Several decades of leadership research have failed to yield a personality measure that accurately predicts successful leaders (Bernus&Manis, 1985; Stogdill, 1974; Vroom&Yago, 2007; Yukl, 1989). A new implicit measure of personality, the Conditional Reasoning Test for Leadership (CRT-L), shows promise in this endeavor. This project investigated the construct and criterion-related validities of this measure. Previous research on implicit personality measures, and specifically conditional reasoning measures, has demonstrated that their relationship to their explicit measure counterparts tends to be modest or nonexistent. This was the case for the CRT-L, which had no relationship to the NEO Hostility Scale or the Motivation to Lead (MTL) Scale. As expected, the two explicit measures did have a significant and positive relationship (r = .42). The CRT-L was also effective at predicting leadership and power criteria. It had positive and significant relationships with Leadership Peer Nominations (r = .25) and Power Peer Nominations (r = .21) and was more successful in these predictions than either of the explicit measures. The results of this research provide evidence for the effectiveness of the CRT-L as a leadership measure and further validation work is encouraged.

<p>Digital television broadcasters use conditional access (CA) systems to protect some of their services from being viewed by people not subscribing for these services. A manufacturer of digital television receivers develops applications to handle the CA systems that the receiver shall support. A problem for the application developer is that a CA application developed for one specific CA system is usually not reusable for other CA systems because of the differences between CA systems. The CA systems are different in both their application programming interfaces (API) as well as the types of functionality that they support. </p><p>This master thesis presents a study of three APIs from different CA systems. The possibilities of defining a new CA API that supports all the functionality that is provided by existing CA APIs while still being as similar as possible to these existing APIs are investigated. The conclusion from the study is that it is not possible to define this new CA API because the studied CA systems are so different and only small parts of the provided functionality are shared between them.</p>

The purpose of this paper is to generalize regression models for repeated categorical data based on maximizing a conditional likelihood. Some existing methods, such as those proposed by Duncan (1985), Fischer (1989), and Agresti (1993, and 1997) are special cases of this latent variable approach, used to account for dependencies in clustered observations. The generalization concerns the incorporation of rather general data structures such as subject-specific time-dependent covariates, a variable number of observations per subject and time periods of arbitrary length in order to evaluate treatment effects on a categorical response variable via a linear parameterization. The response may be polytomous, ordinal or dichotomous. The main tool is the log-linear representation of appropriately parameterized Rasch-type models, which can be fitted using standard software, e.g., R. The proposed method is applied to data from a psychiatric study on the evaluation of psychobiological variables in the therapy of depression. The effects of plasma levels of the antidepressant drug Clomipramine and neuroendocrinological variables on the presence or absence of anxiety symptoms in 45 female patients are analyzed. The individual measurements of the time dependent variables were recorded on 2 to 11 occasions. The findings show that certain combinations of the variables investigated are favorable for the treatment outcome. (author´s abstract) / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

<p>The Global South, and particularly Latin America, experienced a remarkable expansion in conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in the last fifteen years. Although a large literature examines the effects of CCTs on human development, the political behavioral consequences remain underexplored. In the dissertation, I address this gap by analyzing the effects of CCTs on political participation and policy. I also explore the implications of these effects for human development. </p><p>My central argument is that CCTs increase political participation among beneficiaries, and both program transfers and conditionalities contribute to these positive effects. More specifically, CCTs provide beneficiaries with politically relevant resources, including civic skills and access to state officials and community leaders. These resources reduce the costs of political participation and facilitate more involvement in political activities, particularly in more demanding forms of participation. In addition, I argue that CCTs increase the private provision of local services and influence the outcomes of some non-national elections. </p><p>To test this argument, I use four main sources of data: (1) existing survey data from Latin America in 2012; (2) original survey data from Mexico in 2014; (3) experimental data from Mexico in 1998-2000; and (4) in-depth interviews and focus groups from Mexico in 2012. Multilevel models and linear regression models are used to estimate the effects of CCTs on political behavior and service provision. The in-depth interviews and focus groups help to unravel more of the causal mechanism that connects CCTs to political participation. </p><p>The evidence largely supports my argument. I find that CCTs increase participation in a wide variety of political activities, including electoral and non-electoral activities. In addition, the pathways to increased participation include improved civic skills and increased access to state officials and local leaders. Moreover, CCTs increase the private provision of sewerage services.</p><p>I conclude that CCTs have both desirable and undesirable consequences. On the one hand, CCTs increase democratic political participation, improve civic skills, reduce the distance between beneficiaries and government officials, and increase access to local services. The increased access to sewerage services creates an indirect pathway to improved human development outcomes. On the other hand, CCTs reduce the pressure on local officials to provide local services, and in some contexts contribute to electoral rewards for undeserving incumbent parties.</p> / Dissertation

No description available.

Economics

In this study we analyse the role of speculation in forging cross-market linkages between agriculture, equity and crude oil over the period 1992-2014. The market interdependence of ten U.S. traded agricultural commodities futures is measured through the spillover index of Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012) and the dynamic conditional correlation framework of Engle (2002). Utilising data from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, ve dierent measures of speculation are constructed, which are used to examine the long-run and short-run dynamics between market integration and speculation. To explore time-varying characteristics in this relationship, and as a test for robustness, we perform a sub-sampling analysis for the periods 1992-2006 and 2006-2014. We show that cross-market linkages grew stronger post-2005, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. The results of our econometric analysis indicate that any conclusions regarding the role of speculation in this process are highly sensitive both to the choice of market integration measure, as well as to how the extent of speculation is captured. Overall, though, there is little to indicate that speculation has played an important role in creating cross-market linkages. We do provide some evidence of market integration increasing with market size, but other factors, such as inflation and exchange rates, seem to provide better explanations of agriculture-equity-energy price dynamics. In line with previous research, we also find market interdependence to increase with stock market uncertainty, which suggests that the diversification benefits of commodity futures investments are actually reduced when needed the most. Considered together with our findings on the sizes of markets, which are increasingly made up of speculators, it appears at least possible that financialisation has made food markets more vulnerable to disturbances in financial markets.

In this paper we examine the extent of international trade synchronization during periods of international trade collapses and US recessions. Using dynamic correlations based on monthly trade data for the G7 economies over the period 1961-2011, our results suggest rather idiosyncratic patterns of international trade synchronization during collapses of international trade and US recessions. During the great recession of 2007-2009, however, international trade experienced the most sudden, severe and globally synchronized collapse. (author's abstract)

Στην παρούσα μελέτη εξετάζεται ο εντοπισμός διαρθρωτικών μεταβολών εφαρμόζοντας έναν έλεγχο τύπου σωρευτικών αθροισμάτων τετραγώνων και συγκεκριμένα τη στατιστική των Kokoszka και Leipus σε σειρές αποδόσεων του Χρηματιστηρίου Αθηνών. Η ανάλυση στηρίζεται στην εφαρμογή ενός GARCH (1,1) υποδείγματος. / -

I find evidence of predictability in out-of-sample data for four risk premia using simple econometric models. Two factor return models are used, an APT model and the Wilshire Atlas. I demonstrate that investors can exploit conditioning information to manage their exposures to risk factors. The results suggest that the investment opportunities set changes in a large and an economically significant way. I show that the growth rate in money supply and trend in stock market valuations are the main drivers respectfully of the risk premia associated with the Book-to-Market and Size factors from the Wilshire model. The predictability results are mixed with respect to Business Cycle Theory. At times investors price business cycle risk while at other times they exhibit herding tendencies.