Thesis (D. Min.)--Covenant Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-173).

Thesis (M.A.)--Humboldt State University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-55). Also available via Humboldt Digital Scholar.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brock University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-104). Also available online (PDF file) by a subscription to the set or by purchasing the individual file.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brock University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-104).

The thesis sheds light on key policy issues emerging from the recent Global Financial Crisis. The first chapter studies whether expansionary monetary policy contributes to bank risk-taking, in the case of Asia. I rely on panel data analysis covering 432 banks in 9 Asian countries over the year 2000-2011. The ratio of risky assets to total assets serves as a risk-taking indicator. The results support the existence of the bank risk-taking channel, which is more pronounced for banks listed on the stock market. I also report new findings with respect to how banks take more risk following monetary expansion. Importantly, evidence of excessive leverage is not found. The second chapter constructs a model for analyzing bank risk-taking. I embed firm heterogeneity, endogenous default risk and capital adequacy regulation into both RBC and NK DSGE models. A subset of the firms can partially default on their loans obligation but subject to non-pecuniary default penalty. With those financial frictions in place, I find that standard macroeconomic shocks can induce banks to engage in higher risk-taking. The chapter then explores the effectiveness of several macro-prudential tools in mitigating risk-taking. I find countercyclical capital buffers and risky to total asset ratio targeting to be effective. The third chapter emphasises the spillover effects of shocks originating in the housing and financial market on the real economy. I embed endogenous mortgage default into a New Keynesian model that features housing and the banking sector. The latter faces capital regulation. We study two key shocks, namely shocks to the variance of idiosyncratic housing shock and shocks to the penalty on capital regulation. Both are instrumental in causing a surge in mortgage default and loans risk premium, which constrains bank lending activity. The chapter later introduces three macroprudential measures to explore whether they improve economic stability and welfare.

Early experience critically shapes cognitive, affective, and behavioral development, and experiences of early life stress (ELS) have been documented to negatively impact developmental trajectories. An increasing need exists for innovative intervention development to ameliorate negative impacts of ELS. Translational neuroscience approaches hold promise for addressing the needs of individuals who have experienced ELS through the development and testing of targeted intervention strategies grounded in neuroscientific knowledge. The current dissertation work employed a translational neuroscience approach to improve inhibitory control (IC) in a group of adolescents (N=20) exposed to a range of ELS via a brief, computerized training paradigm. Baseline analyses of the association between ELS and IC revealed a positive relationship (i.e., increased ELS, increased IC performance), counter to hypotheses. The IC training did not significantly improve IC in the training group compared to the control group over time, contrary to hypotheses and previous work demonstrating the effectiveness of this IC training in young adults. Transfer of training effects to a non-trained IC task and to real-world risk-taking behavior were limited. ELS demonstrated some moderation of neural effects of IC training. The use of neuroimaging in this dissertation work allowed for further investigation of neural mechanisms even in the absence of significant behavioral training, transfer, and moderation effects. Results are discussed in the context of the utility of such IC training approaches for adolescents with ELS exposure and of translational neuroscience approaches more broadly. Future directions for IC training, translational neuroscience intervention approaches, and the incorporation of neuroimaging in this work are explored. This dissertation includes unpublished co-authored material. / 10000-01-01

Risk is inherent in many social and economic decisions, such as the choice of pathway in secondary school, the choice of major at university, job decisions, health-related behaviour, marriage, parenthood, migration and the allocation of financial assets. Investigating the determinants of attitudes towards risk is therefore essential to fully understand how people make such decisions. Recent research has shown that individual risk attitudes are not immutable personality traits, but are influenced by external factors with the potential to change them in more or less enduring ways, such as the characteristics of the environment, emotional states, life experiences such as poverty, job loss or violence, and social relationships. This thesis studies external factors that play a role in shaping risk attitudes. Specifically, it focuses on two important environmental factors: social relationships and the incentive structure that individuals face (e.g., competition or teamwork). It is composed of three chapters. Each chapter of the thesis presents the results of a different laboratory experiment, in which individual risk behaviour is always measured using the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task - BRET (Crosetto and Filippin, 2013). This task asks participants to choose how many boxes to collect out of 100, knowing that 99 boxes contain £0.10 while one contains a bomb, but without knowing in which box the bomb is located. They can therefore choose their preferred lottery among 100 lotteries whose outcomes and probabilities are fully described only by one parameter, i.e., the number of collected boxes. Earnings increase linearly with the number of boxes collected, but they are all lost if the bomb lies in one of the collected boxes. In the first two chapters, risk behaviour is measured both before and after the treatment manipulation, and feedback on the peers’ ex-ante risk behaviour is used as a channel to study peer influence on the subjects’ ex-post risk behaviour. The first two chapters provide new evidence that individual risk behaviour is influenced by the risk behaviour of the peer group and offer one explanation for why peer effects are not always present and vary in intensity. This is due to the fact that individuals are more influenced by those peers with whom they feel more bonded. Specifically, in the first chapter I study how group identity (that is, the portion of an individual’s self-concept derived from the sense of belonging to the social group) affects peer effects on risk behaviour. I induce different levels of group identity through different matching protocols (random or based on individual painting preferences) and the possibility of interacting with group members via an online chat in a group task. I find that subjects are affected by their peers when taking decisions and that a stronger group identity amplifies the influence of peers: painting preferences matching significantly reduces the heterogeneity of risk behaviour compared with random matching. On the other hand, introducing a group task has no significant effect on behaviour, possibly because this interaction does not always contribute to enhancing group identity. The second chapter digs deeper into this evidence by investigating the role of the incentive structure that characterizes the individuals’ environment. Since the first chapter shows that peer effects vary in intensity, I hypothesize that different types of incentive schemes may have different effects on peer relationships and, therefore, affect peer effects on risk behaviour. Using a real effort task, which consists of recognizing the value and the country of origin of a random sequence of Euro coins, I compare piece-rate compensation first with a cooperation-based and then with a competition-based incentive scheme. I find that competition significantly reduces attachment to peers and more than halves peer influence on risk behaviour compared with piece-rate compensation, despite the fact that the latter effect is not statistically significant. Such findings suggest that, when designing and evaluating an optimal compensation scheme, it may be important to also consider how peer effects on subsequent risk behaviour will in turn affect future decisions involving risk. For example, in research and development, competition may improve the results of current projects, but risk attitudes will shape the types of future projects that are attempted. The third chapter restricts the attention to competition and enquires whether this type of incentive scheme has a direct effect on risk-taking behaviour, beyond any social comparison, and whether its impact on subsequent risk behaviour is heterogeneous according to gender. Risk behaviour is measured after the performance of a real effort task, consisting of recognizing the value and country of origin of Euro coins, incentivized either as a tournament with fixed rewards or as a random draw with the same monetary payoffs. The data show that competition does not significantly affect subsequent risk-taking behaviour when considering the full sample. However, there is a positive relationship between competition and risk aversion for males, who become significantly more risk-averse after losing a competition than after randomly earning the same low payoff. In contrast, males do not become more risk-seeking after winning the tournament, while the average risk-taking behaviour of females is unaffected by tournament participation and outcomes. The reaction of males to negative outcomes might be driven by intrinsic motives, such as emotions or a shift in the locus of control from internal to external. Overall, the evidence presented here shows that risk attitudes are not immutable but may be shaped by external factors. Of particular importance is the role played by the risk behaviour of peers, which begins to emerge even when bonds are weak and becomes stronger as the social link intensifies. Any policy that aims to change risk attitudes (or that does so indirectly) will thus see its effects spread to the target subjects’ peers, and may amplify its success if the peer group is chosen wisely. Changing the characteristics of the subjects’ environment by introducing competition weakens their attachment to the competing peers and may attenuate peer effects on risk behaviour. In addition, competition per se has no impact on subsequent risk behaviour, except for males who become more risk-averse after losing.

[pt] Esse artigo investiga a participação de fundos filiados a conglomerados financeiros na indústria brasileira. Usando dados de 2002 a 2016, mostramos que fundos filiados a bancos apresentam retornos, entre 1.96 por cento-2.30 por cento ao ano, inferior a fundos independentes. Além disso, mostramos que gestores de fundos filiados a bancos têm menos incentivos a tomar risco no mercado do que gestores de fundos independentes. Consistente com os incentivos enfrentados, mostramos que fundos filiados a bancos mudam menos de posição, tentam menos antecipar movimentos de mercado e têm portfólios mais parecidos com o mercado do que fundos independentes. Finalmente, mostramos que as diferenças na tomada de risco pode estar associada a 7.68 por cento-29.6 por cento da diferença de performance entre fundos filiados à bancos e independentes. / [en] This paper investigates financial conglomerates participation in the Brazilian equity mutual fund industry. Using data from 2002 to 2016, we show that bank-affiliated funds underperform funds managed by stand-alone entities by 1.96 percent-2.30 percent per year. Moreover, we find that bank-affiliated fund managers have less incentives to take risk than independent funds. Consistent with incentives, we show that bank-affiliated funds trade less often, try less to time the market and have portfolios more similar to the market s than independent funds. Finally, we show that differences in risk taking can be associated to 7.68-29.6 percent of the performance difference between bank-affiliated and independent funds.

Real life decision-making frequently involves some level of affect, and research has demonstrated that individuals decide differently when outcomes are more or less rich with feeling. This difference in choice has previously been attributed to probability insensitivity in the presence of affect. In a series of three studies, we explored this possibility, while also testing alternative explanations, namely, that differences exist because of outcome characteristics such as comparability or precision. Individuals made choices between affect-rich side effects and affect-poor monetary lotteries in either a strictly numeric format, or with the addition of an icon array. Across the three studies we found little evidence that the icon array was beneficial, casting doubt on the previous explanation that differences in affect-rich and affect-poor choice are due to probability insensitivity. Contrary to our predictions, we did not find evidence that differences in choice could be attributed to outcome comparability, as there continued to be decrements in affect-rich choice, despite making affect-rich outcomes more comparable. As predicted, when precision in each affective context was better equated by describing monetary outcomes in less precise terms, the difference in affect-rich and affect-poor choice disappeared. It appears that it is difficult to choose well when outcomes are vague, which we suggest is potentially the result of a challenge integrating probability and outcome information. This research is a first step in providing a viable explanation for the “affect gap” and contributes to our understanding of how and why affect-rich and affect-poor choice may differ.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether ski tourers in the Swedish mountains have enough knowledge and experience to perform the activity safely. Adventure oriented activities that demands equipment has over the last years increased among outdoor practitioners in Sweden. Because of the growth, ski touring equipment have had a rapid development and made the activity more accessible. In the northern parts of Sweden a survey- and a field study, were examine risk behavior, avalanche equipment and techbindings. The results shows that ski touring has increased over the last years and that the activity is mainly performed by young men that are experienced downhill skiers. According to the result men seems to have a higher risk acceptance and many off-piste skiers are prepared to take risks to get good skiing/ski touring. Nearly everyone from the study are carrying avalanche equipment, but it seems like some are not sufficiently prepared in case of an accident. The results also indicates that some ski tourers dis-trust the retention function of techbindings and some manually lock out the release mechanism of the binding exposing themselves to a high risk of lower leg injury.