The first three papers of this Ph.D. thesis experimentally study the preferences of individuals making cross-border charitable donations. In Is Foreign Aid Paternalistic? (with Anna Breman and Felix Masiye) subjects choose whether to make a monetary or a tied transfer (mosquito nets) to an anonymous household in Zambia. The mean donation of mosquito nets differs significantly from zero, and paternalistic donors constitute a higher share of the sample than do purely altruistic donors. The second paper, Corruption and the Case for Tied Aid (with Anna Breman), compares the willingness to give money to Zambia's national health budget (CBoH) with the willingness to donate mosquito nets to a health-care clinic in Lusaka. Donors clearly prefer tied aid to untied program aid. Exit questionnaires suggest the reason to be a fear of corruption and misallocation at the CBoH. In Altruism without Borders? (with Anna Breman), we study whether the willingness to give increase with the information given about the recipients. We find no significant effect of identification on donations. Women and Informality: Evidence from Senegal, the fourth paper (with Elena Bardasi), uses household survey data to study women’s work and gender wage gaps in the formal and informal sector in Dakar. Multinomial logit analysis reveals that women are 3-4 times less likely to work formally rather than informally. Wage regressions reveal that little schooling, for instance, explains a considerable part of the gender wage gap. In the informal sector, however, the wage gap between men and women remains at 28%.    The fifth paper, Does Innovation Pay? A Study of the Pharmaceutical Product Cycle, examines how a drug’s life cycle depends on its degree of therapeutic innovation. All New Chemical Entities introduced in Sweden between 1987 and 2000 are rated into one of three innovation classes: A (important gains); B (modest gains); and C (little gains). Over a 15-year life cycle, the average class A drug raises 15% higher revenues than B drugs and 114% higher revenues than C drugs. But yearly class A and C sales differences are rarely significant. When comparing innovative (A and B pooled) and imitative (C) drugs, 15-year life cycle revenues of innovative drugs exceed those of imitative drugs by 100%. This sales difference is significant in 19 out of 20 years after launch. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan i Stockholm, 2008 Sammanfattning jämte 5 uppsatser

Hitachi Energy, one of the largest transformer manufacturers in the world, has a factory based in the small town of Ludvika, Sweden. Here, all of the production is carried out, from order to delivery, and the key to reaching the rest of the world lies within the Swedish railway network. Utilizing specialized railway wagons, Hitachi Energy transports the transformers to the industrial ports for further export to the rest of the world. To ensure safe transportation, with loads exceeding 400 tons, transportation consoles made for this exact purpose are used to carry the transformer's weight and keep them in place during transportation. However, with their current solution having stayed the same for many years, they now aspire to a new solution for the transportation consoles to fulfill both the physical and human-centered demands better. In this master's thesis, in industrial design engineering, a new solution for transportation consoles is being developed. To ensure the quality of the project, a design process with four stages - a learning phase, an ideation phase, a development phase, and a delivery phase - has been used. Three research questions have been in focus during the project:  What are the needs and requirements for the new transportation console? How can we identify both user needs and product requirements for the new transportation consoles through an industrial design engineering approach? How would a completely new solution for transportation consoles be designed and used in detail?  Several industrial design methods have been utilized in these phases to gain a broad knowledge of the problem and generate ideas. A product cycle analysis was conducted based on interviews and observations to better understand the product. When the knowledge was gathered, several brainstorming methods, scamper, and virtual prototyping were used to generate several new solutions and ideas. To test and develop the concepts in detail, computer-aided engineering has been used, with computer-aided design to virtually prototype the concepts and finite element analysis to verify them. The learning phase showed the need for a more user-friendly solution and how a slimmer console profile could improve the workers' overall experience. Multiple concepts of solving these problems in different ways were found in the ideation phase. After design reviews with the stakeholders and consultation with the supervisors, a final concept, Arc, for a new transportation console was chosen to continue with into the two later stages of the process. Arc's foundation lies within a human-centered design and the people interacting with it weekly. It has several advantages compared to the previous design, with its adjustability and slim design facilitating the workload and enabling easier transportation. Analyses of its durability against external accelerations have been conducted, leaning towards a promising outcome. However, further testing and verifications are needed to ensure its durability before use.

In the lead up to the Year 2000 dot.com crash of publicly traded high-technology equities, Information Communication Technology (ICT) Companies proudly displayed inter-firm allegiances on their newly created websites. These collaborative relationships were in reality licensing agreements to develop or market new products internationally. Phenomena associated with ICT product development - collaboration, innovation, and internationalisation - are the core tenets of the accompanying dissertation. Leading scholars have suggested these phenomena challenge conventional economic theories of the firm. This study commences with tracing the evolution of trade and production theories from absolute advantage through to competitive advantage and introduces the concepts of non-adversarial collaborative advantage. Within the framework of the technology cycle, this dissertation then seeks to answer why firms engage in international collaborative innovation. The cycle of technological innovation is investigated and this leads to postulating a period of technological overlap and its implications for collaboration. One of the shortcomings acknowledged in the literature is the generic application of the term collaboration to cover a wide scope of inter-firm agreements. Within the literature this is referred to as a problem of multidimensionality. A model is developed in this dissertation that identifies the choices available to the firm and addresses the problem of defining collaboration. The choices provided in the developed model are more complex than simply choosing between external and internal intermediate markets. As a separable form of industry organisation, the success rates of alliance collaboration are compared to Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) to validate issues of sustainability before examining the impact of location on innovation and collaboration. Again, theory is tested by recent events that require explanation. These events include the relocation of early stage foreign R&D to both developed and lesser-developed nations. The final chapter assesses the findings throughout this study and identifies separate and distinct roles for large and small firms in the international and collaborative commercialisation of new innovations. This central conclusion requires empirical validation and suggests the need investigate how firms shape the cycle of innovation from a reflected vantage point to the evolutionary perspective taken in this study. Further research is warranted because the literature on international innovation and collaboration is at an early stage and gaps in understanding remain.