Background: In 1994, the Swedish parliament decided to realize an infrastructural project with PPP. The chosen project, Arlandabaneprojektet, is a four-track railway between Stockholm central station and Arlanda airport. The Swedish government established a PPPcontract with a private consortium which implied that the Swedish government was obligated to finance about one third of the total project cost. The contract also implied that the private consortium got all rights reserved for the operational service. This PPP-project has changed the prerequisites for the Swedish government to meet the transport political objectives. Aim: The aim of this study is to examine how the Swedish government fulfil the transport political objectives in a PPP-project. The purpose of this study is also to examine how the structure of the project contract affect the governmental performance management. Completion: This is a qualitative study. The interview study is based on six interviews. Three interviewees are representing the government’s responsible delegates. The other three interviews were conducted with experts and researchers with extensive knowledge in the project. The interview material is complemented with a document study of reports and investigations. We have also completed a theoretical study of governmental performance management in infrastructural PPP-projects. Furthermore, we have analyzed the empirical study based on the theoretical framework. Conclusions: The government’s possibilities to pursue performance management in line with transport political objectives has been and still is limited. The government has been tied up to a long term contract driven by commercial goals. The main factor behind this is that the government got into the project without having any specific and measureable objectives.

No description available.

Alliances between participants in the beef industry have developed rapidly during the past 10 years. Industry surveys reveal alliances are expected to grow larger in number and become a more dominant part of the beef sector over the next 10 years. This research centers on providing design specific information to managers and decision makers involved with creating alliance organizations, thereby improving the likelihood of future alliance success. A conceptual framework was created to better understand the process of alliance formation. Each participant in the alliance first prioritizes economic motivations for joining, creates unique governance structure designs reflecting motivations, and then assesses results to decide on future participation. Simulations were performed using empirical data from a private beef alliance to analyze various margin sharing and premium allocation designs. Cattle owners were found to prefer equal margin sharing, while packers would prefer to accept a transfer of cattle owner margins rather than share packing margins with owners. Premiums were found to be substantial for cattle grading higher than a Choice YG3 quality level. Premiums averaged $12/head, $8/head, and $4/head when 75%, 50%, and 25% of cattle qualified for premium lines, respectively. Premium rights were found to be good substitutes for equal margin sharing agreements, allowing packers to accept equal margin sharing agreements while maintaining an equivalent level of return from premium rights. Marginal rates of substitution between changes in premium rights and changes in equal margin sharing levels are identified, allowing for more informed negotiations between cattle owners and packers. / Master of Science

In this paper, we first proposed the regional physical capital, and the regional physical capital of the importance of risk sharing. The ten countries of East Asia face the risk into international capital markets, regional physical capital, and international trade of these three risk sharing channels, and use of GDP variance decomposition method to measure the three channels risk sharing situation. The empirical results show that¡G1.East Asia regional physical capital to absorb the impact of GDP for very large. 2.International capital markets played a very small role. 3.The increasing integration of the international trade market will reduce the risk sharing. 4.The East Asian region can not spread the risks as high as 80%, but this phenomenon after the Asian financial crisis has gradually reduced its risk can not be assessed, there have been similar OECD countries only 60% of the standard. This study also explains the international trade market will result in reducing the risk of trade of the reasons for risk sharing: 1. Importers and exporters through the credit agreement will be the number of commodity prices and the sale and purchase agreement has been through pre-determined, so risk can not be assessed the situation. 2. Trade flows do not contribute to cross-country consumption smoothing, is that central bank attempt to neutralize the impact of foreign capital inflows on domestic credit market.

Is the relationship between insurance consumption and its determinants spurious? Is general insurance a luxury service? Do bequest motives matter for life insurance consumption? Is private credit important for the development of life insurance? Do socioeconomic development and informal risk sharing institutions matter for formal insurance consumption? This thesis investigates these and other related issues using international datasets and relatively new panel data method, namely the Common Correlated Effects Pooled (CCEP) estimator. A novelty of the CCEP is that it takes into account the impacts of unobserved common factors. The thesis consists of an introduction, three empirical chapters and conclusions. Chapter 2 studies the relationship between nonlife insurance consumption and income/wealth per capita. Estimation results suggest that income elasticity is below unity and that nonlife insurance is positively related to GDP per capita, the law, risk aversion, infrastructural development, and negatively related to socioeconomic development. Chapter 3 explores life insurance consumption driven by bequest motives. We found that life insurance consumption is positively related to GDP per capita, old age dependency ratio, infrastructural development, and social security and welfare; and negatively related to the extended family institution, savings, inflation, and risk aversion. Estimation results suggest the presence of altruistic, and bequest as exchange old age security motives. Chapter 4 investigates the long run relationship and causality direction between private credit consumption and life insurance development. Life insurance development may be explained by GDP per capita, formal and informal credit consumption, infrastructural development, life expectancy, institutional quality, inflation, and Islam, and Orthodox being the dominant religions. Cointegration test results suggest that life and nonlife insurance consumption and its determinants exhibit a long run relationship; and that there is a long run bi-directional causality relationship between life insurance development and private credit consumption. The thesis concludes that insurance development requires institutional and infrastructural development-in particular- telecommunications infrastructure, to facilitate cost effective insurance supply.

Au sein de chaînes logistiques, les conflits pouvant exister entre d‟une part l‟autonomie et la coopération, et d‟autre part entre des objectifs locaux et globaux, définissent un contexte très complexe auquel les membres d‟une même chaîne doivent faire face, surtout lorsque les entreprises sont impliquées dans des chaînes d‟approvisionnement multiples ou des réseaux. Par ailleurs, ces problèmes sont de nature à provoquer une dégradation de la performance de la chaîne logistique, notamment dans un contexte de fabrication aussi complexe que celui du secteur aéronautique. De ce fait, organiser et bien gérer les relations inter-partenaires devient un facteur important de performance dans une chaîne logistique. Dans ce contexte, ce travail vise à proposer des modèles de négociation client/fournisseur en vue d‟aider à la formalisation de contraintes cachées, dans l‟optique de partager les risques entre partenaires et de faciliter de la sorte la synchronisation entre besoins locaux et impératifs globaux. Afin de rendre notre proposition réaliste, nous avons tout d‟abord détaillé des processus de négociation puis testé leur faisabilité pratique, d‟une part par des exemples d‟évaluation des coûts engagés et d‟autre part en les positionnant par rapport aux situations de coopération dans lesquelles ces processus de négociation peuvent exister. / In supply chains, the conflicts between autonomy and cooperation, local interest and global objective are important problems that supply chain members are currently facing, especially when enterprises are involved in multiple supply chains or networks. Furthermore, the growing complexity of supply networks has extended the risks of poor supply chain performance, particularly for complex manufacturing, such as aeronautic industry. Thereby, building and managing a good relationship between partners is an essential factor for supply chain performance. In this context, we suggest a negotiation process, helping supply chain member to publish hidden constraints, synchronize internal and external interests, and share risks with other supply chain members, finally improving the performance of cooperation. In order to make our suggestion realistic, we have firstly specified the detailed processes and then tested their practical feasibility, on one hand through the assessment of extra costs and on the other hand by matching them with identified cooperation situations, in which such negotiation process may exist.

This thesis in economics includes three self-contained papers united by a common theme: the importance of economic fluctuations within and between countries for capital flows and risk sharing inside and across national borders. The first two papers study the determinants of workers’ remittances, as well as the consequences for macroeconomic volatility for the countries that receive them, using econometric methods and a general equilibrium model. The third paper studies whether two challenges to international real business cycle models, the so called ”Quantity Puzzle” and the positive relationship between financial integration and output correlations, obtain for European countries and regions. As a second step, it also investigates multilateral channels for risk sharing. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2010. Sammanfattning jämte 3 uppsatser.

Under senare år har frågor om delegering och självständighet ofta stått i centrum för styrsammanhang. Inom de flesta företag finns emellertid också en typ av enheter där behovet av samordning dem emellan är viktigt. Ett tydligt exempel är samordningsbehovet mellan en produktionsenhet och en försäljningsenhet som tillsammans ansvarar för samma produkt. Denna studie visar dels hur man mer utförligt kan beskriva verksamhetssambanden mellan enheter, dels hur ekonomisk styrning sker i några företag där sådana samband föreligger. När styrningen i företagen studeras är ett av syftena att se hur ekonomisk styrning samverkar med andra styrinstrument och vilka effekter detta kan leda till. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk.

This dissertation consists of two essays examining formal and informal long term health insurance markets. The first essay analyzes heterogeneity of Long-Term Care Insurance policyholders in their lapse decision, and how their ex-ante and ex-post subjective beliefs about the probability of needing Long-Term Care affect their lapse decisions. In this essay, I develop a model of lapse decision in a two-period insurance framework with a Bayesian learning process and implement several empirical specifications of the model using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study. The results show that policyholders' ex- ante point predictions of their probabilities and their uncertainties about them have a persistent but declining impact on lapse decisions. Those who believe that their risk is higher are indeed more likely to remain insured. However, as their uncertainties surrounding their ex-ante point predictions increase, their chances of lapsing increase regardless of their initial perception biases. These results are heterogeneous across cohorts and policyholders and, in particular, show that those in the older group near the average age of Nursing Home entry have a precise prediction of their risk levels compared to the younger cohort. Policy simulations show that a more informed initial purchase decision reduces the chance of lapsing down the road. The second essay examines the extent to which informal risk sharing arrangement provides insurance against health shocks. I develop a comprehensive model of informal risk sharing contract with two-sided limited commitment which extends the standard model to a regime with the following features. Information regarding the nature of realized health shocks is imperfect and individuals' health capital stock serves as a storage technology and is a factor of production. The theoretical results show that, in such a regime, Pareto optimal allocations are history dependent even if participation constraints do not bind. I perform numerical analysis to show that risk sharing against health shock is less likely to be sustainable among non-altruistic individuals with different levels of biological survival rates and health capital productivity. The results also show that optimal allocations vary depending on the set of information available to individuals. Using panel data of households from villages in rural Ethiopia, I test the main predictions of the theoretical model. While there is negative history dependence in transfers among non-altruistic partners, history dependence is positive when risk sharing is along bloodline and kinship. However, neither short-term nor long-term health shocks are insured through informal risk sharing arrangements among non-altruistic individuals.

This thesis consists of three chapters on financial structure, managerial compensation, and product markets. The unifying theme of these chapters is to examine how the financial decisions of firms are affected by market imperfections. Chapter 1 places emphasis on the impact of internal imperfections arising from asymmetric beliefs (or behavioral biases) and agency conflicts by examining how these internal imperfections affect managerial compensation and corporate financial structure. On the other hand, Chapters 2 and 3 incorporate external market imperfections especially arising from imperfect product market competition. More specifically, these two chapters develop market equilibrium frameworks to examine how the matching market for CEOs and firms interacts with the product market to affect the distributions of CEO compensation and firm size. In Chapter 1, we develop a dynamic model to examine the effects of asymmetric beliefs of a firm's manager and blockholders regarding the profitability of the firm's projects, and differing attitudes towards their risk, on its capital structure. The firm's capital structure reflects the tradeoff between the positive incentive effects of managerial optimism that increases the manager's output and blockholders' private benefits against the negative effects of risk-sharing costs. We provide several testable implications for the effects of the degree of managerial optimism as well as permanent and transitory components of the firm's risk on different components of capital structure. In our calibration of the model, performed separately for different industries, we show that while optimism and risk have qualitatively similar effects on capital structure in different industries, their quantitative effects are significantly different. The interactive effects of asymmetric beliefs and agency conflicts could potentially explain a significant portion of the substantial inter-industry variation in capital structure. Chapter 2 studies how the distributions of CEO talent and compensation vary across industries, and how product market characteristics affect these distributions. We develop a market equilibrium model that incorporates the competitive assignment of CEOs to firms in a framework in which firms engage in imperfect product market---specifically, monopolistic---competition. Using the distributions of CEO pay and firm value in each of twelve Fama-French industries, we calibrate the parameters of our structural model, and indirectly infer the unobserved distributions of CEO talent and firm quality that together determine firm output. We then conduct several counterfactual experiments using the calibrated models corresponding to each of the industries. We find that the distribution of CEO talent does, indeed, vary dramatically across industries. More importantly, contrary to the conclusions of earlier studies that abstract away from the effects of the product market (Tervio, 2008 and Gabaix and Landier, 2008), the impact of CEO talent on firm value appears to be quite significant. Our estimates of the effect of CEO talent on firm value for the industries in our sample are two orders of magnitude higher than those obtained by the aforementioned studies. Further, our estimates suggest that the compensation of CEOs is quantitatively in line with their contributions to firms. Broadly, our study shows that it is important to incorporate the product market environment in which firms operate when assessing the contributions of CEOs to firms. Chapter 3 builds a market equilibrium framework in which the CEO-firm matching process is affected by the product market. We show that under reasonable assumptions there is a unique equilibrium in which only managers with ability above a unique cutoff level are matched to firms. This very simple screening process endogenizes the distribution of active managers who match with firms. Our calibration of the model using a parametric approach, which is in contrast with the empirical analysis performed in Chapter 2, strongly supports the principle arguments on the importance of CEO talent and appropriate CEO talent levels (on average) in Chapter 2. In addition, due to the law of demand and supply, which is a key feature of the extended model, we obtain somewhat different influence of some of product market characteristics on CEO pay. Furthermore, our parametric approach allows us to draw some implications for the effects of CEO talent distribution on the market equilibrium.