Filtyp
This study examines whether cross-border out-licensing announcements by Chinese listed biopharmaceutical firms generate positive abnormal returns and which mechanisms explain these reactions. Using 229 out-licensing events involving 62 Chinese listed firms from January 2020 to February 2026, the study conducted event-study and event-level cross-sectional regressions. The results show that announce
This thesis examines how the European Central Bank’s (ECB) return to positive policy rates, following eight years of negative interest rates, has affected the profitability differential between banks with high and low exposure to deposit funding. The study covers the period 2018-2024 and is based on a sample of 431 banks. To estimate the effect of the transition to positive policy rates on bank pr
Does sentiment in earnings call Q&A sessions help explain stock price reactions beyond reported earnings news? Using FinBERT to classify sentence-level sentiment in OMXS30 earnings calls from 2012 to 2025, we construct event level measures of overall tone and tone dispersion, where dispersion captures the coexistence of positive and negative language within a single discussion. The results sho
Using two cycles of PIAAC survey data collected approximately a decade apart across twelve countries, we study how the task content of work has evolved and what this means for wages. Rather than imposing a predefined taxonomy, we derive five task dimensions directly from the correlation structure of worker-reported survey responses, yielding measures that are empirically grounded and comparable ac
I examine whether the gender of external academic reviewers impacts how likely they are to recommend women for academic positions. As part of the Akademiska Anställningar project at Lund University, I have encoded 434 review letters from 216 Swedish recruitment processes across the years 2018-2020, for the largest scale econometric analysis of external academic reviewers yet. Results find that whi
This essay examines the relationship between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and corporate borrowing costs in Europe, with particular focus on whether this relationship changed after the implementation of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). Using an unbalanced panel of 7,658 firm-year observations across 1,169 listed non-financial firms in the European Eco
The rapid digitalization of banking has reshaped operations, but its net effect on bank stability remains debated. Digital transformation may improve efficiency and credit screening, yet it may also erode deposit stickiness and amplify funding fragility, making its overall impact theoretically ambiguous. Using a panel of 435 publicly traded U.S. commercial banks (1999–2025), we proxy digitalizatio
This study argues for the distinct role of ideas as inputs to knowledge production in an endogenous growth model and proposes a stochastic two-stage expression for knowledge production. This expression reflects two aspects of ideas as inputs to knowledge production. The first is the nonrivalry of ideas being an analytically true notion distinct from other aspects of a model research sector, reflec
This thesis examines the causal effect of working from home (WFH) on individual health outcomes in the post-pandemic Netherlands. While remote work expanded rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and has remained substantially more common than before 2020, existing research provides mixed evidence regarding its effects on physical and mental health. A major limitation of the literature is that many
This thesis examines whether AI-driven productivity growth can offset the pres- sure that population ageing places on a labour-financed pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) pension system. I study this question by simulating a two-period overlapping- generations model with a balanced-budget PAYGO pension scheme, CES produc- tion, and factor-augmenting technological change. The model is calibrated to Swedish macr
This paper studies the role of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance in the pricing of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), with a specific focus on the interaction between the scores of acquirer and target companies. While prior literature has studied the effects of ESG on firm value, limited attention has been given to its effect on takeover premiums and the alignment of ESG sco
This study examines the impact of China's Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zone (GFRIZ) policy on corporate debt financing. Using Chinese A-share listed firms from 2010 to 2024 as the sample, this study treats the establishment of the first batch of GFRIZ pilot zones in 2017 as a quasi-natural experiment and applies a difference-in-differences (DiD) framework. The empirical results sh
This paper examines whether privately and publicly operated primary care units produce different physician behavior when financial incentives are held constant. Using administrative data on the universe of primary care visits in Region Skåne, Sweden, from 2010 to 2019, I exploit physician mobility between sectors to estimate within-physician differences in prescribing, follow-up, specialist referr
This paper investigates VaR forecasting for China’s 10-year government bond yield risk. Since changes in bond yields affect bond prices, this paper first constructs a bond return risk series based on daily changes in China’s 10-year government bond yield using a duration approximation. Based on this series, several VaR forecasting methods are compared under a unified out-of-sample forecasting fram
Factor returns vary substantially over time, and an investor who can forecast when a factor will earn a positive premium could, in principle, improve risk-adjusted performance relative to a passive holding. Can ML-based factor sign prediction improve the risk-adjusted performance of a long-only multi-factor portfolio? A random forest and a ridge-penalised logistic regression are trained to predict
Loneliness is an increasing concern, particularly among older adults. Loneliness may affect elderly’s health status and well-being, and can thus affect the society with an increased level of public spending through more pressure on health care services. Therefore, it is important to be aware of potential risk groups, and to effectively design policies and interventions aimed at preventing loneline
This thesis studies whether making recycling more convenient changes household waste sorting. I examine the introduction of property-close collection of packaging waste, known as FNI, across Swedish municipalities. FNI moves collection infrastructure closer to households and reduces the practical cost of sorting without directly changing the price of residual waste disposal. Using a municipality-y
This thesis investigates whether machine learning models outperform logistic regression in predicting M&A deal completion in Europe, with a particular focus on whether news sentiment, alongside deal characteristics, acquirer fundamentals, and macroeconomic conditions, carries meaningful predictive power. Using European M&A transactions over 2015–2025, three models of Logistic Regression, R
This thesis investigates whether disclosed VaR backtesting results differ depending on whether they are based on actual P&L (APL) or hypothetical P&L (HPL). Since the two measures are based on different concepts, they can lead to different exception counts and different implied regulatory interpretations. The data are hand-collected from public reports for European Union (EU) and United Ki
This thesis examines how fiscal and monetary policy respond to one another at different levels of public debt across 16 advanced OECD economies, including the euro area, between 1999 and 2025. The study extends the reaction-function frameworks of Wolswijk (2026) and Afonso et al. (2019), estimating a fiscal reaction function and an augmented Taylor rule as fixed-effect panel regressions, with coun
