Kenneth Carling

Kenneth Carling
Dalarna University · Department of Data and Information Management

PhD, Full professor

About

106
Publications
127,401
Reads
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2,114
Citations
Introduction
I am at the Dalarna University where I hold a full professorship in Microdata Analysis. I serve as program manager for two Master's programs in Business Intelligence and Data Science, respectively. My mind is truely interdisciplinary, but it is my background in philosophy, computing and statistics that I feed in to the collaborative research I opt for. Today transportation and mobility has my focus. Tomorrow? I have no idea.
Additional affiliations
August 2003 - December 2008
University of Gävle
Position
  • guest lecturer
January 2003 - December 2006
Sveriges Riksbank
Position
  • Guest Researcher
February 2001 - August 2017
Dalarna University
Position
  • Professor (Full)
Education
August 1991 - March 1995
Uppsala University
Field of study
  • PhD Statistics

Publications

Publications (106)
Article
Full-text available
The techniques of exploratory data analysis include a resistant rule, based on a linear combination of quartiles, for the identification of outliers. This paper shows that the substitution of the quartiles with the median leads to a better performance in the non-Gaussian case. The improvment occurs in terms of resistance and efficiency, and an outs...
Article
Full-text available
The p-median model is used to locate P centers to serve a geographically distributed population. A cornerstone of such a model is the measure of distance between a service center and demand points, i.e. the location of the population (customers, pupils, patients, and so on). Evidence supports the current practice of using Euclidean distance. Howeve...
Article
Full-text available
To finance transportation infrastructure and to address social and environmental negative externalities of road transports, several countries have recently introduced or consider a distance based tax on trucks. In competitive retail and transportation markets, such tax can be expected to lower the demand and thereby reduce CO2 emissions of road tra...
Article
Full-text available
There is extant research on theorization, conceptualization, determinants, and consequences of corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, what firms include in their CSR or sustainability reports are much less covered and are predominantly covered in case studies of individual firms. In this paper, we instead take a holistic view and simultane...
Article
Full-text available
Using data from 2001–2012, the effects of IKEA entry in four Swedish municipalities, 2004–2007, on labor productivity in durable goods retailing is investigated using synthetic control methods. We contribute to the literature on synthetic control methods by considering parametric specifications of the intervention effect, which improves the likelih...
Article
We develop a novel and generic text-based measure to classify and evaluate greenhouse gas (GHG) disclosures. We construct the measure using collocation analysis of GHG-related words and regular expressions. Automated implementation achieved high concordance compared to manual investigations. We move beyond the “bag-of-words” approach in classifying...
Article
Full-text available
Transport is a global phenomenon with regional and local impacts. It involves a multitude of actors, and today there is increasing pressure for transport chains to be environmentally sustainable, predictable, seamless, and cost-efficient. An end-to-end transport most often actually engages multiple transport modes involving visits to various transp...
Preprint
Purpose: The paper contributes to the debate if voluntary non-financial disclosures, such as greenhouse gas (GHG) disclosures in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, exhibit accountability or are merely greenwashing. If firms exhibit accountability, does it translate into actions observable, e.g., as country-level real changes in GHG em...
Article
Let us consider a cooperative group of decision-makers striving to strategise against failing to attain a goal. The risk of failure depends on external factors and the decision-makers' assessment and acceptance of risk. Furthermore, the setting is complex, e.g., due to multiple objectives and criteria, making it difficult for the individual decisio...
Chapter
The issue of data privacy is often reduced to secure data transactions by cryptographic techniques. However, in a liberal democracy the issue of privacy connects to fundamental questions about the co-existence and collaboration between its citizens. One is the conflict between self-interest and the interest of the commons, whereby research on priva...
Chapter
In this chapter, I consider the cognitive biases arising in judgment under uncertainty that jeopardize good decision-making aligned with normative decision theories. This problem raises objections towards intuitive and fast decision-making. It would be appealing if training could be devised for reducing the biases, and I argue that such training is...
Article
Full-text available
The quality of a heuristic solution to a NP-hard combinatorial problem is hard to assess. A few studies have advocated and tested statistical bounds as a method for assessment. These studies indicate that statistical bounds are superior to the more widely known and used deterministic bounds. However, the previous studies have been limited to a few...
Article
Full-text available
A sensitivity analysis to vary the weights of an accurate predictive classification model to produce a mixed model for ranking countries on the risk of food price volatility is carried out in this paper. The classification model is a marginal utility function consisting of multiple criteria. The aim of the sensitivity analysis is to derive a mixed...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Purpose: To explore consumers’ attitudes towards e-commerce, in particular online grocery shopping, and its delivery in non-dense areas for the purpose of designing smart last-mile solutions. Approach: The state-of-the-art of smart e-commerce delivery in dense areas was identified by a review of the literature. It was expected that this knowledge c...
Article
Full-text available
An administrative border might hinder the optimal allocation of a given set of resources by restricting the flow of goods, services, and people. In this paper, we address the question: Do administrative borders lead to poor accessibility to public service? In answering the question, we have examined the case of Sweden and its regional administrativ...
Presentation
Full-text available
This presentation provides the information of the PhD-program such as the curriculum, application and admission procedure, and a recorded webbinar on the risk management of the program.
Article
Full-text available
The synthetic control method (SCM) is a new, popular method to estimate intervention effect when only one single unit has been exposed. Other similar, unexposed units synthesize a control unit to mimic the evolution in the exposed unit, had it not been subject to exposure. As the inference relies on only a single observational unit, the statistical...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Using data from 2001-2012, the effects of IKEA entry in four Swedish municipalities, 2004-2007, on labor productivity in durable goods retailing is investigated using synthetic control methods. We contribute to the literature on synthetic control methods by considering parametric specifications of the intervention effect, which in our case arguably...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
GPS-based data are becoming a cornerstone for real-time transportation applications. Tracking data of vehicles from GPS receivers are however susceptible to measurement errors. The assessment of the reliability of data from GPS receiver is a neglected issue, especially in a real road network setting and in the phase after data transfer but before i...
Article
Full-text available
In a city there are hotspots that attract citizens, and most of the transportation arises when citizens move between their residence and primary destinations (i.e. hotspots). However, an ex ante evaluation of energy-efficient mobility and urban residential planning has seldom been conducted. Therefore, this paper proposes an ex ante evaluation meth...
Article
Full-text available
There are three key actors in forming the sustainable spatial distribution of residency in an area, (local) government, the estate investor and the resident, each with its own objective. Most urban planning studies have mainly focused on the ex-post evaluation of residential development by considering the objective of each actor separately. This pa...
Article
Full-text available
Solutions to combinatorial optimization problems, such as problems of locating facilities, frequently rely on heuristics to minimize the objective function. The optimum is sought iteratively and a criterion is needed to decide when the procedure (almost) attains it. Pre-setting the number of iterations dominates in OR applications, which implies th...
Article
Full-text available
De flesta kommuner erbjuder sommarjobb till gymnasieungdomar. Vi har undersökt om denna arbetslivserfarenhet påverkar flickors framtida arbetsinkomster. Vi följde 1 447 flickor i fem till tolv år efter avslutat gymnasium. Flickorna hade under sitt första gymnasieår ansökt och slumpmässigt tilldelats sommarjobb av Falu kommun. Effekten av sommarjobb...
Article
Full-text available
Regarding the location of a facility, the presumption in the widely used p-median model is that the customer opts for the shortest route to the nearest facility. However, this assumption is problematic on free markets since the customer is presumed to gravitate to a facility by the distance to and the attractiveness of it. The recently introduced g...
Article
Full-text available
Solutions to combinatorial optimization problems frequently rely on heuristics to minimize an objective function. The optimum is sought iteratively and pre-setting the number of iterations dominates in operations research applications, which implies that the quality of the solution cannot be ascertained. Deterministic bounds offer a mean of ascerta...
Technical Report
Full-text available
To finance transportation infrastructure and to address social and environmental negative externalities of road transports, several countries have recently introduced or consider a distance based tax on trucks. In the competitive retail market such tax can be expected to lower the demand and thereby reduce CO2 emissions of road transports. However,...
Article
Full-text available
Public programs offering summer jobs to smooth the transition from school to work is commonplace. However, the empirical support for summer jobs is limited. This paper exploits the availability of registered individual information and random allocation to summer job to provide empirical evidences on this issue. Objectives: To identify the effect o...
Article
Full-text available
The p-median model is used to locate P facilities to serve a geographically distributed population. Conventionally, it is assumed that the population patronize the nearest facility and that the distance between the resident and the facility may be measured by the Euclidean distance. Carling, Han, and Håkansson (2012) compared two network distances...
Technical Report
Full-text available
GPS tracking of mobile objects provides spatial and temporal data for a broad range of applications including traffic management and control as well as transportation routing and planning. Previous transportation research has focused on GPS tracking data as an appealing alternative to travel diaries. Yet, the GPS based data are gradually becoming a...
Technical Report
Full-text available
An administrative border might hinder the optimal allocation of a given set of resources by restricting the flow of goods, services, and people. In this paper we address the question: Do administrative borders lead to poor accessibility to public service such as hospitals? In answering the question, we have examined the case of Sweden and its regio...
Technical Report
Full-text available
We develop a method for empirically measuring the difference in carbon footprint between traditional and online retailing (“e-tailing”) from entry point to a geographical area to consumer residence. The method only requires data on the locations of brick-and-mortar stores, online delivery points, and residences of the region’s population, and on th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Solutions to combinatorial optimization, such as p-median problems of locating facilities, frequently rely on heuristics to minimize the objective function. The minimum is sought iteratively and a criterion is needed to decide when the procedure (almost) attains it. However, pre-setting the number of iterations dominates in OR applications, which i...
Data
Full-text available
The Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU) is a research institute under the Swedish Ministry of Employment, situated in Uppsala. IFAU's objective is to promote, support and carry out scientific evaluations. The assignment includes: the effects of labour market and educational policies, studies of the functioning of t...
Article
Full-text available
Denna artikel visar på en metod för att undersöka hur optimal befolkningens fysiska tillgänglighet till sjukvården är. Detta är relevant med tanke på den svenska storregionala omdaningen som säkerligen kommer provocera fram omprövningar av sjukhusens framtida placering. Med Dalarna som exempel fann vi att en ökning från dagens två till tre optimalt...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The p-median model is commonly used to find optimal locations of facilities for geographically distributed demands. So far, there are few studies that have considered the importance of the road network in the model. However, Han, Håkansson, and Rebreyend (2013) examined the solutions of the p-median model with densities of the road network varying...
Article
Full-text available
In this article, the p-median model is used to find the location of retail stores that minimizes CO2 emissions from consumer travel. The optimal location is then compared with the existing retail location, and the excess CO2 emissions compared with the optimal solution is calculated. The results show that by using the environmentally optimal locati...
Article
Full-text available
The p-median model is used to locate P facilities to serve a geographically distributed population. Conventionally, it is assumed that the population always travels to the nearest facility. and re-estate three arguments on why this assumption might be incorrect, and they introduce the gravity p-median model to relax the assumption. We favor the gra...
Article
Full-text available
In this article we use a method that is handy when investigating how optimal a population's physical access to hospitals is. In Sweden this is a relevant question since regional restructuring most certainly will affect where the future hospitals will be located. By using the region of Dalarna as an example we find that by increasing the present two...
Technical Report
Full-text available
A customer is presumed to gravitate to a facility by the distance to it and the attractiveness of it. However regarding the location of the facility, the presumption is that the customer opts for the shortest route to the nearest facility.This paradox was recently solved by the introduction of the gravity p-median model. The model is yet to be impl...
Article
Full-text available
This paper aims to analyze the GPS traces of 258 volunteers in order to obtain a better understanding of both the human mobility patterns and the mechanism. We report the regular and scaling properties of human mobility for several aspects, and importantly we identify its Levy flight characteristic, which is consistent with those from previous stud...
Article
Full-text available
Location Models are used for planning the location of multiple service centers in order to serve a geographically distributed population. A cornerstone of such models is the measure of distance between the service center and a set of demand points, viz, the location of the population (customers, pupils, patients and so on). Theoretical as well as e...
Article
Full-text available
This paper traces the developments of credit risk modeling in the past 10 years. Our work can be divided into two parts: selecting articles and summarizing results. On the one hand, by constructing an ordered logit model on historical Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes of articles about credit risk modeling, we sort out articles which are t...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we discuss how a regression model, with a non-continuous response variable, which allows for dependency between observations, should be estimated when observations are clustered and measurements on the subjects are repeated. The cluster sizes are assumed to be large. We find that the conventional estimation technique suggested by the...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we discuss how a regression model, with a non-continuous response variable, that allows for dependency between observations should be estimated when observations are clustered and there are repeated measurements on the subjects. The cluster sizes are assumed to be large. We …nd that the conventional estimation technique suggested by t...
Article
Full-text available
Despite a surge in the research efforts put into modeling credit and default risk during the past decade, few studies have incorporated the impact that macroeconomic conditions have on business defaults. In this paper, we estimate a duration model to explain the survival time to default for borrowers in the business loan portfolio of a major Swedis...
Article
Full-text available
In 2001 and 2002, Sweden introduced several unemployment insurance reforms. A major innovation in the first reform was the introduction of a two-tiered benefit structure for some unemployed individuals. This system involved supplementary compensation during the first 20 weeks of unemployment. The 2002 reform retained the two-tiered benefit structur...
Technical Report
Full-text available
I ett antal länder har man på senare tid utvecklat statistiska modeller som ett stöd för förmedlarna att förutsäga vilka arbetslösa som riskerar att bli långtidsarbetslösa, s k profiling. I den här rapporten redovisar vi resultaten av att skatta hasardmodeller för att förutsäga vem som riskerar att bli långtidsarbetslös bland dem som registrerar si...
Technical Report
Full-text available
In this paper, we study the interaction between the real activity and the financial stance empirically. Using aggregate data, we find strong evidence of substantial spillover eects from our financial variable on the real economy. Given this result, we use a large micro data-set for corporate firms to develop a macro-micro model of the interaction b...
Article
Full-text available
Location Models are used to locate n service centers in order to serve a geographically distributed population. A cornerstone of such models is the measure of distance between the service center and a set of demand points, viz, the location of the population (customers, pupils, patients and so on). Evidence support the current practice of using the...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This paper seeks to determine the effect of summer jobs offered by the public sector on high-school students’ labour market achievement by use of quasi-experimental data. Many municipalities in Sweden offer summer jobs within their organizations to high-school students. The municipality of Falun randomly allocates about 200 such summer jobs per yea...
Article
Full-text available
Does the geographical proximity between the borrowing firm and the lending bank, matter in credit risk management? If so, the bank might expose itself to a greater risk by lending to distant firms and should therefore respond by rationing them harder. In this paper, we incorporate geographical credit rationing in a simple theoretical model, and der...
Article
Full-text available
Does the geographical proximity between the borrowing firm and the lending bank, matter in credit risk management? If so, the bank might expose itself to a greater risk by lending to distant firms and should therefore respond by rationing them harder. In this paper, we incorporate geographical credit rationing in a simple theoretical model, and der...
Technical Report
Full-text available
A drawback of available portfolio credit risk models is that they fail to allow for default risk dependency across loans other than through common risk factors. Thereby, thesemodels ignore that close ties can exist between companies due to legal, financial and business relations. In this paper, we integrate the insights from theoretical models of d...