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This thesis examines how organised crime is related to the mobilisation of syndicated infrastructure loans in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is motivated by the region’s persistent infrastructure deficit and by a gap between the infrastructure financing literature and organised crime literature. Using a country-year panel of 22 countries from 1997 to 2023, the study analyses whether the selec
This paper uses the 2018 expansion of eligible collateral for the Medium-term Lending Facility (MLF) by the People's Bank of China as a quasi-natural experiment. It examines whether changes in central bank collateral eligibility affect firms' debt structure. The results show that the MLF collateral expansion significantly increased the share of bond financing among firms issuing eligible b
Metal prices affect every sector of the global economy, and even modest disruptions to physical supply can impose substantial costs on manufacturers and commodity users. In metal futures markets, the premium that buyers pay to secure physical metal immediately rather than in three months, the convenience yield, spikes when supply chains tighten, creating a measurable cost of urgency that industria
The study evaluates whether motherhood penalties are larger in occupations with higher gender earnings gaps among childless individuals. The analysis is conducted on German microdata from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). First, 36 sub-major occupational groups are evaluated in regard to their non-child-related gender earnings gaps, which are used as a measure for their “women-hostility”. The occup
The persistent disparity between Saigon Jewelry Company Limited's gold prices and world gold prices has been a defining feature of the Vietnamese gold market since the establishment of the state monopoly regime, which became effective in May 2012 and remained in place until its removal in October 2025. Despite recent regulatory reforms, including the removal of the State Bank of Vietnam’s role
Asset pricing models are ultimately claims about the stochastic discount factor. A model that fits the cross-section of average returns well may nevertheless imply a pricing kernel that is theoretically inconsistent with observed Sharpe ratios, a violation of the Hansen- Jagannathan admissibility bound that conventional regression-based tests do not detect. This thesis exploits this distinction to
Financial markets rarely behave as the textbooks describe them, and oil markets during 2022-2026 are an extreme case: an invasion, a managed supply response, and a tariff-driven shock in close succession produced one of the most turbulent stretches in the modern history of WTI crude oil. Whether the tools researchers have relied on in calmer periods, including the belief that news sentiment carrie
Low-income households in the United States have historically participated less in presidential elections, contributing to a persistent socioeconomic turnout gap. A redistributive policy may help remedy this pattern of unequal participation. To investigate this, our study uses IPUMS CPS 1984-2022 data to examine whether increases in minimum wages are associated with voter turnout changes in the US.
This study examines the effect of the patient choice reform on nurse wages in Swedish primary care centres. Using Swedish register data and a difference-in-differences framework adapted to staggered treatment adoption, the analysis estimates whether the reform increased wages for nurses employed in municipalities with entry potential and who were already employed in primary care prior to the refor
Polymarket is an online prediction market where people trade contracts whose payoff depends on real-world outcomes: whether the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, who wins an election, or which team wins a match. Each contract starts from scratch. When a new market opens, whoever wants to trade immediately must accept the gap between the best available buying price and the best available selling
This thesis examines whether changes in global oil prices are associated with different trade responses depending on the geographical structure of trade relationships. Using a bilateral exporter-importer-year panel for 2014–2024, the analysis combines international trade data, geographical variables, and annual Brent crude oil prices. The empirical approach is based on PPML gravity models with exp
This thesis examines whether the European Union (EU) Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) is associated with stock price crash risk among EU listed non-financial firms. Using a firm-year panel covering 2014 to 2024, the analysis identifies likely NFRDexposed firms based on whether they had more than 500 employees in fiscal year 2017 and compares them with firms below the threshold using event-
Below-replacement fertility rates have become a global phenomenon, with an increasing share of countries entering or reaching ever lower fertility levels. This paper makes two distinct contributions to the subject of fertility decline. First, it introduces a multicausal classification and mechanism model called VESPER, which organises key drivers of fertility decline into six categories commonly d
This paper examines whether and how climate litigation shapes firms’ climaterelated disclosure in Form 10-K filings. Using climate lawsuits filed against U.S. public firms between 2015 and 2021, we find that defendant firms subsequently increase climate-related disclosure, with the effect emerging gradually over the postlitigation period. This increase is sharply asymmetric in content: approximate
This paper examines stock return dynamics around founder-CEO transitions in S&P 500 firms with a sample of 47 firms experiencing such transitions between 1995-2020. Prior research has primarily compared founder-led firms against non-founder-led firms on average but given less attention to the transition event itself. The study has two stages of analysis. First, a within-firm analysis with fixe
This paper examines how technical capital (R&D expenditure) and customer capital (selling and marketing expenses) jointly influence firm market valuation, using a panel of 29,089 firm-year observations of US-listed companies from 2010 to 2024, supplemented by a focused subsample of 855 entertainment and interactive media firms. The analysis is organized around four empirical questions. First,
This paper examines how the closure of more than half of the Swedish Public Employment Service (Ar- betsf¨ormedlingen) offices affected local labor market outcomes across Swedish municipalities. We use monthly municipality-level data from 2017 to 2020 and exploit the staggered timing of office closures in a difference-in-differences framework, with never-treated municipalities as the control group
This study investigates whether defence stocks act as a hedge against the negative return impact of elevated geopolitical risk. Using pooled cross-sectional regressions on the monthly excess returns of 72 defence firms and 100 industrial control firms between January 2010 and December 2024, the study finds that elevated geopolitical risk significantly depresses equity returns, but that defence fir
As sustainability-related risks become increasingly material to creditors, ESG performance has become a relevant signal of firms' exposure to regulatory, reputational, operational, and transition risks. This study examines whether ESG performance reduces the cost of debt among publicly listed non-financial firms in Europe. It also investigates the speed at which ESG information is reflected in
