Im Jahr 2017, 13 Jahre nachdem das ICMJE die prospektive Protokollregistrierung zur Notwendigkeit für zuverlässige klinische Studien erklärt hat, ist die Häufigkeit und Qualität der Studienregistrierung im Bereich der PONV-Forschung sehr gering. Für nur ein Fünftel der seit dem Jahr 2004 publizierten klinischen Studien, die in den 2020 veröffentlichten PONV Cochrane Review aufgenommen wurden, wurden Studienprotokolle registriert. Von diesen waren fast zwei Drittel retrospektiv registriert. Schlussendlich konnten weniger als 50% der prospektiv registrierten Studien als frei von Bias bei der selektiven Endpunktberichterstattung identifiziert werden. Dies ist ein alarmierendes Defizit. Diese Arbeit zeigt auch, dass registrierte Studien im Allgemeinen häufiger mit einem niedrigen Gesamtbiasrisiko beurteilt wurden. Dies legt die Studienregistrierung als Qualitätskriterium für RCTs in der klinischen PONV-Forschung nahe. Bias durch selektive Endpunktberichterstattung verringert die Vertrauenswürdigkeit von Studienergebnissen. Wissenschaftler*innen und Kliniker*innen sollten sich darüber im Klaren sein, dass nur die Adhärenz bezüglich einer adäquaten Protokollregistrierung und die transparente Berichterstattung über vordefinierte Endpunkte, unabhängig von Richtung und Bedeutung deren Ergebnisse, letztlich die Evidenz der PONV-Forschung in der Zukunft stärken kann. / In 2017, 13 years after the ICMJE declared prospective protocol registration a necessity for reliable clinical studies, the frequency and quality of trial registration in the field of PONV research is very poor. Only one fifth of the clinical trials published in 2004 or later and included in the recently published Cochrane review referenced a registered trial protocol of which almost two third were registered retrospectively. In the end, of the prospectively registered trials less than 50% were free of selective outcome reporting bias. This is an alarming deficit. This work also showed that registered trials in general were more frequently judged as overall low risk of bias regarding the Cochrane Risk of Bias assessment, suggesting trial registration as a quality criterion for RCTs in PONV clinical research. Selective outcome reporting reduces trustworthiness in findings of clinical trials. Investigators and clinicians should be aware that only following a properly registered protocol and transparently reporting of predefined outcomes, regardless of the direction and significance of the result, will ultimately strengthen the body of evidence in the field of PONV research in the future.

This dissertation consists of three stand-alone but interrelated empirical studies investigating various aspects of the well-documented ??home bias anomaly?? in international investment. The findings help to understand the international investment allocation behaviour of mutual funds as well as their implications for asset pricing and mutual fund evaluation. The first study investigates the roles of various firm attributes that encapsulate the deadweight costs in determining firm level investment bias. The main findings suggest that firm characteristics related to transaction costs, corporate governance and information asymmetry create significant barriers for fund managers. In addition, foreign funds are more constrained than domestic funds by information asymmetry, even in developed and liberalized markets. Moreover, this study stylises the international investment allocation model in Cooper and Kaplanis (1986) with a quadratic cost function, which reveals the marginal influence of market level deadweight costs on the relationship between firm characteristics and investment bias. It is found that when market level cross-border barriers are exacerbated, as in the case of emerging and restricted financial markets, foreign fund managers become more sensitive to market level deadweight costs and ignore firm characteristics. In general, these findings imply that the market level ??home bias anomaly?? is an outcome of the complementary effects of investment barriers at both firm and market levels. The second study examines the role of firm level investment bias in predicting future stock returns. It is found that both firm level foreign and domestic biases contain valuable information with respect to firm prospects. However, domestic bias is more informative than foreign bias in terms of subsequent stock returns, partially because of information asymmetry. The third study explores the determinants of fund level investment bias and its ability to predict fund performance. It is found that fund portfolio attributes determine fund level investment biases after controlling for market and fund investment objective specific effects, and fund level investment bias is positively related to fund performance due to lower deadweight costs. Moreover, good macroeconomic environments foster the development of the mutual fund industry.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse international financial integration. Chapter 2 investigates the determinants of international financial integration. Variables including the capital control policy dummy variable, openness to international trade, domestic credit and economic growth are candidates for explaining variation in the degree of international financial integration. Chapter 3 analyses cointegration between the US and several European Union equity markets. Between 1993 and 1998, there is mixed evidence of cointegration ties with the US equity market. Over the period covering the introduction of the euro, most of the European markets did not show any evidence of cointegration with the US market. Granger causality tests reveal significant causality running from the US to the European markets. Chapter 4 estimates time series of market and idiosyncratic volatilities for the firms composing the index DJ Eurostoxx 50 following the volatility decomposition method of Campbell et al. (2001). There was a positive trend in both market and firm-level volatility and average correlation among firms has increased. This contrasts with the US evidence in Campbell et al. (2001) of a strong positive trend in firm-level volatility, no trend in market volatility and a decrease in the average correlation. Results confirm a statistically significant market risk-return trade-off and that firm-level volatility has no predictive power for subsequent market returns. Chapter 5 analyses the link between FDI and economic growth using panel data. FDI has a stronger positive impact on economic growth in countries with higher levels of education attainment, those that are more open to international trade, have better stock market development and lower rates of population growth and levels of risk. Chapter 6 investigates the determinants of the home bias. Results indicate that capital controls and transaction costs are factors driving the home bias of Australian equity portfolio investment. The home bias lessens if the bilateral trade is higher. Australian investors invest a higher share of their portfolio in countries with better institutions and larger market size.

<p>Svenson (2009) har visat att olycksrisker, restidsvinster ochinbromsningshastigheter i trafiken skattas med systematiska fel.Svensons studier har replikerats i denna studie för att se om de biassom tidigare upptäckts består. Studien undersöker också om det finnsen korrelation mellan storleken på bias och resultatet på subjectivenumeracy scale (SNS). Fagerlin et al. (2007) utvecklade SNS som ettverktyg för att mäta den subjektiva upplevelsen av en personsnumeracy. I denna undersökning har SNS översatts till svenska frånengelska och skalegenskaperna för den svenska versionen har ocksåundersökts. Undersökningen har gjorts via en enkät besvarad av 61undersökningsdeltagare. Resultaten visar att bias består och att ingenkorrelation finns mellan storleken på det fel en person gör ochdennes poäng på SNS-skalan. Intressant är att upplevelsen av högnumeracy alltså inte tycks vara till någon hjälp för att skattatrafikproblemen mer korrekt. Problemet med hur det lämpligast lärsut hur bättre bedömningar av trafikproblem, av betydelse förtrafiksäkerheten på våra vägar, görs är en utmaning för framtidaforskning.</p>

<p>This thesis consists of three self-contained essays in the fields of banking and portfolio choice.</p><p>Banking and Optimal Reserves in an Equilibrium Model:</p><p>I address the question of reserves in banking, particularly the fact that reserves are substantially larger than the stipulated reserve requirements by Bank of International Settlements. My contribution is to show that when the underlying values of borrowers are correlated, banks should hold positive reserves, regardless of the regulation. I use a derived distribution for debt portfolios to show that intermediation in a debt market will outperform direct lending, even if intermediaries are allowed to default. The model used is a generalization of Williamson (1986), with Costly State Verification as asymmetric information. By using a factor model for the value of entrepreneurs' projects, I introduce a positive probability for banks to default. It is shown that, in equilibrium, banks choose to hold capital reserves that are almost large enough to eliminate the expected auditing cost for their depositors. The reason is that auditing does not provide any utility and hence, the cake to be split between banks and depositors is enlarged by reserves as an insurance against bad outcomes. It is also shown that the more correlation there is in the debt portfolio, the larger is the optimal reserve level. This could explain why small regional banks in Sweden often have more than twice the reserve level of their nation-wide competitors.</p><p>Optimal Rebalancing of Portfolio Weights under Time-varying Return Volatility:</p><p>This paper considers horizon effects on portfolio weights under time varying and forecastable return volatility. The return volatility is modeled as a GARCH-M, which is sufficiently general to encompass both constant and time varying means. The analysis confirms earlier results, namely that there are no horizon effects when the stochastic process, which governs asset returns, has a constant mean. However, when time varying and forecastable volatility is included in the mean equation, there are horizon effects. I show three features to be of importance for the horizon effect: First, the size of the parameter on conditional volatility in the mean equation and second, persistence in conditional volatility. Third, the asymmetry in volatility has some effect. In addition, the parameter of relative risk aversion is important. For low levels of risk aversion, only very small effects on portfolio weights are present; when the level of risk aversion increases, so does the effects on portfolio weights. Portfolio weights increase for the first 2-3 years when the investment horizon is increased; the total effect slightly exceeds 10%.</p><p>Can Parameter Uncertainty Help Solve the Home Bias Puzzle?</p><p>A well-known puzzle in international finance is the equity home bias. This paper illustrates a mechanism where exchange rate estimation risk causes equity home bias. Estimation risk is introduced into a standard mean-variance portfolio framework by having return time series with different lengths. We argue that the exchange rate return history, which is a part of the local currency return on a foreign investment, is likely to be substantially shorter than the available return histories of equity indices due to, for example, exchange rate regime shifts. To econometrically deal with return histories of different lengths we utilize a framework devised by Stambaugh (1997). The impact of estimation risk on an optimal portfolio is tested with data from Sweden and the U.S. Our results suggest that explicitly accounting for estimation risk causes the domestic investor to increase his fraction of domestic assets. While the introduction of exchange rate estimation risk is not powerful enough to explain the whole home bias observed in data, the results of this paper illustrate a mechanism that is often overlooked in discussions of international portfolio diversification.</p>

<p>Cognitive theories claim that phobias involve unconscious processing and that anxious individuals search the environment for threatening stimuli and therefore detect them more rapidly. However, evidence for this is mixed and suggests that anxious individuals do not detect threat more accurately but are more liberal to report that they detected threat even if there was no actual threat (response bias). In this study, 55 women performed a detection task with pictures of snakes, spiders, and guns. The pictures were backward masked to reduce their visibility. Participants also filled in questionnaires that assessed their fear and disgust. As found in previous studies, detection performance did not correlate with fear. However, inconsistent with previous results, disgust sensitivity correlated with lower detection performance of snakes, and response biases varied with fear of spiders or snakes. These findings provide mixed support for notions of relationships between fear and disgust in threat detection.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-112).

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays in the fields of banking and portfolio choice. Banking and Optimal Reserves in an Equilibrium Model: I address the question of reserves in banking, particularly the fact that reserves are substantially larger than the stipulated reserve requirements by Bank of International Settlements. My contribution is to show that when the underlying values of borrowers are correlated, banks should hold positive reserves, regardless of the regulation. I use a derived distribution for debt portfolios to show that intermediation in a debt market will outperform direct lending, even if intermediaries are allowed to default. The model used is a generalization of Williamson (1986), with Costly State Verification as asymmetric information. By using a factor model for the value of entrepreneurs' projects, I introduce a positive probability for banks to default. It is shown that, in equilibrium, banks choose to hold capital reserves that are almost large enough to eliminate the expected auditing cost for their depositors. The reason is that auditing does not provide any utility and hence, the cake to be split between banks and depositors is enlarged by reserves as an insurance against bad outcomes. It is also shown that the more correlation there is in the debt portfolio, the larger is the optimal reserve level. This could explain why small regional banks in Sweden often have more than twice the reserve level of their nation-wide competitors. Optimal Rebalancing of Portfolio Weights under Time-varying Return Volatility: This paper considers horizon effects on portfolio weights under time varying and forecastable return volatility. The return volatility is modeled as a GARCH-M, which is sufficiently general to encompass both constant and time varying means. The analysis confirms earlier results, namely that there are no horizon effects when the stochastic process, which governs asset returns, has a constant mean. However, when time varying and forecastable volatility is included in the mean equation, there are horizon effects. I show three features to be of importance for the horizon effect: First, the size of the parameter on conditional volatility in the mean equation and second, persistence in conditional volatility. Third, the asymmetry in volatility has some effect. In addition, the parameter of relative risk aversion is important. For low levels of risk aversion, only very small effects on portfolio weights are present; when the level of risk aversion increases, so does the effects on portfolio weights. Portfolio weights increase for the first 2-3 years when the investment horizon is increased; the total effect slightly exceeds 10%. Can Parameter Uncertainty Help Solve the Home Bias Puzzle? A well-known puzzle in international finance is the equity home bias. This paper illustrates a mechanism where exchange rate estimation risk causes equity home bias. Estimation risk is introduced into a standard mean-variance portfolio framework by having return time series with different lengths. We argue that the exchange rate return history, which is a part of the local currency return on a foreign investment, is likely to be substantially shorter than the available return histories of equity indices due to, for example, exchange rate regime shifts. To econometrically deal with return histories of different lengths we utilize a framework devised by Stambaugh (1997). The impact of estimation risk on an optimal portfolio is tested with data from Sweden and the U.S. Our results suggest that explicitly accounting for estimation risk causes the domestic investor to increase his fraction of domestic assets. While the introduction of exchange rate estimation risk is not powerful enough to explain the whole home bias observed in data, the results of this paper illustrate a mechanism that is often overlooked in discussions of international portfolio diversification.

Svenson (2009) har visat att olycksrisker, restidsvinster ochinbromsningshastigheter i trafiken skattas med systematiska fel.Svensons studier har replikerats i denna studie för att se om de biassom tidigare upptäckts består. Studien undersöker också om det finnsen korrelation mellan storleken på bias och resultatet på subjectivenumeracy scale (SNS). Fagerlin et al. (2007) utvecklade SNS som ettverktyg för att mäta den subjektiva upplevelsen av en personsnumeracy. I denna undersökning har SNS översatts till svenska frånengelska och skalegenskaperna för den svenska versionen har ocksåundersökts. Undersökningen har gjorts via en enkät besvarad av 61undersökningsdeltagare. Resultaten visar att bias består och att ingenkorrelation finns mellan storleken på det fel en person gör ochdennes poäng på SNS-skalan. Intressant är att upplevelsen av högnumeracy alltså inte tycks vara till någon hjälp för att skattatrafikproblemen mer korrekt. Problemet med hur det lämpligast lärsut hur bättre bedömningar av trafikproblem, av betydelse förtrafiksäkerheten på våra vägar, görs är en utmaning för framtidaforskning.

Cognitive theories claim that phobias involve unconscious processing and that anxious individuals search the environment for threatening stimuli and therefore detect them more rapidly. However, evidence for this is mixed and suggests that anxious individuals do not detect threat more accurately but are more liberal to report that they detected threat even if there was no actual threat (response bias). In this study, 55 women performed a detection task with pictures of snakes, spiders, and guns. The pictures were backward masked to reduce their visibility. Participants also filled in questionnaires that assessed their fear and disgust. As found in previous studies, detection performance did not correlate with fear. However, inconsistent with previous results, disgust sensitivity correlated with lower detection performance of snakes, and response biases varied with fear of spiders or snakes. These findings provide mixed support for notions of relationships between fear and disgust in threat detection.