Asset allocation is the most influential factor driving investment performance. While researchers have made substantial progress in the field of asset allocation since the introduction of mean-variance framework by Markowitz, there is little agreement about appropriate portfolio choice for multi-period long horizon investors. Nowhere this is more evident than trustees of retirement plans choosing different asset allocation strategies as default investment options for their members. This doctoral dissertation consists of four essays each of which explores either a novel or an unresolved issue in the area of asset allocation for individual retirement plan participants. The goal of the thesis is to provide greater insight into the subject of portfolio choice in retirement plans and advance scholarship in this field. The first study evaluates different constant mix or fixed weight asset allocation strategies and comments on their relative appeal as default investment options. In contrast to past research which deals mostly with theoretical or hypothetical models of asset allocation, we investigate asset allocation strategies that are actually used as default investment options by superannuation funds in Australia. We find that strategies with moderate allocation to stocks are consistently outperformed in terms of upside potential of exceeding the participant’s wealth accumulation target as well as downside risk of falling below that target by very aggressive strategies whose allocation to stocks approach 100%. The risk of extremely adverse wealth outcomes for plan participants does not appear to be very sensitive to asset allocation. Drawing on the evidence of the previous study, the second essay explores possible solutions to the well known problem of gender inequality in retirement investment outcomes. Using non-parametric stochastic simulation, we simulate iv and compare the retirement wealth outcomes for a hypothetical female and male worker under different assumptions about breaks in employment, superannuation contribution rates, and asset allocation strategies. We argue that modest changes in contribution and asset allocation strategy for the female plan participant are necessary to ensure an equitable wealth outcome in retirement. The findings provide strong evidence against gender-neutral default contribution and asset allocation policy currently institutionalized in Australia and other countries. In the third study we examine the efficacy of lifecycle asset allocation models which allocate aggressively to risky asset classes when the employee participants are young and gradually switch to more conservative asset classes as they approach retirement. We show that the conventional lifecycle strategies make a costly mistake by ignoring the change in portfolio size over time as a critical input in the asset allocation decision. Due to this portfolio size effect, which has hitherto remained unexplored in literature, the terminal value of accumulation in retirement account is critically dependent on the asset allocation strategy adopted by the participant in later years relative to early years. The final essay extends the findings of the previous chapter by proposing an alternative approach to lifecycle asset allocation which incorporates performance feedback. We demonstrate that strategies that dynamically alter allocation between growth and conservative asset classes at different points on the investment horizon based on cumulative portfolio performance relative to a set target generally result in superior wealth outcomes compared to those of conventional lifecycle strategies. The dynamic allocation strategy exhibits clear second-degree stochastic dominance over conventional strategies which switch assets in a deterministic manner as well as balanced diversified strategies.

Shorter product life cycles and rapid product obsolescence provide increasing incentives to introduce newproducts to markets more quickly. As a consequence of rapidly changing market conditions, firms focus onimproving their new product development processes to reap the benefits of early market entry. Researchershave analyzed market entry, but have seldom provided quantitative approaches for the product rolloverproblem. This research builds upon the literature by using established optimization methods to examine howfirms can minimize their net loss during the rollover process. Specifically, our work explicitly optimizes thetiming of removal of old products and introduction of new products, the optimal strategy, and the magnitudeof net losses when the market entry approval date of a new product is unknown. In the first paper, we use theconditional value at risk to optimize the net loss and investigate the effect of risk perception of the manageron the rollover process. We compare it to the minimization of the classical expected net loss. We deriveconditions for optimality and unique closed-form solutions for single and dual rollover cases. In the secondpaper, we investigate the rollover problem, but for a time-dependent demand rate for the second producttrying to approximate the Bass Model. Finally, in the third paper, we apply the data-driven optimizationapproach to the product rollover problem where the probability distribution of the approval date is unknown.We rather have historical observations of approval dates. We develop the optimal times of rollover and showthe superiority of the data-driven method over the conditional value at risk in case where it is difficult to guessthe real probability distribution

Chapter 1: The Impact of Culture on the Second-Generation Immigrants’ Level of Trust in Canada Trust is one of the main elements of social capital; it determines the extent to which an individual cooperates with others. In this chapter, I assess whether cultural factors influence the level of trust in the population of second-generation immigrants in Canada. This paper is related to two strands of empirical literature. The first analyses the determinants of trust and the second studies the cultural transmission of values, attitudes and beliefs. I follow closely the literature on the cultural transmission and use an epidemiological approach to assess whether trust of second-generation immigrants is affected by their cultural heritage. This approach consists of comparing information about the outcomes of second-generation immigrants with that of the country of origin of their ancestry. We apply this approach using the Ethnic Diversity Survey (EDS), the World Value Survey (WVS) and the European Value Survey (EVS). Estimation results show that the average level of trust in the countries of origin of the ancestors of the second-generation immigrants has a strong significant impact on their level of trust. Thus, individual whose country of ancestry displays a high level of trust, tend to have a high level of trust. This provides evidence that individuals’ level of trust is not only explained by their personal experiences, characteristics, and the environment in which they live; but also by the culture in their country of ancestry. This means that culture does matter! I find that the results remain robust even if certain key countries are omitted or a different data set is used. Chapter 2: Decomposing Health Achievement and Socioeconomic Health Inequalities in Presence of Multiple Categorical Information This chapter presents a decomposition of the health achievement and the socioeconomic health inequality indices by multiple categorical variables and by regions. I adopt Makdissi and Yazbeck's (2014) counting approach to deal with the ordinal nature of the data of the United States National Health Interview Survey 2010. The findings suggest that the attributes that contribute the most to the deviation from perfect health in the United States are: anxiety, depression and exhaustion. Also, I find that the attributes that contribute the most to the total socioeconomic health inequality are ambulation, depression and pain. The regional decomposition results suggest that, if the aversion to socioeconomic health inequality is high enough, socioeconomic health inequalities between regions are the main contributors to the total socioeconomic health inequality in the United States. Chapter 3: Accounting for Freedom and Economic Resources in the Assessment of Changes in Women Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa This chapter assesses the importance of freedom in women’s wellbeing in twelve Sub-Saharan Africa countries by using data from Demographic Health Surveys. This paper presents a poverty comparison by using the stochastic dominance approach and relies on the economic resources and freedom as the two aspects of wellbeing which evokes the multidimensionality of poverty. This study is related to the following three pieces of literature: the sequential stochastic dominance, the multidimensional poverty, the Sen’s capability approach which is based on freedom. This paper is built on Makdissi et al. (2014) but differs from it in a number of respects. First, it focuses on poverty instead of welfare. Secondly, it applies the Shapley decomposition to determine the contributions of the economic resource distribution and the incidence of the threat of domestic violence to poverty changes over time. Consistent with previous work on the importance of freedom, I find that more freedom, i.e. less threat of domestic violence, affects women’s wellbeing positively since it decreases women’s poverty. The results indicate that women’s wellbeing has improved in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Senegal, and Zimbabwe and deteriorated in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania.

Public procurement amounts to a significant part of Sweden's GDP. Nevertheless, it is an overlooked sector characterized by low digitization and inefficient competition where bids are not submitted based on proper mathematical tools. This Thesis seeks to create a structured approach to bidding in cleaning services by determining factors affecting the participation and pricing decision of potential buyers. Furthermore, we assess price prediction by comparing multiple linear regression models (MLR) to support vector regression (SVR). In line with previous research in the construction sector, we find significance for several factors such as project duration, location and type of contract on the participation decision in the cleaning sector. One notable deviant is that we do not find contract size to have an impact on the pricing decision. Surprisingly, the performance of MLR are comparable to more advanced SVR models. Stochastic dominance tests on price performance concludes that experienced bidders perform better than their inexperienced counterparts and companies place more competitive bids in lowest price tenders compared to economically most advantageous tenders (EMAT) indicating that EMAT tenders are regarded as unstructured. However, no significance is found for larger actors performing better in bidding than smaller companies. / Offentliga upphandlingar utgör en signifikant del av Sveriges BNP. Trots detta är det en förbisedd sektor som karakteriseras av låg digitalisering och ineffektiv konkurrens där bud läggs baserat på intuition snarare än matematiska modeller. Denna avhandling ämnar skapa ett strukturerat tillvägagångssätt för budgivning inom städsektorn genom att bestämma faktorer som påverkar deltagande och prissättning. Vidare undersöker vi prisprediktionsmodeller genom att jämföra multipel linjära regressionsmodeller med en maskininlärningsmetod benämnd support vector regression. I enlighet med tidigare forskning i byggindustrin finner vi att flera faktorer som typ av kontrakt, projekttid och kontraktsplats har en statistisk signifikant påverkan på deltagande i kontrakt i städindustrin. En anmärkningsvärd skillnad är att kontraktsvärdet inte påverkar prissättning som tidigare forskning visat i andra områden. För prisprediktionen är det överraskande att den enklare linjära regressionsmodellen presterar jämlikt till den mer avancerade maskininlärningsmodellen. Stokastisk dominanstest visar att erfarna företag har en bättre precision i sin budgivning än mindre erfarna företag. Därtill lägger företag överlag mer konkurrenskraftiga bud i kontrakt där kvalitetsaspekter tas i beaktning utöver priset. Vilket kan indikera att budgivare upplever dessa kontrakt som mindre strukturerade. Däremot finner vi ingen signifikant skillnad mellan större och mindre företag i denna bemärkning.

Les consommateurs d’aujourd’hui ont des goûts très variés et cherchent les produits les plus récents. Avec l’accélération technologique, les cycles de vie des produits se sont raccourcis et donc, de nouveaux produits doivent être introduits au marché plus souvent et progressivement, les anciens doivent y être retirés. L’introduction d’un nouveau produit est une source de croissance et d’avantage concurrentiel. Les directeurs du Marketing et Supply Chain se sont confrontés à la question de savoir comment gérer avec succès le remplacement de leurs produits et d’optimiser les coûts de la chaîne d’approvisionnement associée. Dans une situation idéale, la procédure de rollover est efficace et claire: l’ancien produit est vendu jusqu’à une date prévue où un nouveau produit est introduit. Dans la vie réelle, la situation est moins favorable. Le but de notre travail est d’analyser et de caractériser la politique optimale du rollover avec une date de disponibilitéstochastique pour l’introduction du nouveau produit sur le marché. Pour résoudre le problème d’optimisation,nous utilisons dans notre premier article deux mesures de minimisation: le coût moyen et le coût de la valeurconditionnelle à risque. On obtient des solutions en forme explicite pour les politiques optimales. En outre, nous caractérisons l’influence des paramètres de coûts sur la structure de la politique optimale. Dans cet esprit, nous analysons aussi le comportement de la politique de rollover optimale dans des contextes différents. Dans notre deuxième article, nous examinons le même problème mais avec une demande constante pour le premier produit et une demande linéaire au début puis constante pour le deuxième. Ce modèle est inspiré par la demande de Bass. Dans notre troisième article, la date de disponibilité du nouveau produit existe mais elle est inconnue. La seule information disponible est un ensemble historique d’échantillons qui sont tirés de la vraie distribution. Nous résoudrons le problème avec l’approche data drivenet nous obtenons des formulations tractables. Nous développons aussi des bornes sur le nombre d’échantillons nécessaires pour garantir qu’avec une forte probabilité, le coût n’est pas très loin du vrai coût optimal. / Shorter product life cycles and rapid product obsolescence provide increasing incentives to introduce newproducts to markets more quickly. As a consequence of rapidly changing market conditions, firms focus onimproving their new product development processes to reap the benefits of early market entry. Researchershave analyzed market entry, but have seldom provided quantitative approaches for the product rolloverproblem. This research builds upon the literature by using established optimization methods to examine howfirms can minimize their net loss during the rollover process. Specifically, our work explicitly optimizes thetiming of removal of old products and introduction of new products, the optimal strategy, and the magnitudeof net losses when the market entry approval date of a new product is unknown. In the first paper, we use theconditional value at risk to optimize the net loss and investigate the effect of risk perception of the manageron the rollover process. We compare it to the minimization of the classical expected net loss. We deriveconditions for optimality and unique closed-form solutions for single and dual rollover cases. In the secondpaper, we investigate the rollover problem, but for a time-dependent demand rate for the second producttrying to approximate the Bass Model. Finally, in the third paper, we apply the data-driven optimizationapproach to the product rollover problem where the probability distribution of the approval date is unknown.We rather have historical observations of approval dates. We develop the optimal times of rollover and showthe superiority of the data-driven method over the conditional value at risk in case where it is difficult to guessthe real probability distribution