. We find evidence of statistically significant negative abnormal returns on the trading day after the election for only two out of fifteen examined industry indices. The small effects found in this study are in line with earlier research that finds a weak relationship between exchange rates and equity prices. The fifth paper, When is a Lower Exchange Rate Pass-Through Associated with Greater Exchange Rate Exposure?, written jointly with Martin Flodén and Witness Simbanegavi, we study the relationship between exchange rate pass-through and exchange rate exposure (the relation between profits and exchange rates) under flexible prices. We introduce a convex cost function and study the effects of changing the elasticity of costs with respect to output. We do this both in a model of monopolistic competition as well as in the oligopoly models used by Bodnar et al (2002). We find that increasing the convexity of costs reduces both exchange rate pass-through and exposure, both under monopolistic competition and in duopoly settings. The conclusion is thus that if industries differ mainly on the supply side, this would imply a positive correlation between pass-through and exposure. However, our extension does not affect the result in Bodnar et al. that exchange rate pass-through and exposure should be negatively correlated across industries if industries differ mainly on the demand side, more specifically in the substitutability between domestically produced and imported goods. / <p>Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2006, S. 3-12: sammanfattning, s. 15-120: 5 uppsatser</p>

This thesis is about the economic aspects of public procurement of services through auctionsin Sweden. It focuses on two different institutions, auctions used to find foste r-parents forboarded out children in the 19th century, and auctions of cleaning service contracts in the 20 thcentury. I n both cases, the contracting entity is the municipality or its representative, thelowest bidder wins the auction, and is paid in accordance with his/her bid.In the child auctions, c hildren were allotted to foster-parents by means of an open biddingprocess, the descending English auction, where the bids were given continuously to theauctioneer. In modern public procurement sealed bids ar e used in accordance with the firstprice,sealed bid auction. The first part of this thesis is about price formation in the childauctions and a study is made of the children who were auctioned several times, indicatingasymmetric information among bidders or adverse selection in this market. These subjects arestudied using field data on 601 child auctions held in Northern Sweden during the period 1863to 1889. The empirical findings in the first paper suggest that the foster-parents had a cleareconomic motive in these auctions. The child characteristics significantly affect the amount ofcompensation paid to the foster-parent. There is also evidence that farmers preferred older,more productive children. The second paper studies whether a re-auctioned child commandeda higher or lower price than a child that was not re-auctioned. The results indicate some formof asymmetric information because foster-parents demanded a higher level of compensationfor a re-auctioned child. The results also suggest that the probability that a child was reauctionedincreased if he/she was not healthy.The third paper in the thesis discusses a kind of "paradox". Although there is a competitiveeffect on the bids in the auction of cleaning service contracts, the contracting entity has anoption, given by law, to restrict the number of bidders. In th is paper, an implementation costis introduced fo r the contracting entity to justify such a restriction. The results, based onSwedish municipality data, indicate that contract and municipality characteristics, assumed toaffect the implementation cost, affect the volume of the procurement, and the number ofbidders, but not necessarily the choice of allocation mechanism. The final paper studiesregional differences in bids, costs, and competition in municipal procurement using the samedata as in paper [3]. The results show higher estimated costs for completing the contract, butlower estimated mean bids in the major city area of Stockholm compared with the res t of thecountry. This is explained by lower profit margins and higher operational costs in the majorcity area. An analysis is also carried out of why the lowest bidder is not always the contractedbidder. / <p>Härtill 4 delar.</p> / digitalisering@umu

This thesis consists of three distinct parts. Part I introduces the basic concepts and the notion of general quadratic term structures (GQTS) essential in some of the following chapters. Part II focuses on credit risk models and Part III studies forward price term structure models using both the classical and the geometrical approach.  Part I is organized as follows. Chapter 1 is divided in two main sections. The first section presents some of the fundamental concepts which are a pre-requisite to the papers that follow. All of the concepts and results are well known and hence the section can be regarded as an introduction to notation and the basic principles of arbitrage theory. The second part of the chapter is of a more technical nature and its purpose is to summarize some key results on point processes or differential geometry that will be used later in the thesis. For finite dimensional factor models, Chapter 2 studies GQTS. These term structures include, as special cases, the affine term structures and Gaussian quadratic term structures previously studied in the literature. We show, however, that there are other, non-Gaussian, quadratic term structures and derive sufficient conditions for the existence of these GQTS for zero-coupon bond prices. On Part II we focus on credit risk models.   In Chapter 3 we propose a reduced form model for default that allows us to derive closed-form solutions for all the key ingredients in credit risk modeling: risk-free bond prices, defaultable bond prices (with and without stochastic recovery) and survival probabilities. We show that all these quantities can be represented in general exponential quadratic forms, despite the fact that the intensity of default is allowed to jump producing shot-noise effects. In addition, we show how to price defaultable digital puts, CDSs and options on defaultable bonds. Further on, we study a model for portfolio credit risk that considers both firm-specific and systematic risk. The model generalizes the attempt of Duffie and Garleanu (2001). We find that the model produces realistic default correlation and clustering effects. Next, we show how to price CDOs, options on CDOs and how to incorporate the link to currently proposed credit indices. In Chapter 4 we start by presenting a reduced-form multiple default type of model and derive abstract results on the influence of a state variable $X$ on credit spreads when both the intensity and the loss quota distribution are driven by $X$. The aim is to apply the results to a real life situation, namely, to the influence of macroeconomic risks on the term structure of credit spreads. There is increasing support in the empirical literature for the proposition that both the probability of default (PD) and the loss given default (LGD) are correlated and driven by macroeconomic variables. Paradoxically, there has been very little effort, from the theoretical literature, to develop credit risk models that would take this into account. One explanation might be the additional complexity this leads to, even for the ``treatable'' default intensity models. The goal of this paper is to develop the theoretical framework necessary to deal with this situation and, through numerical simulation, understand the impact of macroeconomic factors on the term structure of credit spreads. In the proposed setup, periods of economic depression are both periods of higher default intensity and lower recovery, producing a business cycle effect. Furthermore, we allow for the possibility of an index volatility that depends negatively on the index level and show that, when we include this realistic feature, the impacts on the credit spread term structure are emphasized. Part III studies forward price term structure models. Forward prices differ from futures prices in stochastic interest rate settings and become an interesting object of study in their own right. Forward prices with different maturities are martingales under different forward measures. This mathematical property implies that the term structure of forward prices is always linked to the term structure of bond prices, and this dependence makes forward price term structure models relatively harder to handle. For finite dimensional factor models, Chapter 5 applies the concept of GQTS to the term structure of forward prices. We show how the forward price term structure equation depends on the term structure of bond prices. We then exploit this connection and show that even in quadratic short rate settings we can have affine term structures for forward prices. Finally, we show how the study of futures prices is naturally embedded in the study of forward prices, that the difference between the two term structures may be deterministic in some (non-trivial) stochastic interest rate settings. In Chapter 6 we study a fairly general Wiener driven model for the term structure of forward prices. The model, under a fixed martingale measure, $\Q$, is described by using two infinite dimensional stochastic differential equations (SDEs). The first system is a standard HJM model for (forward) interest rates, driven by a multidimensional Wiener process $W$. The second system is an infinite SDE for the term structure of forward prices on some specified underlying asset driven by the same $W$. Since the zero coupon bond volatilities will enter into the drift part of the SDE for these forward prices, the interest rate system is needed as input to the forward price system. Given this setup, we use the Lie algebra methodology of Bj\o rk et al. to investigate under what conditions, on the volatility structure of the forward prices and/or interest rates, the inherently (doubly) infinite dimensional SDE for forward prices can be realized by a finite dimensional Markovian state space model. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2006

The need for ancillary services is on the rise due to the increasing share of weather-dependent power sources in the electric power system. This master thesis focuses on the Swedish FCR-D Up market. It is a national balancing market for transmission system operator’s procurement of the ancillary service called FCR-D Up, that is the up-regulating frequency containment reserve in case of system disturbances. The FCR-D Up market is undergoing significant changes to adapt to the changing electric power system, which may affect the current market dominance of hydropower suppliers due to the emergence of new suppliers and regulatory changes by the Swedish transmission system operator. This master thesis establishes a conceptual qualitative market development system model for price formation on the FCR-D Up market. The research question addressed is: "What FCR-D Up market developments and regulatory market changes on the supply and demand side respectively are expected in Sweden in the upcoming years, 2024-2026, and how will they affect the market prices?" The research was based on the theoretical concepts of system modeling and price formation, using Soft Systems Methodology. Data was collected from various sources and analysed using CATWOE analysis, Casual Loop Diagram, as well as supply and demand curve model theory. It was concluded that price-influencing market development and regulatory changes are focused on the supply side of the market. These include the market entry of new suppliers, transition to marginal pricing, new technical requirements for market participation and increasing value stacking opportunities for FCR-D Up suppliers on Nord Pool’s electricity markets and the other balancing markets. / Behovet av stödtjänster ökar på grund av den ökande andelen väderberoende kraftkällor i elkraftsystemet. Denna masteruppsats fokuserar på den svenska FCR-D Upp-marknaden. Det är en nationell balansmarknad för transmissionsnätsoperatörens upphandling av den stödtjänst som kallas FCR-D Upp, som är den uppreglerande frekvenskontrollreserven vid störningar i systemet. FCR-D Uppmarknaden genomgår betydande förändringar för att anpassas till det föränderliga elkraftsystemet, vilket kan påverka den nuvarande marknadsdominansen av vattenkraftsleverantörer på grund av tillkomst av nya leverantörer och regulativa marknadsförändringar av transmissionsnätsoperatören. Denna masteruppsats etablerar en konceptuell kvalitativ systemmodell för marknadsutveckling avseende prisbildning på FCR-D Upp-marknaden. Forskningsfrågan är: "Vilken utveckling av FCR-D Upp-marknaden och vilka regulatoriska marknadsförändringar på utbuds- respektive efterfrågesidan förväntas i Sverige under de kommande åren, 2024-2026, och hur kommer de att påverka marknadspriset?". Arbetet baserades på teoretiska koncept kring systemmodellering och prisbildning, med fokus på Soft Systems Methodology. Data samlades in från olika källor och analyserades med hjälp av CATWOE-analys, Casual Loop Diagram samt modellteori för utbuds- och efterfrågekurvor. Slutsatsen var att prisinfluerande marknadsutvecklingar och regulatoriska marknadsförändringar är inriktade på marknadens utbudssida. Det handlar bland annat om nya leverantörers inträde på marknaden, övergången till marginalprissättning, nya tekniska krav för marknadsdeltagande och ökande möjligheter till värdestapling för FCR-D Upp leverantörerpå Nord Pools elmarknader och de andra balansmarknaderna.