Prepay or pay-as-you-go programs are an increasingly popular type of rate plan offered by electric utilities. Under these plans, ratepayers must keep a positive balance at all times to avoid being automatically disconnected, they are charged daily for their usage, and they are provided with a means to monitor their consumption. One of the suggested benefits of these plans is that they allow electricity consumers to better manage their usage. Using household level monthly usage data from customers enrolled in prepay programs at two Kentucky rural electric cooperatives, we investigate whether there is a change in consumption after these customers enrolled in the program. To address this question, we employ a fixed-effects model. The results of our model indicate that prepay customers reduce their consumption by an average of 11% after enrolling in the program. We also find that this response is larger during periods of high or low temperatures than during mild weather. Furthermore, we find evidence that the prepayment effect diminishes over the length of time that a customer is enrolled in the program.

Several studies have examined the effect of remittances on economic growth,poverty, education, and governance, among other factors, in developing countrieswith inconclusive results. Using annual panel data of 99 developing countries invarious empirical models, this study aim to answer the question how remittances affect a broader aspect of development using the Human Development Index asdependent variable. The findings indicate that there is a positive relationship between remittances and the level of human development in developing countries.

This thesis investigates the relationship between Tobin’s Q and regional housing investment in Sweden for the time period of 1998-2012. The relationship is tested through estimation of two models for time-series analysis, a vector error correction model (VECM) and an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. Depending on which model that is used, I find some evidence of positive correlation between Tobin’s Q and regional housing investment in the long run while the short run dynamics of investment does not seem to be explained by Tobin’s Q. By transforming the regional data into a panel data set and running a fixed effects model, I examine the gain in explanatory power of Tobin’s Q from using disaggregated data rather than aggregated. My findings suggest that using disaggregated data improves the explanatory power of Tobin’s Q on investment. However, the Granger Causality test indicates two-way causality between Tobin’s Q and investment, causing endogeneity problem in the estimated equations.

This paper looks at whether firms’ credit ratings are negatively affected by litigation risk after controlling for known factors that affect credit ratings. The conventional wisdom is that litigation risk and credit ratings have an inverse relationship. However, my hypothesis is that the inverse relationship will not be stable if the model of credit ratings has taken other factors into account. The methodology first constructs a model of litigation risk, and then regress the credit ratings on the measurement of litigation risk. Previous empirical research on litigation risk measurement uses industry proxies as indicators for litigation risk. In this paper, I include firm characteristics and the Beneish M-score (a determinant for earnings manipulation) in addition to the industry proxy to construct an alternative model measuring litigation risk. I find that supplementing the Francis, Philbrick and Schipper (1994a, b; hereafter FPS) industry proxy with measures of firm characteristics improves predictive ability. In the model of credit ratings, I find that the change of litigation risk has a negative correlation with the credit ratings. However, the negative coefficient on the change of litigation risk changes to a positive one after controlling for other variables such as firm size, return on asset, and interest coverage ratio. This finding provides support for the hypothesis that the negative correlation between the credit ratings and litigation risk is not stable. This suggests that credit ratings may not incorporate litigation risk specifically although litigation can lead to firms’ financial damage and reputation crisis. However, the negative coefficient on the change of litigation risk remains unchanged when I control for the year fixed effects. I also find a negative correlation between the year 2007 and credit ratings due to financial crisis. The results are not conclusive given the likely simultaneous determination of litigation risk and credit ratings.

This thesis focuses on the design of field experiments with blocks to study treatment effects for a number of treatments. Small field plots are available but located in several blocks and each plot is assigned to a treatment in the experiment. Due to spatial correlation among the plots, the allocation of the treatments to plots has influence on the analysis of the treatment effects. When the spatial correlation is known, optimal allocations (designs) of the treatments to plots have been studied in the literature. However, the spatial correlation is usually unknown in practice, so we propose a robust criterion to study optimal designs of the treatments to plots. Neighbourhoods of correlation structures are introduced and a modified generalized least squares estimator is discussed. A simulated annealing algorithm is implemented to compute optimal/robust designs. Various results are obtained for different experimental settings. Some theoretical results are also proved in the thesis. / Graduate

The primary task of this paper is to test the interactive relations between tax rates at municipality level. We include 96 municipalities between the years 2006 to 2013.   The relations are estimated by panel data instrumental variable estimation method with fixed effect for overcoming the possible specific error of simultaneity. In addition, we choose a set of control variables to strength our analysis. The main findings of this study suggest, one percent tax cut in the neighboring municipality leads to a 0,62 percent decrease in the tax in the home municipality ceteris paribus. This result is in line with theory and is similar to findings in previous studies such as Edmark and Åhgren (2008).

Bolagsskattesänkningen genomfördes den 1 januari 2013, målet med sänkningen var att stimulera Sveriges tillväxt då en sänk bolagsskatt sägs öka investeringsviljan. Med sänkningen ville man också minska incitamenten för företag att flytta sina verksamheter till lågskatteländer. Att bolagsskattesatsen sänktes väckte ett intresse som skapade denna uppsats att undersöka vilka faktorer det är som styr bolagsskattesatsen, till exempel, i en liten öppen ekonomi som den svenska.  Teorin grundar sig i kapitalstruktur och finansieringsbeslut. Faktorer som anses påverka bolagsskatten och som valts ut är utländska direktinvesteringar, öppenhet mot kapitalflöde och BNP per Capita. Datainsamling har skett sekundärt och bearbetats i det analytiska programmet R. Med hjälp av R och statistiska metoder har det genomförts paneldataanalys och regressionsanalys. Svaret är kort och gott, ja, faktorerna påverkar bolagsskattesatsen. Det visar att ett land som är större geografiskt och har en hög öppenhet för kapitalrörelser tenderar att ha en lägre bolagsskattesats och att det tycktes vara ett bra val av Sverige att justera bolagsskatten. / The goal with lowering of the Swedish corporate tax rate the 1st of January 2013 was to stimulate the Swedish growth, as a lower corporate tax rate is said to increase the will to invest. The incentives for corporations to move to low tax countries was also thought to be decreased due to the reduction.  When the tax rate was reduced an interest arise to examine which factors influence the tax rate, as for example, for a small economy as the Swedish. Theory presented is based on capital structure and finance decisions. The variables chosen is FDI, Openness towards capital flow and BNP per capita. Collection of data is secondary and has been analysed in the statistic program R with focus on panel data and regression analysis. The answer is for short, yes, the variables do indeed influence the corporate tax rate. Countries whom are larger geographically and has a high openness towards capital movement are more likely to have a lower corporate tax rate and it seemed to be a good choice of the Swedish parliament to lower the corporate tax rate.

This doctoral thesis examines the long-term impact of birth order on health, and educational attainment. Swedish register data is used to link individuals to their siblings, thereby allowing members of the sibling group to be compared to one another. This thesis consists of an introductory chapter summarizing empirical research on the relationship between birth order and educational attainment, intelligence, health, and personality, as well the theoretical frameworks that have been developed to explain those relationships. This introductory chapter is followed by four original empirical studies. The first two studies show that relative to first born siblings, later borns have lower physical fitness in late adolescence, and higher mortality in adulthood. The third study uses the Swedish registers to identify sibling groups that entirely consist of adopted individuals, and shows that the commonly observed negative relationship between birth order and educational attainment persists in these fully adopted sibling groups. These results suggest that birth order effects are likely explained by post-natal, social mechanisms within the family. Finally, the fourth study shows that even though later born siblings do worse than first borns in a fully adjusted statistical model, educational expansion in the 20th century has meant that later born siblings actually tend to have greater educational attainment and are more likely to attend university in comparison to older siblings within the same family. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Manuscript. Paper 2: Epub ahead of print. Paper 3: Accepted. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

Spillover phenomena are usually statistically estimated on the basis of regional and temporal panel data. In this paper we review and investigate exploratory and confirmatory statistical panel data techniques. We illustrate the methods by calculations in the stetting of the well known Research and Development Spillover study by Coe and Helpman (1995). It will be demonstrated that alternative estimation techniques that are well compatible with the data can lead to opposite conclusions. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"

In endogenous growth models, in contrast to the neoclassical growth models, government expenditure and taxation have an effect on the long run growth rate. In this thesis I examine whether the empirical evidence support the predictions of endogenous growth models or the neoclassical growth models in relation to fiscal policy. For this purpose I use panel data for fifteen European Union (EU) member and thirty-three developing countries between the years 1970 and 1999. I specifically test the following two propositions. The first proposition states that distortionary taxation decreases growth while non-distortionary taxation does not. The second, states that productive government expenditure increases growth while non-productive expenditure does not. The empirical results are quite different between European Union countries and developing countries. The results do not support endogenous growth especially for developing countries.