The thesis consists of two parts, a theoretical part and an applied part, and in addition an Appendix. Except for a very short chapter in the applied part and the appendix we only present previously unknown results leading to a very concise style. In the theoretical part we study rates of decay for vector-valued functions and semigroups of operators depending on a real and positive variable. Under boundedness assumptions on the function/semigroup itself and under analytic extendability assumptions of its Laplace transform/resolvent across the imaginary axis we provide (almost) sharp rates of decay. Our results improve known results in this very active area of research. In the second part of the thesis we apply our results to specific examples (from the field of PDEs): local energy decay for wave equations on exterior domains, energy decay for damped wave equations on bounded domains and decay for a viscoelastic boundary damping model for sound waves. Many more examples can be found in the vast literature.