Klimatförändringarna är numera ett fenomen vi inte kan bortse ifrån. De sker här och nu och det råder mer eller mindre gemensam vetenskaplig konsensus om att så är fallet. Med klimatförändringarna kommer risker vi i nuläget har väldigt svårt att förutse och förhålla oss till och därmed påverkas integrationen av dessa i den kommunala krisberedskapen. Syftet med studien är att undersöka vilka faktorer det är som påverkar integrationen av klimatrisker inom den kommunala krisberedskapen. Resultatet är baserat på ett antal intervjuer som har genomförts med personer inom kommun och kommunfullmäktige. Svaren har varit mer eller mindre entydiga om att de övergripande faktorerna som påverkar integrationen av klimatrisker inom den kommunala krisberedskapen är vetenskaplig osäkerhet och hur denna förmedlas av internationella organisationer, att det råder en gemensam kunskapsbrist om just de effekter som kan komma att uppstå av klimatförändringarna och det finns även en lägre medvetenhet om många av riskerna. Dessutom prioriteras olika effekter och risker olika högt inom olika kommuner vilket påverkar integreringen av alla risker överlag. Jag har även genomfört en dokumentanalys för att ge ytterligare substans till de resultat jag fått fram. / Climate change is now a phenomenon we cannot ignore. It is happening here and now and there is more or less common scientific consensus that so is the case. With climate change come risks that are difficult to predict and to relate to and this affects the integration of these risks in the municipal emergency preparedness. The purpose of the study is to examine the factors that are affecting the integration of climate risks in the municipal emergency preparedness. The result is based on a number of interviews conducted with people working with municipal activities and a Municipal Council. The responses have been more or less clear that the largest factors affecting the integration of climate risks in the municipal emergency preparedness is scientific uncertainty and how this is mediated by international organizations, the fact that there is a common lack of knowledge about the effects that may arise from climate change and that there is also a lower awareness of many of the risks in general. In addition, different effects are differently prioritized which affects the integration of all risks associated with climate change. I have also conducted a document analysis to give further substance to the results I found.

Water is the essential resource that is becoming extremely scarce worldwide. The 21st century will further stress all available water resources through the growth and expansion of developing nations. It is not only the quantity of cheap water that is being depleted, but the quality of these waters is being endangered. Florida is an example where rapid development and an exploding population are competing for shrinking groundwater resources. Current water use does not address the use of alternative supplies and reuses in the United States. The objective of this research was to determine a strategy for augmenting existing water supplies with alternative sources that could be developed economically. Having reviewed numerous alternative sources, it was determined that runoff from roofs potentially provides a source that might meet the augmentation requirement for a small community of a population of 30,000 or less. This research has shown that the quality of water collected from five different roof surfaces meets the drinking water standards and will not degrade the current quality of the main source of water supply. This work not only required the collection of hydrological data from the roof systems, but chemically and biological analyzes samples for contaminants. Since rainfall events vary periodically and in duration, 100,000 meteorological events were analyzed for wind speed, relative humidity, rainfall intensity, and the rainwater runoff across five roofing surfaces to analyze variables that contribute to the effects on the water quality of the source. The model establishes the economics and the public health value of this water. The research assesses the local regulatory aspects of using the water with the outcome of a working objective and rational decision matrix that will permit agencies to select an optimal and safe utilization of the water sources.

This dissertation presents three essays on asset pricing and econometrics. The first chapter identifies rare events and long-run risks simultaneously from a rich data set (the Barro-Ursua macroeconomic data set) and evaluates their contributions to asset pricing in a unified framework. The proposed model of rare events and long-run risks is estimated using a Bayesian Markov-chain Monte-Carlo method, and the estimates for the disaster process are closer to the data than those in the previous studies. Major evaluation results in asset pricing include: (1) for the unleveraged annual equity premium, the predicted values are 4.8%, 4.2%, and 1.0%, respectively; (2) for the Sharpe ratio, the values are 0.72, 0.66, and 0.15, respectively. / Economics

The world we live in is getting more and more global and this development carries many affects, not least for the business environment. During the last decades foreign direct investments have increased rapidly. Historically speaking, foreign direct investments were primarily undertaken by large corporations with high turnover and financial strength. However, with the alleviation of investment regulations smaller companies now also have an opportunity to reap the benefits of international business. Jönköping County is known for its entrepreneurial spirit and high density of small- and medium sized companies. We found that it would be interesting to discover the reason why these, usually successful, firms conducted foreign direct investments. The purpose of this thesis is to describe the reasons and factors behind a foreign direct investment undertaken by mediumsized manufacturing firms in the Jönköping region. The research was carried out by using a qualitative method. We found five firms within this region that were of medium size and wanted to participate in our study. The companies that we interviewed were; Eldon AB, Carlfors Bruk AB, AB Pettersons Järn-förädling, IDAB WAMAC International AB, and RH Form AB. The main reason for conducting a foreign direct investment mentioned by these firms was market seeking motives. The companies wanted to enter new markets in order to grow and widen their customer base. The firms were mainly seeking markets that were large and had a good potential for growth. The remaining company based their decision on a resource seeking motive. The firms have decided to enter these markets through different entry modes. The firms that saw risks and lack of knowledge as important factors have chosen to use a joint venture as an entry mode. The companies that wanted a quick entry chose acquisitions as their form of entry. The two firms that have done green-field investments have done so for different reasons. One had knowledge and contacts already and did not see the need to acquire another firm and the other wanted to keep the full control of its technology. We have found that the factors in the host markets are most influential in the decision to invest abroad, and that push factors from the domestic market has had little significance. The firms are aware of the risks involved but do not choose location based on them.

Adolescents are disproportionately affected by a wide range of STDs due to high level of personal risk behaviors and poor access to STD prevention services. As documented in numerous previous studies, STDs could lead to many serious consequences to adolescents’ health and the overall well being of society. One prominent concern is that STDs increase adolescent’s risk in acquiring HIV infection. Among all STDs, Chlamydia is the most prevalent in adolescents as well as in the general population. No previous studies have attempted to examine the social interaction of adolescent population heavily affected by Chlamydia. In this study, we would like to take a step forward to identify the difference in behavioral risk level between Chlamydia positive and negative adolescent social network and to describe any impacts of these groups on the transmission of other STDs using social network analysis of data collected from adolescent population in Dekalb County, Georgia. The results indicated highest behavioral risk in the negative girl index respondents’ contacts followed by those of positive boys, positive girls and finally negative boys. However STD prevalence in the contacts among these different groups did not follow the same pattern. Prevalence of STD is highest in the negative girls’ contact group followed by that of positive boys, negative boys; and interestingly positive boys’ contacts exhibit the lowest STD rate. As informed by the results, the presence of infection is not a sufficient indicator of risks; thus, network characteristic was also examined to accurately determine transmission dynamics in this population. Social and sexual network structures among these four different index groups and their contacts suggested low level of STD transmission.

It is of interest that researchers study competing risks in which subjects may fail from any one of K causes. Comparing any two competing risks with covariate effects is very important in medical studies. This thesis develops omnibus tests for comparing cause-specific hazard rates and cumulative incidence functions at specified covariate levels. In the thesis, the omnibus tests are derived under the additive risk model, that is an alternative to the proportional hazard model, with by a weighted difference of estimates of cumulative cause-specific hazard rates. Simultaneous confidence bands for the difference of two conditional cumulative incidence functions are also constructed. A simulation procedure is used to sample from the null distribution of the test process in which the graphical and numerical techniques are used to detect the significant difference in the risks. A melanoma data set is used for the purpose of illustration.

This thesis investigates the relationship between foster care placement settings and discharges. Placement settings are where foster children live: foster homes, group homes, etc. There may be one or several placements for any individual child. In the interest of stability, federal funding to states depends in part on low numbers of placement moves. Federal reviews, however, do not consider whether the placement settings resemble permanent family life (foster homes compared to congregate care) or the direction of placement moves. Competing risks regression was used to analyze time to discharge data of foster children in Georgia. Discharges (competing risks) were compared based on the number and the direction of placement moves. Children with movement patterns that favored placements similar to permanent family life were found to have higher probabilities of discharges to safe permanence. This thesis promotes “proximity to permanence” as an important, but often overlooked, consideration in foster care placements.

<p>The main goal of this work is to explore the effects of time-varying extreme jump tail dependencies in asset markets. Consequently, a lot of attention has been devoted to understand the extremal tail dependencies between of assets. As pointed by Hansen (2013), the estimation of tail risks dependence is a challenging task and their implications in several sectors of the economy are of great importance. One of the principal challenges is to provide a measure systemic risks that is, in principle, statistically tractable and has an economic meaning. Therefore, there is a need of a standardize dependence measures or at least to provide a methodology that can capture the complexity behind global distress in the economy. These measures should be able to explain not only the dynamics of the most recent financial crisis but also the prior events of distress in the world economy, which is the motivation of this paper. In order to explore the tail dependencies I exploit the information embedded in option prices and intra-daily high frequency data. </p><p>The first chapter, a co-authored work with Andrew Patton, proposes a new class of dynamic copula models for daily asset returns that exploits information from high frequency (intra-daily) data. We augment the generalized autoregressive score (GAS) model of Creal, et al. (2013) with high frequency measures such as realized correlation to obtain a "GRAS" model. We find that the inclusion of realized measures significantly improves the in-sample fit of dynamic copula models across a range of U.S. equity returns. Moreover, we find that out-of-sample density forecasts from our GRAS models are superior to those from simpler models. Finally, we consider a simple portfolio choice problem to illustrate the economic gains from exploiting high frequency data for modeling dynamic dependence.</p><p>In the second chapter using information from option prices I construct two new measures of dependence between assets and industries, the Jump Tail Implied Correlation and the Tail Correlation Risk Premia. The main contribution in this chapter is the construction of a systemic risk factor from daily financial measures using a quantile-regression-based methodology. In this direction, I fill the existing gap between downturns in the financial sector and the real economy. I find that this new index performs well to forecast in-sample and out-of-sample quarterly macroeconomic shocks. In addition, I analyze whether the tail risk of the correlation may be priced. I find that for the S&P500 and its sectors there is an ex ante premium to hedge against systemic risks and changes in the aggregate market correlation. Moreover, I provide evidence that the tails of the implied correlation have remarkable predictive power for future stock market returns.</p> / Dissertation

Although direct-to-consumer (DTC) prescription drug advertising is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, content analyses (Baird-Harris, 2009; Frosch, Krueger, Hornik, Cronbolm, & Berg, 2007; Kaphingst, DeJong, Rudd, & Daltroy, 2004; Wilkes, Bell, & Kravitz, 2000) and other studies (Davis, 2000, 2007) have suggested that advertisers may not disclose drug risks to the same extent that they describe drug benefits. This study builds on previous studies by Baird-Harris and Smith and Shaffer (2000) and aims to test the relationship between image congruency in televised DTC advertisements, recall of risks and benefits, and perceived ad persuasiveness. Advertisements for Nexium, Advair, and Lunesta were shown to college students in either their original (i.e., image incongruent) or modified (i.e., image neutral) form. In general, risks were easier to recall with image neutral advertisements (which were considered to be less persuasive), although results were not statistically significant. Gender had a significant interaction effect, suggesting that males and females process risks differently depending on images in a DTC advertisement. Despite its lack of significant findings, this study explores an underdeveloped area of research and provides a model for future studies.

Shandong Province, renowned as China’s greatest agricultural province, is dominated by smallholders growing rain-fed crops and vulnerable to severe weather shocks that can increase poverty rates. Weather index insurance, an innovative agricultural risk management product, may be an effective mechanism to address vulnerability to catastrophic weather risk in rural regions of China, including Shandong. This project evaluated current household livelihood and risk management strategies and farmer interest in weather index insurance. Data from 174 participants were collected using a methodology that included focus groups, questionnaires, and personal interviews. Despite limited access to formal financial services, Shandong farmers generally employ informal, well-diversified income strategies and rely on no-interest informal loans from community members to manage adverse impacts of natural disasters, such as drought. Households sometimes rely on reducing consumption as a risk coping strategy; however, unlike many regions of the world, Shandong farmers do not tend to sell livelihood assets to manage weather shocks. A majority of interviewed participants were interested in weather index insurance after they understood its basic concept; however, participants expressed concerns regarding basis risk and program implementation.