Over the past several decades there has been extensive research done in an attempt to determine what demographic characteristics affect economic growth, measured in GDP per capita. Understanding what influences the growth of a country will vastly help policy makers enact policies to lead the country in a positive direction. This research focuses on isolating a new variable, women in the work force. As well as isolating a new variable, this research will modify a preexisting variable that was shown to be significant in order to make the variable more robust and sensitive to recessions. The intent of this thesis is to explore the relationship between several demographic characteristics and their effect on the growth rate of GDP per capita. The first step is to reproduce the work done by Barlow (1994) to ensure that the United States follows similar rules as the countries in his research. Afterwards, we will introduce new variables into the model, comparing the goodness of fit through the methods of R-squared, AIC and BIC. There have been several models developed to answer each of the research questions independently.

This study has applied a geographical perspective with the ambition of evaluating the presence of the Sell in May effect, January effect and monthly anomalies in the Nordic stock markets. In extension the study examines the relationship between corporate size and the returns of calendar anomalies. The study has conducted statistical tests based on Newey-West regressions as well as a Generalized Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity model. The findings suggest that the Sell in May and January are present in the Nordic region and partially abide by theory and results of previous research. The findings suggest that the Sell in May and January effect are independent, however, tendencies when the January effect has a considerable influence on the Sell in May effect are also evident. Additionally, the “April Effect” is an unexpected outlier with positive excess returns that was identified through this study.