This paper provides a detailed examination of individuals' active participation in a new public and mandatory defined contribution pension system. The new pension system was launched in the fall of 2000 and entitles Sweden's workforce of 4.4 million individuals to invest part of their individual...

Publicly provided health care implies considerable intergenerational redistribution. The possibility of accumulating a fund or debt will affect the degree of redistribution as well as how efficient the financing of health care is. In a voting model we study how governments inability to make...

This paper examines how investor and capital flows into mutual funds in the Swedish pension system are related to fund characteristics. Similarly to U.S. studies, we show that individuals chase past returns and have a strong preference for lower-fee funds. However, our results suggest that past...

We performed a cross-sectional, "bottom-up" observational study of resource consumption and quality of life of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) in the United Kingdom. Three centers participated in the study. Patients received a questionnaire either by mail or during a clinic visit, and a...

We performed a cross-sectional, "bottom-up" observational study of resource consumption and quality of life of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) in Germany. Six centers participated in the study. Patients were asked to complete a questionnaire, and a total of 737 patients returned the...

In order to get a more complete picture of how labor supply is affected by economic incentives, the effects on absenteeism and not just on contracted hours should be taken into account. In particular, absenteeism due to sick leave can be considerable. In this paper we examine whether the level...

The concept of common factors has in the econometrics literature been applied to conditional means or in some cases to conditional variances. In this paper we generalize this concept to bivariate distributions. This is done using the conditional bivariate copula as the statistical tool. The...

This paper contains a forecasting exercise on 30 time series, ranging on several fields, from economy to ecology. The statistical approach to artificial neural networks modelling developed by the author is compared to linear modelling and to other three well-known neural network modelling...

In this paper we examine the forecast accuracy of linear autoregressive, smooth transition autoregressive (STAR), and neural network (NN) time series models for 47 monthly macroeconomic variables of the G7 economies. Unlike previous studies that typically consider multiple but fixed model...

We propose a seasonal cointegration model [SECM] for quarterly data which includes variables with different numbers of unit roots and thus needs to be transformed in different ways in order to yield stationarity. A Monte Carlo simulation is carried out to investigate the consequences of...