During the 1980s and 1990s more and more countries opened up their economies to trade and increased their volumes of trade. In the same period of time it has been said that income inequality increased in many parts of the world. The aim of this thesis is to discover whether increased income inequality can be related to trade openness. This relationship is studied using three different hypotheses.

Due to the increasing need for advanced credit risk management and lacking quantitative credit risk measurement modeling at the Chinese banks, the purpose of this dissertation is to study the feasibility of applying the Western credit risk model, the Moody’s KMV (MKMV), to China. Because of the particular Chinese considerations, such as developing stage of financial market and lacking of default d

The EC Internal Market is aiming at integrating all markets, securing competition and allowing for free movements of goods, services, persons and capital. Measures have been taken to also include the so-called network industries in the internal market, but because of their special features this is not as straight forward as with regular goods. The electricity sector is one of these network industr

Obesity is one of the most important public health concerns around the world. Research suggests that obesity has potentially important effects on labour market outcomes. Using longitudinal data, the thesis aims to study the effect of obesity on wage earnings in Sweden. The data set used in this study is the Swedish level-of-living Survey (LNU) from the year 1991 and 2000. Different estimation proc

In this thesis, employment and earnings differentials between visually or hearing-impaired and non-disabled Swedish workers are analyzed. The thesis investigates whether there are any differences and if so, how large, in the earnings and the employment probabilities of the visually or hearing-impaired and the non-impaired on the Swedish labor market. Due to the detailed measures of visual acuity a

This thesis will focus on one of the most external factors that drove the institutional change particularly in Chinese industry, which is the emergence of private de novo firms. The purpose of this thesis is to bring together the important role of emerging private firms in a marketizing economy and the impediments imposed by the government. Several institutional problems need to be addressed in or

Title: Health in developing countries – The determinants of health in Latin American and Caribbean countries Author: Fredrik Klintberg Supervisor: Carl Hampus Lyttkens, Professor, Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Lund University Problem discussion: There are still today many problems related to health in developing countries. When reasoning on how to deal with these pro

ABSTRACT The threat of globalization to public spending as well as a fiscal debate of the disciplining hypothesis and compensation hypothesis on large sample of countries, have been widely analyzed in the public finance literature. Yet the welfare states in Nordic countries with largest share of public expenditures have never been singled out for similar studies. This study employs a much more det

The purpose of this paper was to investigate whether EQ-5D is a valid measure of Health Related Quality of Life of psoriasis patients. The objective was carried out by investigating the correlation between the EuroQol EQ-5D and two other Health Related Quality of Life measures, Dermatology Life Quality Index and a Visual Analogue Scale assessed by the patient, as well as two clinical outcome measu

The Indonesian law against pornography has caused controversy since 2006. This thesis aims to explore what norms and conceptions that can be found amongst politicians and influential actors promoting the Indonesian pornography law, in order to understand its significance. Six interviewees’ understanding of the law and pornography is analysed from a theoretical platform inspired by discourse theory

I 24 kap. 10 § a-e IL regleras begränsningen i avdragsrätten för ränta på vissa koncerninterna skulder. Reglerna framarbetades i samband med de av Skatteverkets konstaterade skatteflyktsförfaranden som skedde i anslutning till avdrag för koncerninterna ränteutgifter. Skatteverket har försökt att komma åt transaktionerna genom att tillämpa skatteflyktslagen men har inte haft framgång eftersom skattThe Income Tax Act Chapter 24 Section 10 a-e deals with restrictions of interest deductions for certain dividends. The regulations were worked out in connection with the established tax evasion procedures that occurred together with deductions for intergroup interest expenses. The Swedish Tax Agency has attempted to get hold of the transactions by applying the Law Against Tax Evasion, but have not

Vi ämnar bidra med ny kunskap kring hur svenska konsumenter uppfattar Swedish Matchs kommunicerade CSR-arbete, samt visa på eventuella skillnader i hur företaget och branschen uppfattas. Vi har genomfört en kvalitativ undersökning med kvantitativa inslag där vi samlat in sekundärdata från internetbaserade källor, samt primärdata genom utförd enkätundersökning. Denna baserades på vår teoretiska ref

The aim of the paper is to provide a systematic review of the estimation of cost-of-illness (COI) due to air and noise pollution related ill-health. The methodology used for the review includes a systematic search on electronic databases for peer-review published literature and manual searches for the identification of unpublished literature. Searches are based on the major electronic databases su

The problem of poverty is present all over the world. Poverty consists of many different factors and appears in different dimensions in all environments. Institutions are the rules and games of a society and are important to people experiencing poverty as they provide safety nets such as social security or strong social relations in the form of kinship ties. I will describe the role of institution

This paper examines the possibility to use McDonald’s as a leading indicator for economic growth and stability. A small number of alternative hypotheses are also explored. The theory that McDonald’s can be used as an economic indicator originates in Thomas L. Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” which presents a relationship between McDonald’s and political stability. Common st

This paper investigates volatility and mean spillover effects from the US and the Chinese stock markets into individual ASEAN stock markets using a GARCH spillover model. I find strong statistical evidence for both the mean-spillover and the volatility-spillover effects from the US into the individual ASEAN markets. The Chinese volatility-spillover effects are less essential to the individual ASEA

The recent development and implementation of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is generating application of complicated models over a wide range of sciences. For two correlated binary responses, bivariate binary logistic regression is a suitable way to identify the related covariates and at the same time, their interactions validity can be investigated in terms of logarithm of odds ratio. Pre

This thesis analyses microcredit as a means to overcome the problem of inefficiently working financial markets in Uganda. Empowerment of women and the benefits of targeting women with microcredit are similarly discussed. The conclusion of the study is that microcredit provides a way of giving poor people access to credit through accepting untraditional collateral and reaching out to remote rural a

This paper studies the importance of property rights when investigating the determinants of foreign direct investment. Property rights are difficult to measure and its relation to foreign direct investment has not been examined that much in previous researches. This paper examines the effect of some independent variables and property rights on foreign direct investment by using panel data for 127