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Social capital has shown the potential to benefit health, and therefore is an important concept to take up within nursing. However, the lack of consensus about how social capital should be defined and measured leads to challenges translating existing evidence into health promotion practice. Further, there is some literature suggesting that social capital may not benefit the health of rural residents in the same way as it does for urban residents. Therefore, there is a need for research that helps advance our conceptual knowledge of social capital while examining the concept and its impact on health for rural residents. This thesis involved a sequential explanatory mixed methods study to understand how rural residents experience social capital and how it impacts their health. In the first phase, I began with an exploratory factor analysis of the 2013 General Social Survey data. This revealed the underlying factors that made up social capital for urban and rural residents of Ontario. Logistic regression analysis indicated that four of the six social capital factors were positively associated with health. There were no differences between rural and urban residents in the factors revealed, nor in the influence of the factors on health, however rural residents scored higher on several social capital factors. In the second phase, interviews and focus groups in two rural Ontario communities helped explain the findings and explored how rural residents experienced social capital in their daily lives. The friendly and helpful social context helped elucidate why rural residents had high social capital scores, yet the structural context contributed to difficulties accessing social capital for some groups. Together, the data from both study phases help advance our knowledge of social capital with important implications for nursing practice. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / There has been a lot of attention to the topic of social capital and how it may benefit health. Social capital means the resources someone has access to because of belonging to a social network. This thesis aimed to understand what makes up social capital, how it influences health, whether there are differences in its impact between urban and rural residents, and how people living in two rural communities experience it in their daily lives. Quantitative analysis showed that some components of social capital benefited physical and mental health while others did not. Rural residents were not impacted any differently by social capital, however they had higher scores on several of its components than urban residents. Interviews and focus groups helped explain how the friendly and helpful social context of the rural environment contributed to high social capital, yet structural challenges meant some community members had difficulty accessing its benefits.

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What do FedEx, Apple Computers, Microsoft, and Starbucks have in common? They all were started with venture capital investments. Venture capital investments have been an important aspect of many successful companies and will continue that importance in future business growth and development. During the forty plus, years that venture capital investments have been a part of business development many changes and morphologies have taken place. Despite this, the process and procedures that define how venture capital companies operate and make decisions can be generally classified into a five stage process. The characteristics of these stages along with the investment opportunities are examined. The amount of funds invested in each of these stages is analyzed to determine if there are trends in the investing patterns of the venture capital companies.

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This thesis examines the changes in the investment behavior of parent companies that issue tracking stocks as a financial engineering instrument. Several authors and researchers have different perspectives on the performance and efficiency of this instrument. This thesis studies the efficiency of internal capital market, taking evidence from the performance of tracking stocks. Subsequently, the real question of this thesis is whether the sensitivity of investment in parent companies changes before and after the issue of tracking stocks. In the analyses performed, I obtained results consistent with the view that the sensitivity of investment increases after the tracking stock issue. However, the results are not conclusive and not statistically significant. I conclude that the results represent at best weak evidence that investment in the parent company becomes more sensitive to investment opportunity after the tracking stock issue.

Submitted by Silvana Teresinha Dornelles Studzinski (sstudzinski) on 2017-03-16T15:32:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Pablo Fogaça_.pdf: 1377414 bytes, checksum: 5353984afc0693a3fd9accf0c57942f1 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-03-16T15:32:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Pablo Fogaça_.pdf: 1377414 bytes, checksum: 5353984afc0693a3fd9accf0c57942f1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-01-05 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / PROSUP - Programa de Suporte à Pós-Gradução de Instituições de Ensino Particulares / UNISINOS - Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos / Empresas utilizam-se da automação para aumentar sua competitividade, o que se traduz em ganhos de confiabilidade, eficiência, redução de custos com aspectos legais associados a segurança, saúde e meio ambiente, e ainda para obter ganhos de inovação. Em muitos processos, as máquinas substituem pessoas, no entanto, os sistemas automatizados dependem dos seres humanos para serem criados e aperfeiçoados. A criação de valor está essencialmente ligada ao conhecimento e seu uso. A presente pesquisa, de caráter qualitativo e exploratório, trata de um estudo de casos múltiplos no qual se buscou compreender e explicar como Pequenas Empresas de Automação (PEAs) do Vale do Sinos articulam seu Capital Intelectual (CI) para criar valor internamente e junto a suas Grandes Empresas Clientes (GECs). Para isto, foram revisados os conceitos de CI e sua classificação – Capitais Humano (CH), Relacional (CR) e Estrutural (CE). A partir da revisão teórica, foram criadas categorias de análise para cada um desses capitais e aplicados questionários semiestruturados a gestores de quatro PEAs e seis GECs que mantêm negócios entre si. Foi também utilizado o software NVivo para a análise de conteúdo. Podem-se destacar como principais resultados: (i) as PEAs não se preocupam com a gestão de seus conhecimentos, pois a retenção do conhecimento está nos seus gestores; (ii) essas empresas têm pouco ou quase nenhum conhecimento sobre CI, o que é corroborado pela literatura acadêmica; (iii) essas empresas atribuem grande peso aos valores familiares de seus colaboradores e aos relacionamentos como atributo de CH, o que evidencia que entendem CH como sendo CR e confirma que existe sobreposição de entendimento entre diferentes capitais, conforme atestam autores como Dumay (2009; 2013); (iv) o CR identificado na cadeia das PEAs consiste nas suas relações internas, bem como nas relações entre essas empresas e seus fornecedores e clientes; (v) as PEAs consideram que seus fornecedores agregam valor por meio de três fatores chaves: qualidade, preço justo e atendimento de prazos, o que também é corroborado pela literatura acadêmica. Esta pesquisa identificou o problema de cumprimento dos prazos de entregas como sendo a principal fonte de conflito na relação entre PEAs e GECs. / Small enterprises employ automation in order to improve their competitiveness, which is traduced in increasing reliability, efficiency, and costs reduction. They also reduce costs related to legal aspects associated with safety, health, environment, and innovation, as well. In several processes, machines relplace persons; nevertheless, automated systems depend on human beings to be created and improved. Value creation is intrinsically linked to knowledge and its use. This qualitative and exploratory research relates to a multiple case studies in which we intended to understand and explain how Small Automation Enterprises (SAE) placed at Vale do Sinos, articulate their Intellectual Capital (IC) to value creation both internally and jointly with their Big Customers Enterprises (BCE). To achieve such goal, there were reviewed the concepts of IC and its classification – Human, Relational, and Structural Capitals (HC, RC, SC). From the theoretical review, there were created categories for analysis for each type of capital, and applied semistructured questionnaries to managers of four SAEs and of six BCEs that keep business each other. Also, N-Vivo software was employed to perform analysis content of the interviews. As results, there can be highlighted: (i) SAEs do not have concern related to their knowledge management, because their knowledge retention is within their managers; (ii) such firms has few or almost none knowledge about IC, which is corroborated by academic studies; (iii) such firms give high weigth to familiar values of their collaborators and their relationships as a HC attribute, what brings evidences that they understand HC as RC, and it confirms that there is overlapping of understanding between different intellectual capital categories, as regarded by authors as Dumay (2009; 2013); (iv) RC identified in the SAEs chain consists in their internal relations, as well as in the relationships between such firms and their suppliers and customers; (v) SAEs consider that their suppliers add value through three key factors: quality, fair price, and terms attainment. It is corroborated by academic literature, as well. This research identified, as unanimity, the problem of term accomplishment as the main source of conflict in the relationship between SAEs and BCEs.

This thesis aims to contribute to a better understanding of the overall magnitude of intangible investment and the impact of this intangible investment on the behavior of the capital stock and on the value of capital goods. I begin by constructing a data set to document firms’ expenditures on an identi- fiable list of intangible items in Canada. I then examine the implications of treating intangible spending as the acquisition of final (investment) goods on estimates of GDP growth for Canada. I find that investment in intangible capital by 2002 is almost as large as the investment in physical capital. Furthermore, the growth in GDP and labor productivity may be underestimated by as much as 0.1 percentage point per year during this same period. I proceed by measuring the size of the stock of the intangible capital in Canada using newly released data on the market value of all securities in the economy. The approach taken relies on a quantitative application of the q-theory of investment to generate the quantity of capital owned by firms. I find that the intangible capital stock accounted for approximately 30% of overall capital since 1994. Of this, the R&D reported by national accounts makes up only 23%. These results imply that official Canadian statistics failed to account for 26% of the value of the capital stock in their 2005 quarterly data collection. Finally, I extend the q-theory of investment to model explicitly the decision of firms to invest in intangibles. I then use the model to measure the contribution of intangible goods to the overall capital stock in the U.S. The model departs from the one mentioned earlier in that it highlights the embodiment of intangible goods in tangibles and the role of relative price movements in the measurement of the contribution of each type of investment to the overall capital stock. I find that the growth in the overall capital stock from the late-80s until 2000 was driven mainly by an increase in the contribution of intangibles. However, the contribution of intangibles fell consistently after 2000. These results underscore the importance of accounting for the movements in the price of intangibles rather than focusing only on their rising share in overall investment. / Thesis (Ph.D, Economics) -- Queen's University, 2008-06-26 09:32:06.389