Effects of subsidizing the first employee – Empirical evidence from Finland

Small businesses form a significant share of all businesses and employ a large share of all employees. Therefore, governments are often interested in subsidizing them and especially employment in smaller firms. Nonemployer firms have received special interest, especially in Finland, due to their large share of all businesses. It has been argued that the government should encourage them to hire by subsidizing employment. However, there is no evidence on the effectiveness of such policies. In general, there is surprisingly little evidence on how small firms react to employment subsidies or of employment subsidies targeted according to firm characteristics. The subject of this thesis is the effects of subsidizing the first employee. While theoretical background suggests the subsidy might have efficiency gains, because there might be market inefficiencies that lead to too little employment in small firms. The focus of this research, however, is on the empirical evidence. There was a regional subsidy for hiring the first employee in Finland between 2007 and 2011. Nonemployer firms in the subsidy area were eligible for a wage subsidy for two years when they hired the first employee. The design of the subsidy enables studying the effects in a natural experiment framework that are nowadays popular in public economics. It can be shown that the area without the subsidy provides a good counterfactual to the area where the subsidy was available. Therefore, the effects of the subsidy can be estimated with difference-in-differences method. This method compares the change in the subsidy area to the change in the area without the subsidy. The data used is firm level data spanning from 2000 to 2013. The data is provided by the Finnish Tax Administration including tax declarations by all Finland based companies. The effects for hiring decisions are estimated by examining the effects for alternative variables such as employment, wage expenditure and turnover. According to the results, the subsidy did not have statistically significant effect on any of the variables of interest. Therefore, it can be concluded that the subsidy did not increase hires in nonemployer firms. This implies that the labour demand elasticity of nonemployer firms is very small. The results are in line with previous literature on the effectiveness of general employment subsidies in Scandinavia that suggest that labour demand elasticity is rather small resulting in small or no effects of employment subsidies. However, my research provides new evidence on labour demand of nonemployer firms especially that has not been studied before. The results are in line with the observation that most nonemployer firms are self-employed persons who are not interested in growing their business to employ others as well, but only provide for themselves. Because of this employment subsidies to the self-employed are not particularly well targeted. The theoretical grounds for the subsidy actually hold for other small firms as well, so it can be argued the subsidy would be more effective if it was extended for hiring the first few employees.

Modeling reaction kinetics and mass transfer in ozonation in water solutions

This dissertation is based on four articles dealing with modeling of ozonation. The literature part of this considers some models for hydrodynamics in bubble column simulation. A literature review of methods for obtaining mass transfer coefficients is presented. The methods presented to obtain mass transfer are general models and can be applied to any gas-liquid system. Ozonation reaction models and methods for obtaining stoichiometric coefficients and reaction rate coefficients for ozonation reactions are discussed in the final section of the literature part. In the first article, ozone gas-liquid mass transfer into water in a bubble column was investigated for different pH values. A more general method for estimation of mass transfer and Henry’s coefficient was developed from the Beltrán method. The ozone volumetric mass transfer coefficient and the Henry’s coefficient were determined simultaneously by parameter estimation using a nonlinear optimization method. A minor dependence of the Henry’s law constant on pH was detected at the pH range 4 - 9. In the second article, a new method using the axial dispersion model for estimation of ozone self-decomposition kinetics in a semi-batch bubble column reactor was developed. The reaction rate coefficients for literature equations of ozone decomposition and the gas phase dispersion coefficient were estimated and compared with the literature data. The reaction order in the pH range 7-10 with respect to ozone 1.12 and 0.51 the hydroxyl ion were obtained, which is in good agreement with literature. The model parameters were determined by parameter estimation using a nonlinear optimization method. Sensitivity analysis was conducted using object function method to obtain information about the reliability and identifiability of the estimated parameters. In the third article, the reaction rate coefficients and the stoichiometric coefficients in the reaction of ozone with the model component p-nitrophenol were estimated at low pH of water using nonlinear optimization. A novel method for estimation of multireaction model parameters in ozonation was developed. In this method the concentration of unknown intermediate compounds is presented as a residual COD (chemical oxygen demand) calculated from the measured COD and the theoretical COD for the known species. The decomposition rate of p-nitrophenol on the pathway producing hydroquinone was found to be about two times faster than the p-nitrophenol decomposition rate on the pathway producing 4- nitrocatechol. In the fourth article, the reaction kinetics of p-nitrophenol ozonation was studied in a bubble column at pH 2. Using the new reaction kinetic model presented in the previous article, the reaction kinetic parameters, rate coefficients, and stoichiometric coefficients as well as the mass transfer coefficient were estimated with nonlinear estimation. The decomposition rate of pnitrophenol was found to be equal both on the pathway producing hydroquinone and on the path way producing 4-nitrocathecol. Comparison of the rate coefficients with the case at initial pH 5 indicates that the p-nitrophenol degradation producing 4- nitrocathecol is more selective towards molecular ozone than the reaction producing hydroquinone. The identifiability and reliability of the estimated parameters were analyzed with the Marcov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. @All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.

UHPLC-epäpuhtausmenetelmän kehittäminen ja validointi inhalaatiovalmisteelle

Tämän diplomityön tarkoituksena on kehittää menetelmä, jolla voidaan seurata inhalaatiovalmisteen sisältämiä epäpuhtauksia. Menetelmä kehitetään erittäin korkean suorituskyvyn kromatografialaitteistolle (Ultra High Performance Liquid Chromatography, UHPLC) jo olemassa olevan HPLC-epäpuhtausmenetelmän pohjalta. Uusi menetelmä kehitetään analyysiajan lyhentämiseksi ja erotuksen resoluution parantamiseksi. Työn kirjallisuusosa esittelee lyhyesti inhalaatiovalmisteet sekä nestekromatografian perusteet. Korkean erotuskyvyn nestekromatografia ja analysoinnin apuna käytettävät parametrit selvitetään laskukaavoineen. Kirjallisuusosa keskittyy epäpuhtausmenetelmän kehittämisen kulkuun ja menetelmän validoinnissa suoritettaviin kokeisiin. Soveltavassa osassa Orion Oyj:n kehitteillä olevalle kahden vaikuttavan aineen inhalaatiovalmisteelle kehitetään UHPLC-epäpuhtausmenetelmä kirjallisuusosiossa esitellyn menetelmäkehitysrungon pohjalta. Menetelmäkehityksen kulku ja analyysin olosuhteiden valinta esitellään pääpiirteittäin, jonka jälkeen kehitetty menetelmä validoidaan sille tehdyn validointisuunnitelman mukaisesti. Kehitetystä UHPLC-epäpuhtausmenetelmästä saatiin 16 minuuttia lyhyempi kuin vastaava HPLC-epäpuhtausmenetelmä. Myös analyysin resoluutio parantui merkittävästi. Toistuvien injektioiden jälkeen kromatogrammissa esiintyi kuitenkin häntimistä, joka johti merkittävään resoluution heikkenemiseen. Häntimisen syyksi epäiltiin toisen vaikuttavan aineen kiinnittymistä kolonnimateriaaliin, mutta sen estämiseksi ehdotetut toimenpiteet eivät sopineet kehitettyyn menetelmään.