This thesis consists of three papers that examine Marshallian sources of growth and interdependent location of Swedish firms and households. Paper [I] examines the impact of static and dynamic knowledge externalities and their impact on Swedish market operating firms growth pattern between 1997...

Milk is one of the main sources for the livelihood of pastoralists around the world. Somali Region in Ethiopia is famous for the high density of livestock, implying significant potential for milk production. The perishable nature of the milk and the absence of the milk processing facilities do...

The objective of this study is to identify the economic feasibility of the investment made to establish a commercial slaughterhouse facility in Faafan village, Somali Regional State, Ethiopia. Although the financial feasibility of the facility is essential for the project, the main purpose of...

The prevalence of malnutrition, vitamin-A deficiency, and anemia is high in Uganda. Of children under 5 years of age, 33 percent are stunted and 5 percent wasted. The rate of anemia among women and children is as high as 50 percent. The aim of this study is to identify if a 5 year off-take...

Using a matching approach, we compare the productivity trajectories of future exporters and matched and unmatched non-exporters. Future exporters have higher productivity than do unmatched non-exporters before entry into the export market, which indicates self-selection into exports. More...

This thesis consists of five papers, four of them basically concerning environmental issues, while the fifth paper addresses the issue of measuring output from the educational sector. <p> The first paper starts from the fact that industrial activity causes environmental damage. Therefore, public...</p>

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a procedure to empirically test the Porter hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that environmental regulation not only increases environmental quality, but also brings the polluting producers information that makes them more resource efficient, as well as...

The purpose of this paper is to compute and evaluate producers’ marginal abatement costs (MACs). These costs are obtained by calculating shadow prices of bad outputs from the production technology, which is represented by the estimated directional output distance function. To be more specific,...

We provide a fast algorithm for calculating the fractional difference of a time series. In standard implementations, the calculation speed (number of arithmetic operations) is of order T^2, where T is the length of the time series. Our algorithm allows calculation speed of order T log(T). For...

We investigate the impact of financial crises on two fundamental features of stock returns, namely, the risk-return tradeoff and the leverage effect. We apply the fractionally integrated exponential GARCH-in-mean (FIEGARCH-M) model for daily stock return data, which includes both features and...