The thesis Urban green spaces and its institutional framework attempts to analyze different cases of urban green spaces foundation and administration in which various public and private entities act. Based on these foundations it tries to come with an overview of the most important forms of provision of greenery in cities. Through research of available literature we came to the understanding that greenery in urban environments is not just a result of municipal service provided by a public authority but to its foundation, administration, financing and maintenance contribute also other entities. The overview created in the thesis is not exhaustive but can serve as an inspiration for various subjects at a time when local public authorities do not have sufficient resources to ensure satisfactory range and quality of public green.

Market Liquidity, Active Investment, and Markets for Information. This paper studies a financial market in which investors choose among investment strategies that exploit information about different fundamentals. On the one hand, the presence of other informed investors generates illiquidity. On the other hand, investors who use different strategies can serve as quasi-noise traders for each other, thereby also supplying each other with liquidity. Thus, investment strategies can be substitutes or complements. Such externalities in information acquisition have effects on investor herding, comovement in prices and liquidity across assets, trade volume, and the informational role of prices. They further affect the relationship between financial markets and information markets. Information market competition fosters investor diversity, whereas monopoly power promotes investor herding. Also, in order to benefit from quasi-noise trading, a financial institution may engage in both proprietary trading and information sales. Security-Voting Structure and Bidder Screening. This paper shows that non-voting shares can promote takeovers. When the bidder has private information, shareholders may refuse to tender because they suspect to sell at an ex-post unfavourable price. The ensuing friction in the sale of cash flow rights can prevent an efficient sale of control. Separating cash flow and voting rights mitigates this externality, thereby facilitating takeovers. In fact, the fraction of non-voting shares can be used to discriminate between efficient and inefficient bidders. The optimal fraction decreases with managerial ability, implying an inverse relationship between firm value and non-voting shares. As non-voting shares increase control contestability, share reunification programs entrench managers of widely held firms, whereas dual-class recapitalizations can increase shareholder wealth. Signaling in Tender Offer Games. This paper examines whether a bidder can use the terms of the tender offer to signal the post-takeover security benefits to the shareholders of a widely held target firm. As atomistic shareholders extract all the gains in security benefits, signaling equilibria are subject to a constraint that is absent from bilateral trade models. The buyer (bidder) must enjoy gains from trade that are excluded from bargaining (private benefits), but can nonetheless be relinquished and enable shareholders to draw inference about the security benefits. Restricted bids and cash-equity offers do not satisfy these requirements. Dilution, debt financing, probabilistic takeover outcomes and toeholds are all viable signals because they make bidder gains depend on the security benefits in a predictable manner. In all the signaling equilibria, lower-valued types must forgo a larger fraction of their private benefits and these signaling costs prevent some takeovers. When the bidder has additional private information about the private benefits as in the case of two-dimensional bidder types, fully revealing equilibria cease to exist. This does not hold once bidders can offer not only cash or equity but also (more) elaborate contingent claims. Offers which include options avoid inefficiencies and implement the symmetric information outcome. Goldrush Dynamics of Private Equity. This paper presents a simple dynamic model of entry and exit in a private equity market with heterogeneous private equity firms, a depletable stock of target companies, and rational learning about investment profitability. The predictions of the model match a number of stylized facts: Aggregate fund activity follows waves with endogenous transitions from boom to bust. Supply and demand in the private equity market are inelastic, and the supply comoves with investment valuations. High industry performance precedes high entry, which in turn precedes low industry performance. There are persistent differences in fund performance across private equity firms, first-time funds underperform the industry, and first-time funds raised in booms are unlikely to be succeeded by a follow-on fund. Fund performance and fund size are positively correlated across firms, but negatively correlated across consecutive funds of a private equity firm. Finally, booms can make ”too much capital chase too few deals.” Reputable Friends as Watchdogs: Social Ties and Governance. To examine how governance is affected when a designated supervisor befriends the person to be supervised, this paper embeds a delegated monitoring problem in a social structure: the supervisor and the agent are friends, and the supervisor desires to be socially recognized for having integrity. Strengthening the friendship weakens the supervisor’s monitoring incentives, forging an alliance against the principal (bonding). But the agent also grows more reluctant to put the supervisor’s perceived integrity at risk, thus becoming more aligned with the principal (bridging). If the supervisor’s desire for social recognition is strong, the principal’s preferences regarding the supervisor-agent friendship are bipolar. Weak friendship makes the supervisor monitor intensively to save face. Strong friendship leads the supervisor to abandon monitoring but the agent to behave well in order to protect the supervisor from losing face. The strength of friendship necessary for the latter outcome decreases in the supervisor’s desire for esteem; that is, image concerns leverage the bridging effect of friendship. This suggests that overlapping personal and professional ties can enhance delegated governance in cultures or contexts where social recognition is important, and provides a novel perspective on issues related to crony capitalism, corporate governance, and organizational culture. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2009 Sammanfattning jämte 5 uppsatser

Cette thèse s'articule autour de deux thèmes : l'évaluation monétaire des biens environnementaux et l'innovation en environnement. Si ces deux volets sont traités séparément, ils s'attachent toutefois à contribuer à un objectif commun : la lutte contre le changement climatique. Cette thèse se décline en cinq chapitres. Le premier propose une introduction générale, qui présente les deux thèmes développés, ainsi que leur contribution au défi du changement climatique. En attribuant une valeur pécuniaire aux biens environnementaux, l'évaluation monétaire peut servir la décision publique, non seulement lors de la mise en œuvre de projets pro-environnementaux, mais aussi en aidant é évaluer les dommages causés à l'environnement. L'innovation environnementale peut encourager les transferts de technologies et une croissance plus verte, dans une volonté de développement durable. Les chapitres 2 et 3 s'intéressent aux expériences de choix, en vue d'évaluer le consentement-à-payer pour l'amélioration de la qualité de l'eau de rivières. A partir d'une enquête proposant aux résidents de choisir entre différentes options de gestion pour les rivières de leur voisinage, nous montrons dans le chapitre 2 que ces derniers sont disposés à payer pour une meilleure qualité de l'eau. Nous nous apercevons toutefois que plus de 20% des individus de notre échantillon adoptent un comportement de protestation, c'est-à-dire déclarent un consentement-à-payer nul alors même que leur valeur pour l'eau des rivières est positive. Dans le chapitre 3, nous recourons à un modèle logit emboîté, afin de prendre en compte ce type de comportement. Nous obtenons des consentements-à-payer plus élevés, signe que le modèle utilisé est mieux adapté pour traiter des données comportant des zéros de protestation. Les chapitres 4 et 5 étudient les déterminants de l'innovation en environnement. A partir de données sur les dépôts de brevets et de l'enquête d'opinion du forum économique mondial, le chapitre 4 s'intéresse à l'impact de politiques publiques sur l'innovation en matière de technologies propres dans les domaines de l'eau, de l'air et des déchets. Notre analyse met en évidence le rôle positif sur l'innovation en environnement de la capacité d'innovation globale d'un pays et de la rigueur de ses politiques environnementales. Le chapitre 5 étudie l'influence des collaborations pour la publication d'articles scientifiques sur l'innovation en matière d'énergie éolienne. Nous couplons notre base de données sur les brevets avec une base rassemblant de nombreuses références littéraires dans le domaine de la recherche scientifique. Nous montrons que les transferts de connaissance entre les pays membres et non membres de l'OCDE dans le domaine éolien contribuent à améliorer la capacité d'innovation des pays non membres de l'OCDE. / This dissertation is interested in two areas of the environmental economics field: monetary valuation of environmental goods and services and environmental innovation. Even if those two fields are studied separately in this dissertation, they both aim at contributing to a common objective: fight against climate change. This dissertation ranges into five chapters. The first one is a general introduction, which depicts the two fields of the dissertation and their relevance towards climate change. Environmental valuation serves public decision through monetary valuation of environmental goods. This is useful not only for the implementation of projects directed to environmental protection, but also for the quantification of environmental damages. Environmental innovation may encourage technological transfers, but also a greener growth, in a will that our societies develop themselves following a sustainable path. Chapters 2 and 3 are interested in the choice experiments method in order to value local residents’ willingness-to-pay for water quality improvements at a specific river basin in France. Using a choice experiment with different management regimes for the river basin, we find that residents are willing-to-pay for an improved water quality. Despite this positive result, we observe a significant proportion (20%) of protest bids in our sample. Protest bids are respondents that state a zero willingness-to-pay, even though their true value for the good is positive. In order to take into account the existence of protest bids, we estimate a cross-nested logit model in chapter 3. We then obtain larger willingness-to-pay, which proves that the cross-nested logit model best fits the peculiarity of our data. Chapters 4 and 5 try to identify the drivers of environmental innovation. Using world patent data and data from the world economic forum survey, we study the impact of environmental public policies on innovation in clean technologies directed to water and air pollution, and waste. We find that both general innovative capacity and environmental policy stringency have a positive role on environment-related innovation. Chapter 5 looks at the influence of co-authorship of scientific publications on wind energy-related innovation. We use both the world patent database and the “Scopus” database, which contains lots of scientific literature references. We highlight the existence of knowledge spillovers between OECD and NON-OECD countries. Therefore, we show that knowledge transfers, regarding wind energy-related innovation, between OECD and NON-OECD countries contribute to improve NON-OECD countries' innovative capacity.