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Thesis focuses on concrete examples of social engineering in working time regulation field. Mainly uses econometric measures and models to evaluate agreed and expected goals. In the theoretic part of work are presented concepts, how and why the proper authorities regulate working time, what are costs and benefits of this activity and how academy economics see working time as regulation needed subject. With anticipating existing analysis are further developed authors own econometric model, which is putted in the light of french 35hours working week, effects of maximal obligate working time in European union and tries of german politic garniture, which argue for longer working week as well. Later is presented comparation of results of all the case studies into Czech reality, which is preciselly mentioned and predicted as economic future in case, if Czech arrea addopts similar policies. As starting point is described historical development of life/day time spend by work, are used dates of work productivity, economic reality of chosen countries, before in and after the moment, when they decided for legislative according to driving of working time.

Bostadsmarknaden i Stockholm har sedan finanskrisen 2008 befunnit sig i en skönhetshistoria medstigande priser och korta försäljningstider. Idag befinner sig bostadsmarknaden i allt annat än enskönhetshistoria, prisutvecklingen har stannat av, rekordmånga objekt finns ute till försäljning ochbostadsutvecklare väljer att avvakta med nya bostadsprojekt. Med anledning av utvecklingen påbostadsmarknaden syftar studien till att konstruera ett nytt index som baseras på time on market,försäljningstid. Vidare syftar studien till att utreda vilka effekter de utvalda makroekonomiskafaktorer har på time on market och om time-on-market-index kan användas för att förklarahusprisutvecklingen. Metoden i denna studie utgår från såväl ekonomiska teorier somekonometriska analyser. Genom tillämpningen av regressionsanalyser, utifrån tvärsnittsdata ochtidsseriedata, kan ett index konstrueras. Resultat visar att time on market för både småhus- ochbostadsrättsmarknaden har ett cykliskt mönster. Vidare visar resultatet att bostadsmarknadentidigare har befunnit sig i en dal, tid med låg time-on-market-värde, för att sedan stiga och slutligenvända nedåt. Time on market korrelerar med de utvalda faktorerna, arbetslöshet, omx30,bolåneränta för tre månader samt prisutveckling för bostäder. Studiens resultat indikerar att demakroekonomiska faktorerna har en viss eftersläpning i förhållande till index. Vidare visarresultatet att time-on-market-index endast kan användas som indikator för bostadsrättsmarknaden,då indexet visar utslag sex månader innan husprisutvecklingen. / The housing market in Stockholm has since the financial crisis in 2008 been remarkable with risingprices and short sales periods. Today the housing market is everything but remarkable. The pricetrend has stopped, record numbers of objects are out for sales and housing developers choose towait with new housing projects. Due to the changes in the housing market, the study aims toconstruct a new index based on time on market. The aim also includes investigating what effectsmacroeconomic factors have on time on market and if the time on market index can be used as anindicator to show the price development on the housing market.The method used in this study is based on both economic theories and econometric analysis.Through the application of regression analyzes, based on cross-sectional data and time series data,an index can be constructed. Results shows that time on market for both the house- and tenantownedmarket has a cyclical pattern. Furthermore, the results show that the housing market haspreviously been in a valley, with low time on market value, to then rise and finally turn downwards.Time on market correlates with the chosen macroeconomic factors being unemployment, omx30,mortgage rate and price development for housing. The results indicate that the macroeconomicfactors have a certain lag in relation to the time on market index. Moreover, the result shows thatthe time on market index can only be used as an indicator for the tenant-owned market, as itchanges six months before the price development on the housing market.

En ökad konkurrens i flera branscher medför större krav på företagen inom dessa, där de behöver lansera sina produkter i en snabbare takt för att förbli konkurrenskraftiga. Tiden det tar för ett företag att börja utveckla en produkt tills att den kan lanseras på marknaden, ergo Time-To-Market (TTM), är ett av de mätetal som företag idag behöver förbättra. Denna studie var på uppdrag av konsultbolaget Combitech AB, där en fallstudie genomfördes på Epiroc Rock Drill AB i Örebro, en av deras kunder. Undersökningen syftade till att undersöka hur tiden för industrialisering kan reduceras inom en monteringslina på divisionen Operations Epiroc URE genom att implementera arbetssättet Model Based Definition (MBD). Detta är ett arbetssätt där ingenjörs- och affärsprocesser hanteras med hjälp av 3D-modeller. Utöver tiden för industrialisering beaktades även aspekterna kostnader, kvalitet och hållbarhet. Genomförandet av studien inleddes med en datainsamling inom två olika delar. Den första delen är Epirocs nulägesbeskrivning, där data angående den nuvarande arbetsprocessen inom den undersökta monteringslinan eftersöks. Den andra delen är MBD och dess användning, där data angående de olika fördelar och utmaningar som generellt följer av arbetssättet eftersöks. Utifrån all insamlade data genomfördes sedan en kvalitativ dataanalys för att identifiera kopplingar mellan Epirocs utmaningar och de olika fördelarna som MBD kan bidra med.   Resultaten visar att MBD kan bidra till kortare tid för industrialisering, lägre kostnader och en förbättrad hållbarhet för Epiroc utan att deras produktkvalitet kompromissas. Några faktorer som bidrar till detta är att; tvetydigheter kan reduceras, olika aktiviteter i produktutvecklingsprocessen kan genomföras parallellt och tvärfunktionellt samt att fel och problem kan upptäckas tidigare i processen. En utmaning som har identifierats med att implementera MBD är att det kräver en god företagskultur där det gäller att få med sig hela organisationen i omställningen. Denna studie är av kvalitativ karaktär och framtida arbete skulle därför kunna vara att kvantifiera de resultat som presenteras i denna studie. / Increased competition in several industries entails greater requirements on companies in these, where they need to launch their products at a faster pace in order to remain competitive. The time it takes for a company to start developing a product until it can be launched on the market, ergo Time-To-Market (TTM), is one of the metrics companies today need to improve. This study was commissioned by the consulting company Combitech AB, where a case study was conducted at Epiroc Rock Drill AB in Örebro, one of their customers. The study aimed to investigate how the time for industrialisation can be reduced within an assembly line in the Operations Epiroc URE division by implementing the Model Based Definition (MBD) approach. This is a way of working where engineering and business processes are handled using 3D models. In addition to the time of industrialisation, the aspects of cost, quality and sustainability were also considered. The implementation of the study began with a data collection in two different parts. The first part is description of the current situation at Epiroc, where data regarding the current work process within the examined assembly line is collected. The second part is MBD and its use, where data regarding the various benefits and challenges that generally follow from the working method are collected. Based on collected data, a qualitative data analysis was carried out to identify links between Epiroc's challenges and the various benefits that MBD can contribute.   The results show that MBD can contribute to shorter time for industrialization, lower costs and improved durability for Epiroc without compromising their product quality. Some factors that contribute to this are that ambiguities are reduced; the work can take place both in parallel and cross-functionally and that errors and problems can be detected earlier in the process. A challenge that has been identified with implementing MBD is that it requires a good corporate culture where it is important to involve the entire organization in the changeover. This study is of a qualitative nature and future work could therefore be to quantify the results presented in this study.

This thesis seeks to investigate the vastly varying time to market of newly approved drugs across Europe. Firtsly, I use a country fixed effects model on data of newly approved drugs from 2014 to 2017 from 18 European countries. I investigate the correlations between medication specific characteristics and the launch time and find that drugs intended to treat HIV, rheumatism or hepatitis are correlated with a faster launch time. Orphan drugs, though they represent a third of the dataset are found to be insignificantly correlated with time to market. Using a drug fixed effects model, I research important country characteristics in relation to the launch time and find that countries with higher imports of medications are correlated with a quicker time to market. Countries with larger medication export sectors experience a longer waiting time, which could be linked to companies trying to hinder the parallel export of new drugs.

In the competitive and fast-paced industry of residential real estate, digital marketing strategies must effectively meet the information needs and demands of the industry’s three key stakeholders: buyers, sellers, and agents. Digital house hunting is the predominant search strategy for prospective homebuyers who scour the Internet looking for homes to purchase. Property sellers and real estate professionals, whose shared end-goal is to transact a successful sale, must discern which digital marketing choices are optimal for marketing for-sale properties online in the digital channels where buyers are searching. A 2008 settlement agreement between the Department of Justice and the National Association of Realtors over concerns of anticompetitive policies relating to virtual office websites (VOWs) led to a shift in responsibility from the agent to the seller regarding which online marketing options will be associated with the online property listings. Real estate agents allocate time and resources to market properties on behalf of sellers, and need strategies that cater to buyers’ search preferences and sellers’ online marketing prerogatives while remaining effective and cost-efficient. Previous empirical studies using MLS data have considered the effects of seller marketing choices of real estate platforms and types of agents (i.e. full-service, flat-fee, etc.) as well as the impacts of a variety of agent marketing efforts on the market outcomes of sales price, time on the market, and the probability of sale. This research extends prior work by providing a quantitative analysis of the effects digital marketing choices of sellers (allowing “blogging” or third-party commentary) and digital marketing efforts of the agents (using a virtual tour) have on market outcomes. This analysis also includes a novel inquiry into what, if any, measurable effects the various platforms chosen for the virtual tours have on market outcomes.

This dissertation examines a profit-maximizing project selection and scheduling problem. Assume that a set of potentially profitable projects are available, yet limited available resources may not allow all of them to be pursued. Profit profiles for projects are assumed to be non-increasing functions of project completion times, i.e. profit returns are sensitive to time-to-market. Decision needs to be made on which sub-set of projects should be chosen and how resources should be allocated to these projects such that the total profit is maximized.Formal mathematical models are formulated for various versions of the problem, including such ones incorporating a third team formation aspect. Structure of the problem is examined and insights are gained regarding prioritization of project, specifically. Although prioritization is sub-optimal in general, heuristic solution methods based on prioritization are pursued, since the scheduling sub-problem itself is NP-hard.A decomposition heuristic framework is first proposed to obtain good solutions using minimum computational time. Sets of test instances are generated using project network data from well-known source in the literature. Computational runs reveal that three priority rules achieve significantly better profits than the benchmarking random priority rule.Improving upon the prioritization based decomposition heuristic, an implicit enumeration is proposed. This algorithm does not examine all priority sequences, yet guarantees an optimal priority sequence when the computation is completed. Several fathoming rules are proposed to cut back computational time effectively. Comparison to the profits achieved by the best priority rule and the benchmarking random priority rule shows a significant improvement on profits, yet at a cost of reasonable added computation time.Future research areas include identifying general conditions under which prioritization of projects would lead us to an optimal solution. Developing better upper bounds for the implicit enumeration scheme is also of interest. The team formation aspect has yet to be treated computationally. It would also be of interest to consider how synergy deviation information may be fed back to the earlier stages of project selection and scheduling decision. Trade-off between profit and team synergy may also be considered in the future.

Thesis (M.B.A.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 194-203). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Economic agents often face situations, where there are multiple competing fore- casts available. Despite five decades of research on forecast combinations, most of the methods introduced so far fail to outperform the equal weights forecast combination in empirical applications. In this study, we gather a wide spectrum of forecast combination methods and reexamine these findings in two different classical economic times series forecasting applications. These include out-of- sample combining forecasts from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters and forecasts of the realized volatility of the U.S. Treasury futures log-returns. We asses the performance of artificial predictions markets, a class of machine learning methods, which has not yet been applied to the problem of combin- ing economic times series forecasts. Furthermore, we propose a new simple method called Market for Kernels, which is designed specifically for combining time series forecasts. We found that equal weights can be significantly out- performed by several forecast combinations, including Bates-Granger methods and artificial prediction markets in the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters application and by almost all examined forecast combinations in the financial application. We also found that the Market for Kernels forecast...

This thesis aims to find out the range of unpaid work in the Czech Republic and whether there are significant gender differences in the terms of unpaid work. This target was reached by evaluating experience from abroad, specifically from the research of OECD, research of HETUS and research based on a survey in the Slovakia in 2011. Measure of unpaid work in the Czech Republic was determined by present surveys, but was mainly based on my own survey. The thesis also contains a theoretical part that specifies the importance and influence of unpaid work. Gender inequalities in society but mainly in the labour market were also specified. This thesis summarises past results of surveys that addressed the topic of unpaid work. The main asset of my work is the research in the Czech Republic, which is directly focused on the range of unpaid work as there only had been series of research that dealt with unpaid work briefly. Another benefit of this work is proposing possible amendments because the assumption that women spend more time on unpaid work than men was confirmed. These changes could help to compensate the inequality.