published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Economics and Finance / Master / Master of Philosophy

The objective of this study is to estimate advertising effects on international tourismdemand for the leading Swedish winter destination, Åre. The increasing share of foreigninbound tourists in this destination region creates a strong interest by shareholders toidentify the factors responsible for this trend. According to traditional micro-economictheory, economic factors, such as income and price, are considered as main determinantsfor tourism demand (Song and Witt 2000). However, according to advertising theories(Comanor and Wilson, 1974) and previous tourism research (Bhagwat and Debruine, 2008;Divisekera and Kulendran, 2006), this study additionally focuses on the brand awarenessof Åre as perceived by international tourists. More concretely, advertising theoriesdistinguish between the brand and the information function of advertising (Nelson, 1974).The former function follows the idea that advertising increases the level of productdifferentiation to build up a base of loyal customers. By contrast, the information functionimplies that advertising primarily provides information about products in order to increasethe market transparency. Accordingly, in order to estimate the impact of advertisingexpenditures for off- and online channels as well as promotional activities, furtherexplanatory variables, e.g. mega events, are considered in this study (Salman, 2003; Songet al., 2010). By applying ordinary least square (OLS) methods, demand elasticitycoefficients are estimated for each of the sending countries Norway, Finland, Russia,Denmark and the UK. Results show that advertising is the main significant driver oftourism demand from the UK, Russia and Finland, while a comparably weak advertisingleverage can be shown for Denmark and Norway. Interestingly, in contrast to microeconomictheories tested in previous research, income and tourism price levels reveal asbeing less significant drivers for demand in all analysed tourism markets. In turn, theresults provide evidence that the increased usage of online channels most significantlyaffects consumers’ buying behaviour. Finally, with respect to brand image perception,results reveal that the destination of Åre is perceived as a brand by tourists from Denmark.Moreover, for customers from the countries Norway and Finland, Åre indicates a weakbrand perception, while tourists from Russia and the UK don’t perceive Åre as a brand atall. The results gained by this research conducted at the level of the tourism destinationprovide useful hints about the factors influencing travel behaviour of tourists from maininternational markets. The study supports destination managers to appropriately adjustmarketing campaigns according to the predominant level of brand perception in respectivesending countries. / KK-Foundation project ‘Engineering the Knowledge Destination’ (no. 20100260; Stockholm, Sweden).

The aim of the study is to verify a hypothesis, whether a company’s financial statement items can be modelled using econometric techniques incorporating accounting and macroeconomic variables. For the modelling and forecasting are selected items, necessary to calculate a company’s free cash flow (FCF) of four Lithuanian companies: telecommunication provider TEO LT, cheese manufacturer Rokiškio sūris, producer of household refrigerators Snaigė and distributor and supplier of electric energy VST. From their financial statements are taken such items as operating profit, current assets and current liabilities, long - term assets and long - term liabilities, and modeled as endogenous variables. Two types of exogenous variables are used: accounting variables (revenues and various types of expenditures) and macroeconomic variables (interest rates, disposable income or net earnings, growth of gross domestic product, country’s export, foreign direct investment and inflation). Initial econometric analysis of the variables includes verification of seasonality and stationarity according to the time series graphs and unit - root tests as well as correlation and causality analysis using cross - correlation matrices and Granger causality tests. For the modelling are selected two types of econometric methods: structural simultaneous - equations models (SEM), estimating them using two - stage least squares technique, and vector autoregression (VAR) models. After estimation of the models... [to full text] / Darbo tikslas yra patikrinti hipotezę, ar įmonės finansinės atskaitomybės straipsniai gali būti modeliuojami naudojant ekonometrinius metodus įtraukiant apskaitos ir makroekonominius kintamuosius. Modeliavimui ir prognozavimui yra pasirinkti įmonės laisvam pinigų srautui (angl. free cash flow, FCF) apskaičiuoti reikalingi straipsniai ir keturios Lietuvos įmonės: telekomunikacijų paslaugų teikėja „TEO LT“, sūrių gamybos įmonė „Rokiškio sūris“, buitinių šaldytuvų gamintoja „Snaigė“ bei elektros energijos skirstytoja ir tiekėja VST. Iš šių bendrovių finansinių atskaitomybių yra paimti tokie straipsniai, kaip veiklos pelnas, trumpalaikis turtas ir trumpalaikiai įsipareigojimai, ilgalaikis turtas ir ilgalaikiai įsipareigojimai. Šie rodikliai yra modeliuojami kaip endogeniniai kintamieji. Modeliuojant naudojami egzogeniniai kintamieji yra dviejų tipų: apskaitos kintamieji (pardavimai ir įvairios sąnaudos) bei makroekonominiai kintamieji (palūkanų normos, disponuojamos pajamos, neto darbo užmokestis, bendrojo vidaus produkto augimas, šalies eksportas, tiesioginės užsienio investicijos ir infliacija). Pradinė ekonometrinė kintamųjų analizė apima sezoniškumo ir stacionarumo tikrinimą pagal laiko eilučių grafikus ir vienetinės šaknies testus bei koreliacijų ir priežastingumo analizę, naudojant kryžmines koreliacijas ir Granger priežastingumo testus. Modeliavimui yra pasirinkti du ekonometriniai metodai: struktūrinių vienalaikių lygčių modeliai (angl. structural simultaneous – equation... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

China has been increasingly sending more contracts to work on projects in Africa. This study tests the effects of Chinese contracts on economic growth in 50 African countries as well as the correlation between Chinese contracts and other economic indicators. The paper uses data from the World Bank and National Bureau of Statistics of China starting from 2000-2015. This study finds that from 2000 to 2015, Chinese contracts have not been significant in economic growth of all African countries. The analysis does find that Chinese contracts are significant to economic growth when considering only the top five countries who have received the most contracts on average.

Nowadays, people have many business activities and entertainments on a variety of online platforms. Despite their various functionalities, online platforms have a fundamental administrative problem: How do platform designers or administrators create proper online environments, including mechanisms and policies, to better manage user behaviors, in order to reach the goals of the platforms? Starting with a taxonomy of online platforms, I introduce three critical dimensions that help to characterize such platforms, including revenue model, heterogeneity in the role of users and level of user interaction. Then, I choose three online platforms as research contexts and conduct empirical studies, trying to identify and understand the impact of the incentive program, quality information disclosure, and social influence, on users' decision-making in online platforms. The first essay investigates the effectiveness of incentive hierarchies, where users achieve increasingly higher status in the community after achieving increasingly more challenging goals, in motivating user contribution in the same platform. The findings have important implications for crowd-based online applications, such as knowledge exchange and crowdsourcing. The second essay focuses on online consumer review sites, and studies whether and how consumer-generated word-of-mouth of restaurants-both volume and valence-is influenced by the disclosure of quality information from health inspectors, by conducting analytical modeling and econometric analyses using data from a leading consumer review site. The third essay examines how social interactions matter in a large-scale online social game that adopts an increasingly popular freemium revenue model. The study leverages an econometric model to quantify the effect of peer consumption on players' repeated decisions for the consumption of both free services and premium services. Finally, I conclude the dissertation by highlighting the three fundamental issues of design and management of online platforms.

In a recent article, Bai and Perron (2003, Journal of Applied Econometrics) present a comprehensive discussion of computational aspects of multiple structural change models along with several empirical examples. Here, we report on the results of a replication study using the R statistical software package. We are able to verify most of their findings; however, some confidence intervals associated with breakpoints cannot be reproduced. These confidence intervals require computation of the quantiles of a nonstandard distribution, the distribution of the argmax functional of a certain stochastic process. Interestingly, the difficulties appear to be due to numerical problems in GAUSS, the software package used by Bai and Perron. / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

Recent software developments are reviewed from the vantage point of reproducible econometric research. We argue that the emergence of new tools, particularly in the open-source community, have greatly eased the burden of documenting and archiving both empirical and simulation work in econometrics. Some of these tools are highlighted in the discussion of three small replication exercises. / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

This thesis deals with analyzing multivariate financial and economical data. The first section describes the theory of multivariate time series and multivariate ARMA models. The second part deals with some models with exogenous variables such as simultaneous equations models and ARMAX model. In the final chapter, the described theory is applied to analyze the reciprocal dependence of time series of inflation rates and dependence of inflation rates on various macroeconomical indicators. The results were obtained by software Mathematica 8, Mathematica 10, EViews and R. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

In a recent article, Bai and Perron (2003, Journal of Applied Econometrics) present a comprehensive discussion of computational aspects of multiple structural change models along with several empirical examples. Here, we report on the results of a replication study using the R statistical software package. We are able to verify most of their findings; however, some confidence intervals associated with breakpoints cannot be reproduced. These confidence intervals require computation of the quantiles of a nonstandard distribution, the distribution of the argmax functional of a certain stochastic process. Interestingly, the difficulties appear to be due to numerical problems in GAUSS, the software package used by Bai and Perron. / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics