Problem background and discussion: Emerging countries economies are growing substantially; one of these is India which stock market has been one of the best performing in the world in recent years. Analysts are forecasting further development and some claims that India has the most business- and investment-stimulating political leaders in the world. However, stock markets in emerging countries are highly volatile and normally more risky than in developed economies. One approach to emphasise the more common risks in emerging countries are by including Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) rating into the fundamental investment model. However, there is a conflict of what previous studies suggest regarding ESG investments. Some argues there is a positive relation and others a negative relation between ESG factors and risk- adjusted return. Research question: “Is there a relation between risk-adjusted return and ESG performance at the Indian stock market?” Objective: The objective is to determine if there is a relationship between ESG performance and risk-adjusted return in India. Another objective is to determine if there is a relationship between ESG performance and risk-adjusted return among companies with high Total ESG rating as well as for companies with low Total ESG rating. Theoretical framework: ESG is an established approach to describe sustainability issues, where screening is a process designed to select those companies that meet ESG criteria. A basic description of Capital Asset Pricing Model CAPM, which calculates an asset's expected return, has been used to calculate risk-adjusted return. Efficient Market Hypothesis EMH is the basic theory of market efficiency and is used to explain any non-linear relationship between ESG factors and risk-adjusted returns. Adaptive Market Hypothesis AMH has been taken into account as it deals with financial behaviour. Method: A quantitative study using a deductive approach has been selected to perform this study. The practical approach is a cross sectional study where the relationship in the Indian market has been analysed and significance-tested during 2014. ESG information for 126 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) has been purchased from Sustainalytics, a global leader in research for responsible investment. Empirical findings and analysis: The results of the study demonstrate no significant relationship between Total ESG rating and risk-adjusted return during 2014. In the examination of individual categories, Environmental and Social rating does not have a significant association with the risk-adjusted Return. Though, the results display a negative relationship between Governance rating and risk-adjusted return. This relationship is also obtained among companies in with low Total ESG rating but not companies with high ESG rating. Conclusion: Results implies that investors have not been able to use the information of Total ESG performance to obtain a better risk-adjusted return on the Indian stock market in 2014. However, this can be achieved by using Governance rating.

By using IT-solutions, the flexibility on the demand side in the electrical systems could be increased. This is called demand response and is part of the larger concept called smart grids. Previous work in this area has concerned the utilization of demand response by grid owners. In this thesis the focus will instead be shifted towards the electrical companies that have balance responsibility, and how they could use demand response in order to make profits. By investigating electrical appliances in hourly measured households, the business value from decreasing electrical companies’ power imbalances has been quantified. By an iterative simulation scheme an optimal value was found to be 977 SEK/year and appliance. It could however be shown that the value became larger for energy inefficient households, and that such consumers’ participation in a demand response market would be prioritized ahead of other measures like isolating walls is rather unlikely. Thermal appliance whose load depend on the outdoor temperature are less valuable for demand response during the summer months, and the annual value would increase if less seasonally dependent appliances were used. Additionally, by increasing the market price amplitudes and the imbalance price volatility, it could be shown that the potential for such demand response markets is larger in e.g. the Netherlands and Germany.

This dissertation consists of three essays on different attributes of immigrants and remittances over time. Using the recently available three waves of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants in Canada (LSIC), our first essay investigates the relationships between socio-economic characteristics and remittance behaviour of Indian and Chinese immigrants in Canada. After conducting a logistic regression on the likelihood of remitting and an instrumental variable regression of the amount remitted, the study observes significant differences between the remittance behaviour of Chinese and Indian immigrants. While Chinese remittances are mostly affected by age, income, level of education and personal investment in home country, Indian remittances are influenced by marital status, having family members in the host country, and being involved with social/religious organization in the host country. Financial variables play significant roles for both types of immigrants. Using data from the LSIC, our second essay explores the link between health and education among recently arrived immigrants in Canada. The empirical evidence suggests that education has a positive impact on the health of newly arrived immigrants. This relationship remains valid for a few years after arrival. More educated immigrants seem to be better informed and appear to make use of health-related information. If differences in health can be explained using educational inequality then education might directly affect the quality of life. The likelihood of being in better health increases amongst those with higher levels of education. Our third essay examines whether the financial sector of a country plays a significant role in explaining a country’s capacity to take advantage of remittances to influence economic growth. Using data from 1979 to 2011 for the 33 top remittance recipient developing countries and employing the GMM approach, the study observes a positive association between remittances and growth. However, no conclusive evidence on the importance of financial development on remittance-growth nexus could be established. Moreover, remittances have the strongest effect on economic growth under repressed financial regimes. Ensuring that remittance recipients have access to financial intermediaries and promoting financial literacy may increase the positive influence of the financial sector on the relationship between remittances and economic growth.

In this article we investigate the question whether the highly demanding informative requirements of rational expectations models are necessary to derive equilibria within capital market models. In the analysis agents are only provided with publicly available information such as prices and dividends. Nevertheless, we require that agents should behave like econometricians. Additionally, we skip the assumption of rational expectations models that agents know the implied law of motion of the system. By these assumptions, the stock market can be considered as a Sorger-Hommes consistent expectations model. In this article, we show the existence of consistent expectations equilibria with myopic agents, where the only CEE is the rational expectations equilibrium. In the simulation part we demonstrate how the steady state CEE can be derived by means of sample autocorrelation learning. Thus, we are able to derive a stock market equilibrium with less demanding requirements, where this equilibrium is equal to the rational expectations equilibrium. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

This paper examines the role of investment banks in initial public offerings. More specifically, we uncover whether or not bulge bracket banks, on average, more or less underprice IPOs than non-bulge bracket counterparts. Three different models are utilized to uncover the determinants of underpricing, with an emphasis on deal mechanics and quantitative measures of the going public firm.

With the adoption of European Commission directives in 2003 related to open data,member States of EU were encouraged to provide citizens access to previously inaccessiblepublic sector data. This published public data could be used, reused and distributed free ofcharge. Following these directives, many municipalities within Sweden and Europe ingeneral created open data portals for publishing public sector data. With such datapublished, expectations of third party innovations were highly envisaged. This thesis adoptsa qualitative research approach to investigate the challenges and proposed solution ofusing open data for third party innovation. The thesis identifies various aspects ofgovernance, architecture and business model that public organizations should take intoconsideration in order to attract third party innovations on open data. Specifically, theresults of this thesis suggest that in order for open data to act as a platform for innovation,there is need for integration of open data policies. This involves developing commonstandards relating to governance, data format, and architecture. Harmonizing thesestandards across municipalities within Sweden and Europe, would provide the muchneededuser based which is necessary to enhance the two-sided nature of innovations onopen data platforms.

Adaptive agent models are supposed to result in the same limit behavior as models with perfectly rational agents. In this article we show that this claim cannot by accepted in general, even in a simple capital market model, where the agents apply sample autocorrelation learning to perform their forecasts. By applying this learning algorithm, the agents use sample means, the sample autocorrelation coefficient, and the sample variances of prices to predict the future prices, and to determine the demand for the risky asset. Therefore, even if the agents are not perfectly rational, we require that the agents' forecasts are consistent with the underlying information. In this article a sufficient condition for convergence is derived analytically, and checked by means of simulations. The price sequence as well as the sequence of parameters - estimated by means of sample autocorrelation learning - converge, if the initial value of the price sequence is sufficiently close to the steady-state equilibrium, and a random variable derived from the dividend process is not too volatile to skip the price trajectory out of the attracting region. Therefore, the market price can even diverge, and the region of convergence could become very small depending on the underlying parameters. Thus, divergence of the price sequences is not a pathological example, since it possibly occurs over a wide range of parameters. Therefore, the often claimed coincidence of adaptive agents models and ration agent models cannot be observed even in a simple capital market model. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"

This research is empirical and exploratory in nature. It examines the emergence of a market of underserviced consumers within the U.S. banking subsector of the financial services industry. The aim of this research is to introduce generalizable sociological theory that explains the formation of an underserviced consumer market. This new social theory called Underserviced Consumer Market Formation Theory (UCMFT) is then applied to the U.S. banking subsector of the financial services industry in order to address the research question of, Why has an emerging market of underserviced consumers formed within the U.S. banking subsector of the financial services industry? In addition to introducing UCMFT to academia, other contributions to knowledge have materialized as a means of explaining this phenomenon and answering the research question of this study. These additional contributions to knowledge are: introducing the term underserviced consumer within the U.S. banking subsector of the financial services industry and introducing a theoretically based explanatory model specific to this subject matter of this research termed the model of underserviced consumer market formation within the U.S. banking subsector of the financial services industry. Positioning UCMFT for future research and generalizability includes clearly defining the industry being studied, clearly defining the term underserviced consumers in the context of the industry being studied, and empirically identifying and linking the unique psychosocial characteristics to the predominant consumers (buyers) within the industry being studied or encompassed by the research. Potential industries that could be included for future research grounding in UCMFT are healthcare, technology, telecommunications, education, as well as other subsectors within the financial services industry. Overall, the empirical findings support the creation of the theory and its applicability to the U.S. banking subsector of the financial services industry as scoped for this research.

This paper examines for the first time the relationship between the net issue values of aggregate bonds, as well as the different bond sectors separately, and economic growth. The other new feature of this study is the usage of quarterly data. Granger causalities are calculated for time series of 15 European countries, the USA, and Japan in order to test if there is a positive relationship between the development of bond markets and economic growth also for shorter time periods. The significant Granger causalities found show the following tendency: Economic growth is causal for net issue values of government bonds, and net issuance of corporate and financial institutions bonds are causal for economic growth. That finding is important for the future architecture of the financial sector, in particular in emerging markets and the new EU member countries. (author's abstract) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut

We use annual real GDP and the volume of the bond, stock and credit markets to assess the causal relationship between the aggregate bond market development and economic growth in the USA, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, France and the Netherlands over the 1950 to 2001 period. The literature on the real - financial nexus to date has focused on the credit and stock markets, with few exceptions. Partially due to data availability problems, the impact of bond markets on economic growth has not yet been examined in the same way. To fill this gap we provide empirical evidence for long-run equilibrium and Granger causality in at least one direction in the relationship among real GDP and bond, credit and stock markets in seven economies with large bond markets. The supplyleading hypothesis that development of the financial markets enhances growth is supported in all countries except for Germany. The demand-leading hypothesis that economic development pulls the development of the financial markets is supported only for Germany. A feedback between domestic credits and output is found in Japan. There is evidence for a feedback between the equity markets and real output in Japan and the Netherlands. (author's abstract) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut