The purpose of the thesis is to explore the link between labour markets and transportation accessibility. Accessibility has been estimated with logsum and travel times of public and private transportation. Logsum as a concept has been used in the transportation system estimation, all though all in all logsum as a measure of accessibility is not as established as travel times. This way the overview of the effects of accessibility to employment is thorough. I also evaluate how impact assessment of transportation is done historically and how wider economic impacts are considered in the framework. Cost-benefit analysis is widely used, but the framework should be improved on how to include wider economic impacts. The methods section goes through how transportation system estimation is done. The used data in the estimation is collected from three dependencies. These are the interview-based traveling habits from Helsingin Seudun Liikenne, Statistics Finland metropolitan regional employment statistics and travel times of public and private transportation from Helsinki Region Travel Time Matrix. In the results I go through the empirical model. Travel time, logsum and employment are all viewed as an elasticity measure. The results of the model are reasonable and in line with the previous literature, but the coefficient of determination ends up quite low. This means that the results still need confirmation, either through better data or better estimation model. My results can be viewed as a preliminary result on the link between employment and accessibility.

This thesis investigates the tax base and allocation choices in international corporate income tax architecture and provides an evaluation of the effects of the choices made in three different systems: the current system, residual profit allocation, and OECD Pillar One. International corporate income tax design has a significant effect on the functioning of the international economy and on the welfare of individuals. Thus, making the correct design choices is extremely important. This thesis argues that the international corporate income tax system should be designed following certain important principles of taxation: 1) fairness, 2) economic efficiency, 3) robustness to avoidance, 4) administrative ease, and 5) incentive compatibility. The different systems are then introduced in turn and evaluated against these criteria. The thesis finds that the current system suffers from certain conceptual weaknesses that leave significant room for improvement with regards to the set criteria. It is further argued that a reform is required for the continued functioning of the international system. Such a reform could be introduced in the form of residual profit allocation. OECD Pillar One proposal involves elements of residual profit allocation, but in comparing the different systems with each other, this thesis argues that the OECD proposal is too narrow in scope to gain the full benefits of a residual profit allocation system.

Asymmetric information in insurance markets is the result of policyholders, the buyers of insurance, having more information about their own risk types and preferences than the insurer. Informational asymmetry between the insurer and policyholders can lead to non-optimal insurance prices and quantities which reduce market efficiency. While the presence of asymmetric information has been widely studied in several insurance markets, it has not been empirically studied in the Finnish automobile insurance market before. This thesis aims to fill this gap in literature. The Finnish automobile insurance market consists of two types of insurance. Motor liability insurance is required by law from all vehicles used for driving in traffic. Also, voluntary automobile insurance can be acquired in addition to the mandatory motor liability insurance. In this thesis, the presence of asymmetric information is studied by comparing the occurrence of motor liability insurance claims, conditioned with the pricing variables used by the insurer, between policyholders who only have a motor liability insurance policy and policyholders with an additional automobile insurance policy. The data set used in this thesis is from a single Finnish insurance company. The data set is from the year 2019 and it contains nearly 105,000 motor liability insurance policies. The data include all variables observed by the insurer. Several regression specifications and the widely used positive correlation test are used in this thesis to study the correlation between insurance coverage and motor liability insurance claims. The results of this thesis suggest that signs of asymmetric information are not present at aggregate level in the Finnish automobile insurance market in question. However, different subgroups of policyholders show signs of asymmetric information: After controlling for the pricing variables, policyholders with an automobile insurance policy with the largest coverage show a positive correlation between buying automobile insurance and motor liability insurance claims whereas policyholders with an automobile insurance policy with the third largest coverage show a negative coverage-claims correlation. However, the results from different regression specifications regarding different automobile insurance coverages were not unanimous and thus the results are left ambiguous. In addition, new policyholders considered as experienced drivers show a negative correlation between motor liability insurance claims and having automobile insurance coverage. On the contrary, policyholders considered as experienced drivers with 1–2 years of company experience do not show signs of asymmetric information. The result suggests that the insurer learns from its repeat customers as signs of informational asymmetry disappear over time. Moreover, policyholders considered as unexperienced drivers do not show signs of asymmetric information regardless of the length of their customership in the firm. The results are in line with previous research.

The determinants of FDI have been a topic of interest in economics since the 1980s and this paper aims to contribute to this field. This study aims to measure how associated FDI is with the political risk as well as to see the extent of this relationship in Turkey in the years 1996–2017. The political risk is measured as a change in indexes that are provided by the World Bank, Freedom House, and Transparency International. These political indicators are Political Rights, Civil Liberties, the Corruption Perceptions Index, Regulatory Quality, Voice and Accountability, Rule of Law, Government Effectiveness, Control of Corruption, and Political Stability. The earlier literature on FDI and political risks is mostly empirical and there has not been much theoretical research. Chakrabarti analyzed the past studies on FDI and its determinants in 2001 and found out that in the earlier research, almost every explanatory variable of FDI except the market size was sensitive to small changes in the conditioning information set, casting doubt on the robustness of the results. There have also been conducted studies that address political risk or equivalent concepts. The 2005 research of Busse and Hefeker had the same topic as this paper but their data consisted of many countries and they employed two different panel models. One was a fixed-effects panel analysis while the other utilized a generalized method of moments estimator. I selected three model specifications for the time-series regression analysis. All three specifications have market size as a control variable and the other two also have the economy’s growth rate and trade openness. The third has the inflation rate as the final control variable. The data have a small number of observations which limits the options available for the empirical part of the study. Out of the nine political indicators, Regulatory Quality is the only political indicator that is not associated with FDI, while the results on the Corruption Perceptions Index and Control of Corruption are inconclusive. The rest six are associated with FDI. The Rule of Law index has the highest estimated coefficient value of the World Bank indicators and the Political Rights index has the highest estimated coefficient value of the Freedom House’s indicators.

This thesis evaluates the effects of entry on incumbent firms' prices and procedures volume in dental care markets using difference-in-differences regression and administrative data on private dental care visits reimbursed by the Social Insurance Institution of Finland. The entry is considered as a competition increasing shock. The entrant's prices were remarkably low at the time of the entry and the firm was able to acquire a large share of volume in common procedures performed at the market. Thus, the entrant offered a real low-cost alternative to the residents of the Capital Region. I focus on examinations and fillings, which are two of the most common procedures. Patients face switching costs when changing their dental care provider. This means that incumbent firms with locked-in customers might be able to accommodate the entry easier, than without the switching costs. The results show that incumbent firms do not lower their prices in response to the entry by economically significant amount. However, the results suggest that incumbent firms perform less fillings after the entry. The effect is driven by summer months. The pattern where the incumbent firms do not change their prices and lose a share of their turnover to the entrant is consistent with the theoretical switching costs literature.

In this thesis, a conditional BVARX forecasting model for short and medium term economic forecasting is developed. The model is especially designed for small-open economies and its performance on forecasting several Finnish economic variables is assessed. Particular attention is directed to the hyperparameter choice of the model. A novel algorithm for hyperparameter choice is proposed and it is shown to outperform the marginal likelihood based approach often encountered in the literature. Other prominent features of the model include conditioning on predictive densities and exogeneity of the global economic variables. The model is shown to outperform univariate benchmark models in terms of forecasting accuracy for forecasting horizons up to eight quarters ahead.

I study whether modest copayment increases affect the general practitioner (GP) use in Finland, a country with relatively low copayments, low inequality, and an extensive welfare state. I also examine whether the estimates are driven by certain low–income groups considered to be economically vulnerable. The Finnish Government allowed municipalities to increase copayments in 2015 and 2016 by 9.5% and 27.5% respectively. At maximum, this meant that the copayment for a GP visit was 20.90 euros at the beginning of 2016, approximately 40% higher than at the end of 2014. Almost all municipalities made the 9.5% increase at the start of 2015, but some of them decided not to make the 27.5% increase at all or made smaller increases. I exploit this variation by estimating two–way fixed effects regression models, and I use population–wide administrative data containing all primary healthcare visits in 2013–2018 and socioeconomic information on patients. In the models, copayment increases are negatively associated with both GP use and median waiting times. Based on the means of estimates from several specifications, the 27.5% increase alone is associated with a 2% decrease in visits per resident in the first four quarters after the change and a 6% decrease thereafter. The estimates are not statistically significant. The median waiting times decrease by two days in the first year after the change and five days thereafter, and these results are significant. When I estimate the effects of both increases, the means of estimates are now a 5% decrease in visits per resident in the first four quarters after the last increase and an 8% decrease thereafter. Some of the estimates are statistically significant. I find no evidence to support the hypothesis that the low–income groups were more sensitive to the increases. However, the confidence intervals are wide across the study, suggesting that the design may be underpowered to detect small effects from zero. Moreover, the point estimates are surprisingly far from zero, which is especially surprising when upper income quintiles are concerned. Therefore, more evidence is needed to be able to make firm conclusions about the causal effects of policy changes.

Wage discrimination occurs when employees of equal productivity receive different wages due to characteristics such as ethnicity, sex, or nationality, which do not affect their productivity directly. One of the common challenges in empirical research on wages has always been the challenge of determining individual employees` productivity. Professional sports leagues such as NBA (National Basketball Association) provide an ideal setting for the study of salary discrimination, as the salaries, players` backgrounds, and different statistical measures of players` performance throughout their whole careers are available publicly. Therefore, economists have used professional sports leagues when studying salary discrimination by ethnicity or nationality. The objective of this research is to find out whether salary discrimination by nationality occurs in the NBA during the period between 2016 and 2018. The research consists of a literature review that introduces previous findings on salary discrimination by nationality in the NBA, and an empirical part which aim is to find out whether this discrimination still occurs in the 2016 – 2018. The dataset of this thesis consists of statistics that measure NBA players' on-court performance and salary during the 2016 – 2017 and 2017 – 2018 seasons, as well as their nationality, and physical attributes. The empirical analysis is carried out using linear regression-analysis, which has been a standard in previous researches on salary discrimination by nationality in the NBA. Moreover, this study applies Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, which is one of the standard tools used in salary discrimination studies in general. The statistical analysis of this study does not find discrimination by nationality against either foreign or domestic born NBA-players during our sample period. Nevertheless, foreign players earn, on average, around USD 500,000.00 higher annual salaries than their American contemporaries. However, according to our analysis, this difference is explained by foreign players' on-court performance rather than their nationality. Some previous researches find that foreign players from large economic markets receive sizeable salary premiums due to marketing possibilities in their home countries. However, this study does not find the market size of a player's home country to have a statistically significant effect on their salaries. The earliest literature on salary discrimination by nationality in the NBA dates back to the 1990s. Over the years, the results of previous researches have varied between foreign or domestic players being discriminated against by nationality. However, as different tools for statistical analysis on player performance have improved drastically and basketball has indeed become a global sport over the years, it seems that discrimination by nationality does not occur in the NBA anymore in 2019.

We consider a so-called principal-agent problem, where our aim is to construct an optimal contract that maximises utilities for the contractor, the principal, and for the effort-exerting party, the agent. In our setting, the time-horizon of the contract is infinite, and the agent receives a continuously paid compensation for exerting effort. Our main goal is to establish a problem introduced in Sannikov (2008) and characterise an optimal contract by restricting the menu of feasible contracts, an approach inspired by Cvitanic et. al. (2018) We begin with an extensive literature review, where we review the continuous-time principal-agent problems and further motivate the scope of this thesis. We start from the notable article Holmström et. al. (1987), and we progress towards the works Williams (2008), Sannikov (2008) and Cvitanic et. al. (2018) Following the review, we construct the problem and lay the mathematical foundations for it. We focus on a new benchmark setting, adapted from Sannikov (2008) and Cvitanic et. al. (2018). We first define the so-called controlled state equation, and construct the canonical probability space. Then, we introduce then impose few assumptions regarding the core concepts, and identify the problems of the agent and the principal and characterise their objective functions. After characterising the problem, we characterise the optimal contract and show that the optimal contract maximises the principal's profit. We characterise the difference function of Sannikov (2008) to the agent's optimisation problem, and then follow Cvitanic et. al. (2018) on the reduction of the problem. The reduction is done by restricting the possible menu of contracts and thus reduce the non-standard problem to a dynamic programming problem. We introduce the corresponding Hamiltonian functionals, together with the value functions to the both principal and the agent. Furthermore, we introduce a family restricted processes, which we show to characterise the optimal contract. We finish with showing that the optimal contract exists even with the notion of retirement. Having completed the main technical contribution, that is, having solved for the optimal contract, we briefly discuss the results and their implications against previous literature. Additionally, we discuss the possible extensions to our research.

In this thesis, I analyze the causes and consequences of the Asian Crisis 1997 and simulate it with Dynare. The model includes financial accelerator mechanism, which in part explains the dynamics and the magnitude of the crisis via balance sheet effects. I find that the major components of the crisis were highly similar to other crisis that had happened in other emerging economies: High levels of foreign-currency denominated debt, unsound financial regulation, and fixed exchange rates with skewed valuation. Even though this simulation do not specifically incorporated different exchange rate regimes into the simulation, the previous literature draw a clear conclusion that flexible exchange rates lessen the shock’s effects on the economy. Thailand, as well as other ASEAN-countries during the crisis, faced severe economic contraction as well as changes in political landscape: Due to the crisis, Thailand’s GDP contracted over 10 percent, the country lost almost a million jobs, and the stock exchange index fell 75 percent. In addition, the country underwent riots, resignation of ministers, and several political changes towards more democratic institutions, even though faced some backlash and re-entry of authoritarian figures later. As the crisis worsened, IMF collected a large rescue package that was given to ASEAN-countries with preconditioned austerity policies. The simulation with recalibrated parameter-values seems to be relatively accurate. The dynamics and the impact of the crisis is captured realistically with correct magnitudes. The financial accelerator mechanism accounts a large part of the shock’s impact on investment and companies net worth, but do not account much on overall decline in output.