[pt] A relação entre risco idiossincrático e o retorno já foi amplamente estudada em diversas publicações internacionais, contudo, os resultados encontrados são controversos. Para o caso brasileiro, estudos sobre este tema são ainda escassos. Este trabalho procura verificar a relação entre o risco idiossincrático e o retorno das ações no mercado brasileiro. Para isso, utilizou-se dois métodos para estimação da volatilidade idiossincrática: um através dos resíduos de regressões baseadas no Modelo de Três Fatores de Fama e French, e o outro através do modelo EGARCH, que forneceu a volatilidade condicional. As variáveis encontradas foram adicionadas a modelos de regressões cross-section, juntamente com outras variáveis específicas às ações, a saber: beta, valor de mercado, índice book-to-market, efeito momentum e liquidez. Os resultados mostram que a volatilidade idiossincrática apresenta influência positiva e significante sobre o retorno, e que o modelo de explicação mais apropriado é o que inclui todas as variáveis citadas, utilizando como variável de volatilidade idiossincrática a estimada segundo o primeiro método citado. / [en] The relationship between idiosyncratic risk and stock returns has been widely studied in various international publications, however, the results are controversial. For the Brazilian case, studies on this subject are still scarce. This work seeks to verify the relationship between idiosyncratic risk and stock returns in the Brazilian stock market. To achieve this goal, two methods to estimating the idiosyncratic volatility were used: one through the residuals of regressions based on the Fama and French Three-Factor Model, and the other one through the EGARCH model, which provided the conditional volatility. These variables were added to cross-section regression models, along with other stock-specific variables, namely: beta, market value, book-to-market ratio, momentum effect and liquidity. The results show that idiosyncratic volatility has positive and significant influence on stock returns, and that the most appropriate model is the one that includes all the mentioned variables.

This thesis explores the occupational health and safety risks facing labour hire employees (also known as temporary agency workers) in the Australian state of Victoria. Three questions are considered. First do labour hire employees face greater risk of injury and disease than direct hire employees? Second, if so, which characteristics of labour hire employment contribute to a higher rate of injury? Third, what characteristics of labour hire employment reduce the likelihood of injured employees returning to work and being rehabilitated? The first question is answered by an aggregate analysis of data drawn from all workers' compensation claim files in Victoria between 1994/5 and 2000/1 contrasting the frequency of injury for both temporary agency employees and direct hire employees. Second a unique sub sample of individual investigated claim files was then examined to test employment factors that could account for the higher frequency of injury amongst agency workers. A third data source involved a survey and focus groups of temporary agency workers. This provided supplementary data on the work experiences of labour hire employees. A number of conclusions are drawn. Labour hire employees are more likely to be injured at work than their direct hire counterparts. Factors explaining this include economic pressures, disorganisation at the host workplace, and regulatory failure for agency employees. Several of these factors are uniquely related to the triangular nature of labour hire arrangements. Once injured at work, labour hire employees are especially disadvantaged relative to direct hire employees through the reluctance of many labour hire employers to offer further employment. This reduces the capacity of labour hire workers to return to meaningful employment. Regulatory failure stemming from both employment and occupational health and safety legislation underpins the greater likelihood of agency workers being injured at work and then dispensed with by employers. Until the uniqueness of their triangular relationship with employers and hosts is recognised through appropriate regulatory intervention, their greater occupational health and safety risks will not be overcome.

This critical hermeneutic study explored what it is like to re-enter the workforce following long-term forensic hospitalisation. An in-depth analysis of the phenomenon was completed, with the aim of evoking insights and developing understandings about the lived return-to-work experience. As this research was situated within the critical paradigm, the process of seeking, securing and sustaining employment was viewed in terms of power relationships, and through the multiple positionings of psychiatric disability, employment status and social capital.An unstructured interview process was used to explore the return-to-work experiences of eight purposefully selected informants with a history of mental illness and prior illness-related offending. They were living in the community and had returned to part or full-time employment, which they had sustained for at least six months. The gathered data was interpreted using hermeneutic analysis. This process revealed a number of themes, which were clustered into related groups, under eleven essential overarching themes. Freire's (1972) critical social theory was used to add critical depth to the findings.The findings reveal that returning to work exposes people who are affected by mental illness to an array of challenges and personal opportunities. People who have a forensic psychiatric history can encounter complex employment barriers related to stigma and misunderstanding. Therefore, the selected critical hermeneutic design provided a congruent framework with which to view the informants' quest to seek, secure and sustain employment. Despite significant obstacles, securing employment provides opportunities for individuals to test their skills while engaged in meaningful work activity. The acquisition of work skills can result in individuals' experiencing a strong sense of self-satisfaction. The experience of being bolstered by personal accomplishment often co-exists with, but is not necessarily negated by, difficulties that arise on-the-job.As there is scant reference to forensic rehabilitation within the mental health vocational literature, this study may be a timely contribution. It may also be used to add depth to the knowledge base within the field of mental health rehabilitation, in particular the specialised areas of forensic rehabilitation and vocational practise. Therefore, it may be a positive precursor to further discussion and analysis regarding work and education outcomes from the unique forensic psychiatric perspective.

Research in this thesis deals with some unexplored, or only partially explored, issues relating to the information content of volatility of the idiosyncratic component of asset returns at the firm and industry-level, both in the context of developed and emerging stock markets. Specific issues we have investigated include potential role of idiosyncratic volatility of equity returns for the explanation of future stock market volatility, aggregate economic activity, cross-border information transmission, and fundamental efficiency of stock prices. Chapter 2 of the thesis presents research into the information content of firm and industry-level idiosyncratic volatility, estimated as cross-sectional volatility (CSV), for future market-level volatility in Australia. We find that CSV does contain information beyond what is already contained in the lagged market-level return shocks and has a significant positive relationship with conditional market volatility. Our analysis gives new empirical evidence that the effect of CSV is stronger in relatively stable market conditions than in more volatile market conditions. We also examine how the information content of stock turnover and aggregate company announcements compares with that of CSV, and take a novel data-driven approach to verify whether CSV captures any information about multiple common factor shocks in asset returns. The explanatory power of CSV for future market volatility remains robust even after controlling for the effects of stock turnover, company announcements and omitted factor shocks in returns. These results are in line with the theoretical models relating volatility to the flow of information to the market, and suggest that the amount of information as captured by the firm and industry-level CSV shares a common co-movement with the market-wide information flow. In Chapter 3, unlike most other studies investigating the role of macroeconomic aggregates in explaining the fluctuations in stock market returns, we consider the possibility of reverse causality, and that using idiosyncratic volatility of industry-level stock returns in the context of Australia. Both the theories of investment and consumption under uncertainty and the models of sectoral reallocation provide rationale for the analysis. By explicitly modeling the cyclical patterns of industry-level volatility and relating it to corresponding cyclical behaviour of macroeconomic variables, we show that industry-level volatility is a leading indicator of the cyclical movements in output growth and inflation in Australia. We find complementary evidence from the multi-step Granger causality test and the impulse response analysis based on a vector autoregression of industry-level volatility, GDP growth, inflation and changes in unemployment rate. However, the forecast error variance decompositions suggest that although the industry-level volatility accounts for a significant fraction of the forecast error of inflation, this explains only a small fraction of output and unemployment uncertainties. Further analysis indicates that industry-level volatility contains better information about the future state of the economy than does aggregate stock market volatility. In Chapter 4, we explore a new but potentially important channel of crossborder information transmission between international stock markets ���� idiosyncratic volatility of stock returns. Specifically, we analyze the role of US and Japanese idiosyncratic volatility in transmitting information across three smaller but advanced Asia-Pacific stock markets – Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. We find that, similar to cross-market first and second moment return correlations, market-wide measures of IV are also highly correlated across countries. The effect of US and Japanese IV information is found to be much stronger on cross-market conditional volatility process than on the returns process. Further, we find significant contemporaneous and dynamic information transmission from IV of the US and Japan to the trading volume of other stock markets. Transmission of IV information, in general, seems to have gained momentum in the period since the Asian crisis of 1997. Overall evidence presented in this chapter is consistent with the interpretation that IV may contain information about some unobservable factors driving international stock market co-movement. In Chapter 5, we make the first attempt to understand the direct relationship between firm-specific variations in returns and firm fundamentals by analyzing firmlevel micro panel data in the context of each of a set of emerging Asian stock markets. After properly accounting for unobserved firm-specific effects, volatility persistence and potential endogeneity bias, we find that firm-specific variation of stock returns is highly correlated with, and is significantly explained by, alternative proxies of firm-specific variation of fundamentals in a majority of the emerging markets in Asia. Further analysis reveals that the observed effect of firm-specific fundamentals variation on returns variation is not indirectly driven by some other factors known to affect stock return volatility, viz., firm size, stock turnover, and leverage. Consistent with the rational approach, these results suggest that stock prices in majority of the Asian emerging markets are not devoid of fundamentals. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis consists of empirical studies on various aspects of international corporate finance, a series of long-run event studies examining the abnormal stock return performance of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), and stock analyst recommendations. The first two of these, presented in Chapters 2 and 3, investigate the key issues relating to Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). The next, in Chapter 4, examines the performance of new American Depositary Receipt issues from emerging markets and its determinants. The final study, presented in Chapter 5, assesses the value of stock analysts? recommendations in emerging markets. It is essentially a series of empirical studies adopting a tried and tested methodology, involving benchmarks, for measuring returns over time in emerging markets, a subject that has not been sufficiently investigated. The long-run event study approach is designed to identify anomalies in these markets, which may be much more pronounced than in developed markets. This thesis makes substantive contributions to the existing knowledge on measuring, documenting and determining various issues in international corporate finance, and provides methodological improvements over previous studies. Chapter 2 presents an examination of the stock return performance of the IPO stocks listed on the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) in Hong Kong, finding that the return performance is sensitive to the benchmark employed. Two main factors contributing to the underperformance of GEM stocks are the ?technology boom? and ?IPO effects?. Moreover, the results of cross-sectional analyses suggest that the Hong Kong GEM is a unique market; since at least 70 percent of the IPO stocks listed on the GEM are technology stocks, the ?technology? factor outweighs previous hypotheses advocated by previous researchers to explain the poor performance of newly listed stocks. Chapter 3 extends this analysis by turning attention to the post-issue stock price performance of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in Asian markets, using a comparative assessment of the stock performance of Asian IPOs motivated by the ongoing discovery of biases in event studies involving long horizon returns. Various methods were used to remove such biases, while examining the robustness of the long run performance of the IPOs. The results of this examination show that the existence of long run underperformance for the Asian IPOs depends on the methodology used. The study also assesses the ?Market Timing? theory with regard to Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), adding to the growing literature that suggests that Asian firms time their issuance of equity securities. Chapter 4 presents a comparative study of the post-issue stock performance and operating performance of the Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) of American Depositary Receipts (ADR) in emerging markets. The results of this study suggest that ADR IPOs are underpriced, though not to the same extent as regular IPOs. In the aftermarket, ADR IPOs underperform the Emerging Market Index. However, after controlling for differences in size and industry, underperformance of ADR IPOs compared with both home market IPOs and US IPOs could not be demonstrated. The analysis of stock and operating performance yields consistent results; aside from the ?window dressing? effect, this also demonstrates that stock price performance is a reflection of operating performance over the long run. Chapter 5 presents the first study to examine post-recommendation abnormal returns in emerging markets, based on the Emerging Market Index adjusted model and the Controlling Firm approach, demonstrating that stock prices react significantly to recommendation revisions, both on the revision day and subsequently. In this cross-sectional analysis, it appears that the Market-to-Book ratio is the primary indicator for Buy and Strong Buy recommendations. This indicates that stock analysts in emerging markets prefer high growth stocks with their attractive characteristics.

The focus of this inquiry is “New Zealand small business employers’ perspectives of the important factors in return-to-work (RTW) of an employee following a musculoskeletal injury or an illness”. Whilst worldwide there is an increasing amount of attention focused on the RTW process in large organisations, there continues to be little understanding of this phenomenon in small businesses. I chose to use a social constructivist theoretical framework drawing on grounded theory methodology to construct some understanding of the employers’ perspectives of the RTW process. Eight small business employers from Auckland and Christchurch participated in this research. Data were gathered using semi-structured interviews. Constant comparative analysis, theoretical sampling and thematic analysis were used to construct two themes from the data. The findings showed that small business employers prefer informal organisational approaches, rely on close working relationships with their staff, are generally wary of bureaucracy and often must run their businesses with limited staff and financial resources. Having an employee off work for a prolonged period of time creates a sizable gap in the staff resources that keep the business running. The employer has responsibility to fill this gap while maintaining a productive business. In the absence of formal injury management practices an ad hoc approach was taken to the RTW process. A number of the employers felt undervalued by key stakeholders, such as doctors, treatment providers, Accident Compensation Corporation and in some cases RTW co-ordinators. Health and safety was a risk all employers appeared to take seriously whereas injury management information and support seemed less of a focus. This research suggests there may be little focus on injury management in small businesses by employers and, that employers perceive greater government emphasis on injury prevention. The extent and associated costs of work disability in small businesses is as yet unknown, but it is likely to be significant. How to support and encourage the uptake of injury management in small businesses in the long term warrants further investigation. Understanding that employers may well lack injury management expertise, experience and resources requires stakeholders to make specific effort with the employer, at the workplace, to facilitate the RTW process.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on December 18, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

<p>Den nya rehabiliteringskedjan med sina fasta tidsgränser för långtidssjukskrivna har fått stor uppmärksamhet i svensk media under senare tid. De nya reglerna fokuserar framförallt på tidiga insatser för långtidssjukskrivna med målet återgång i arbete. Intervjuerna i föreliggande studie utfördes med sju försäkrings-kassahandläggare på olika försäkringskontor. Syftet var att undersöka vilka erfarenheter och upplevelser handläggarna på Försäkringskassan har av den nya rehabiliteringskedjan och arbetslivsinriktad rehabilitering. Resultatet visade att det är en mängd olika faktorer som påverkar handläggarnas arbete. Som viktiga faktorer uppgav handläggarna ett ändrat regelverk med fasta tidsgränser, samarbetet mellan olika aktörer för den försäkrades återgång i arbete, handläggarnas och andra aktörers engagemang samt den försäkrades egna resurser. Vidare forskning inom området arbetslivs-inriktad rehabilitering behövs, om den nya rehabiliteringskedjans effekter på tidigare återgång till arbetslivet verkligen innebär ökat stöd till de långtidssjukskrivna. Även andra rehabiliterings-aktörers erfarenheter av de nya sjukskrivningsreglerna behöver utforskas.</p>

<p>During the last decades major changes has occurred at the financial markets, meaning an increasing supply and a greater variation of financial instruments. The saving habits of the Swedish people have gone from traditional bank deposits to investments in equities, funds and bonds. All this together with the great rise in the stock market at the late 90’s has brought words like risk and return up-to-date, and is the background to the development of a new law concerning financial advising which come into force the 1th of July 2004. </p><p>The contents of the thesis can be described as three bricks, representing the survey questions. The thesis starts with descriptions of which risk- and return concepts that exists and which are used by the contemporary financial institutions. Further on, the thesis deals with the individuals’ perception of risk, in particular financial risk. To end with, details regarding how a message should be conveyed are given. The three bricks together fulfil the purpose of the thesis; To investigate how the meaning of financial risk in a simple and pedagogical way can be explained to a person not familiar with financial literature, and to develop questions that facilitate when an individuals risk profile is ascertained. </p><p>We have found that standard deviation is the risk concept that dominates in financial theory, and together with Value at Risk is the most common used in practise. Good knowledge about risk is required when explaining risk. It is important to describe the information in an attractive way and use examples and illustrations. For financial advisers it also is important to have knowledge about the human behaviour, because ascertain the clients risk profile is an important part of the risk explanation. A clients risk profile is best ascertain with so called open questions where both what the clients answer and how he or she answer can form the basis for the judgement.</p>

<p>Work has a great influence on most of individuals in society. It influences both identity as well as the structure of the day. Unemployed people are often affected in a negative way through economic and psychological problems. In order to help people with reduced work capacity back to the labour market and decrease unemployment, the Labour Market Board works with vocational rehabilitation. The aim of this study is to investigate experiences of vocational rehabilitation within the Labour Market Board among unemployed people. A qualitative method was used by which interviews were made with 11 unemployed persons who participated in an investigation as a part of vocational rehabilitation within the Labour Market Board. The result shows both positive and negative experiences of the investigation period. The identified experiences were sorted into code groups: Support, Insight, Confidence in the investigation and result, Belief in the future, Motivation, and Participation. Both the actions of the personnel and the presence of the group members influenced the experiences. The support given by the personnel and how it is experienced is of great importance for the future of the unemployed. When the investigation was pursued during a short period of time, there was a lack of confidence in the investigation and result. A suggestions for future studies is to design a questionnaire that can be used in a larger study including a large number of individuals who are participating in vocational rehabilitation within the Labour Market Board.</p>