The following dissertation is a collection of four stand-alone research papers. The focus of my research is on the interplay of immigration, native human-capital investment and the resulting consequences for the labour market outcome of natives and necessary implications for the immigration...

I study several policy instruments for carbon mitigation with a focus on subsidies for renewable energies, emission taxes and emission allowances. In Chapter 1, I analyze the optimal design and the welfare implications of two policies consisting of an emission tax for conventional fossil-fuel...

The increasing use of production contracts in the hog sector has reduced the number of spot market transactions and raised concerns about price manipulation by packers. These concerns have helped spur legislative efforts to restrict packer ownership of livestock and to regulate livestock...

With the advent of digital convergence, incumbent telephone and cable companies have begun to offer their services, such as voice telephony, Internet and TV in so-called triple play packages. While carefully recognizing the technological, legal and economic framework of the fixed-line...

The main goal of this thesis is to investigate the reasons why firms do often adopt inefficient technologies even when superior ones are widely available, and to assess their consequences. From a macroeconomic perspective it has been emphasized that differences in the adoption and diffusion...

This thesis examines how industry differences affect both corporate financial policies and valuation. Chapter 1 studies the impact of a firm‟s product market power, through the channel of business risk, on its dividend policy. Using three measures of market power – the Herfindahl-Hirschman...

The three papers in this dissertation all deal with new challenges for energy policy.The first paper deals with mitigation of market power in deregulated wholesaleelectricity markets, while the second and third papers deal with reduction ofgreenhouse gas emissions.The first paper experimentally...

This paper uses representative firm level panel data of 1,701 Bulgarian and 2,047 Romanian manufacturing firms to estimate price-cost margins and to analyze how these are affected by privatization and increased competitive pressure. The estimation method used, which is based on Roeger (1995),...

The apparent increase in market concentration and vertical integration in the Indonesiancrude palm oil (CPO) industry has led to concerns about the presence of market power.For the Indonesian CPO industry, such concerns attract more attention because of theimportance of this sector to the...