Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1960. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Since mining companies depend on debt and/or equity funding to sustain their operations, investors, in theory, could influence mining company policy by making financing conditional on environmental and social performance factors. The rise in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting combined with the increasing trend of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) - different sides of the same coin - CSR provides sustainability information to the market and SRI principles influence the investment decisions of investors. The purpose of this research was to gain a deeper insight into the influence of sustainability metrics on the investment behaviour of investors when investing in the South African mining industry. The research was conducted by performing in-depth, qualitative interviews with members of the investment community which included asset owners, asset managers, chief investment officers, investment analysts and fund managers. By and large, the investment community does not consider sustainability metrics published by mining companies when making investment decisions, and the principles and use of sustainability metrics have yet to be integrated into the decision-making process of most asset managers. There is, however, an increasing awareness of the principles of responsible investment and a correlating increase in the number of asset owners and asset managers subscribing to the principle guiding bodies which augurs well for the future. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / zkgibs2015 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / Unrestricted

Systematic mispricing by the state-of-the-art option pricing models is a paradox in financial economics as both the magnitude and direction of the mispricing is debated. The models have been found to overprice out-of-the-money and deep-in-the-money call options while underpricing in-the-money and deep-out-of-the-money calls. In addition, research has shown these biases have different signs in different time periods. We propose that when investors maximize expected utility for Friedman-Savage-Markowitz utility functions, the option mispricing observed in the market will result. The theories and empirical tests in the literature of higher-order utility functions and risk-neutral valuation (RNV) in the options market are presented. Though investor attitudes towards risk are irrelevant in the non-arbitrage world of modern option pricing, to the extent the options market does not meet the non-arbitrage conditions, investor risk preferences will affect the pricing of options. Risk-loving traders will bid up market prices relative to risk-neutral model prices; risk-averse traders will bid down prices. And investor risk preferences can, and do, change over time as market conditions change. New tests are run to analyze the relationship between mispricing biases and investor preferences before and after the historic stock market crash of October 19, 1987. We find mispricing biases which imply a decreased risk aversion on the part of investors in the IBM call option markets for the period prior to the market crash and mispricing biases which imply an increased risk-averse (and decreased risk-loving) behavior in those markets following the crash. Similar analyses are also performed in the Microsoft call options markets with less conclusive results. / Ph. D.

Using a random sample of transactions data from the time period of September 1, 1978 through August 31, 1985, the high end-of-day transaction returns noted by Wood, Mclnish and Ord and by Harris were examined to determine their persistence over time and their relationship to a commonly used measure of daily security performance. Additionally, final transactions were classified by type of price change-reversal or continuation-in order to document whether the high end-of-day returns are the result of security price appreciation or the result of increases in transactions at the ask price. New information provided by this study can be summarized as follows: 1. The end-of-day anomaly persisted over the time period of the study and appeared to be strongest in the last three years. 2. A Friday effect was found in that the mean return to the final transaction on Friday was at least as great or greater than the mean final transaction returns on the other days of the week. 3. A relationship was found to exist between CRSP excess return level (good day/bad day) and the final transaction return, and there was evidence that the final transaction may have had a large impact on the CRSP excess return. 4. Reversals are more frequent than continuations on the final trade, particularly after 3:56pm, and the mean return to reversals is greater than the mean return to continuations. / Ph. D.

ABSTRACT “Almost all places are in trouble, but some are in more trouble than others" Kotler, Haider & Rein (1993) Kotler, Haider & Rein (1993) contend that all places are in trouble now, or will be in the near future. The onset of globalisation of the world's economy, country political dynamics and the accelerating pace of technological changes are some of the forces that require all places to learn how to compete on the world arena. Porter (1990) states that the framework for understanding a company’s sources of competitive advantage can be extended to the level of nations. It is basically concerned with the question as to why some nations succeed in global competition when others fail. Nations must learn how to think more like businesses if they are to survive and should begin by identifying their competitive advantages and building on them. As countries compete for inward investment, tourism and export of goods and services- success or failure can accurately be chartered, and questions of reputation, image, identity and hence marketing and branding become central to the competitive edge (Olins, 1999). Faced with the challenge of a negative image, a country must adopt a proactive stance to correct this image. This is where the question of country branding comes in. Branding a country for many is misconstrued and interpreted to simply mean designing a new logo for their country and possibly a slogan to go underneath it. However country-banding proponents highlight that there is a difference between nation branding and tourism promotion. It helps even less that there are so many communications agencies that perhaps frustrated by lack of pure strategy capacity to sell to governments, have fallen into the habit of i Sibonokuhle GUMPO - 34462481 pandering to this misconception and simply selling logos and slogans to any government prepared to buy them (Anholt, 2003). However faced with the urgent need to address the crippling impact of a negative image, countries like Zimbabwe cannot simply wait and expect things to turn out for the better. Kotler et al (1993) stress that places are not able to respond to negative images concerning their nations as quickly as negative perceptions are built, be it through media, word of mouth or other channels. As a result the importance of a pro-active response cannot be overemphasized. This study explores the current negative image of Zimbabwe and tries to define the root or source of this negative image. Having defined or spelt out what is thought to be the problem, the researcher than explores possible ways of how the stakeholders of Zimbabwe can rebrand their country reflecting on known success stories. Kotler et al (1993) contend that the central tenet of marketing places is that in spite of the powerful internal and external forces that buffet them, places have within their collective resources and people the capacity to improve their relative competitive positions. Zimbabweans in general believe that their situation has been sensationalised by the media and is not a reflection of what is on the ground. By adopting a proactive stance in rebranding their country, Zimbabweans will perhaps finally realise that when it comes to image, “being in possession of the truth is not enough, the truth has to be sold” (Anholt,all places are in trouble now, or will be in the near future. The onset of globalisation of the world's economy, country political dynamics and the accelerating pace of technological changes are some of the forces that require all places to learn how to compete on the world arena. Porter (1990) states that the framework for understanding a company’s sources of competitive advantage can be extended to the level of nations. It is basically concerned with the question as to why some nations succeed in global competition when others fail. Nations must learn how to think more like businesses if they are to survive and should begin by identifying their competitive advantages and building on them. As countries compete for inward investment, tourism and export of goods and services- success or failure can accurately be chartered, and questions of reputation, image, identity and hence marketing and branding become central to the competitive edge (Olins, 1999). Faced with the challenge of a negative image, a country must adopt a proactive stance to correct this image. This is where the question of country branding comes in. Branding a country for many is misconstrued and interpreted to simply mean designing a new logo for their country and possibly a slogan to go underneath it. However country-banding proponents highlight that there is a difference between nation branding and tourism promotion. It helps even less that there are so many communications agencies ABSTRACT “Almost all places are in trouble, but some are in more trouble than others" Kotler, Haider & Rein (1993) Kotler, Haider & Rein (1993) contend that all places are in trouble now, or will be in the near future. The onset of globalisation of the world's economy, country political dynamics and the accelerating pace of technological changes are some of the forces that require all places to learn how to compete on the world arena. Porter (1990) states that the framework for understanding a company’s sources of competitive advantage can be extended to the level of nations. It is basically concerned with the question as to why some nations succeed in global competition when others fail. Nations must learn how to think more like businesses if they are to survive and should begin by identifying their competitive advantages and building on them. As countries compete for inward investment, tourism and export of goods and services- success or failure can accurately be chartered, and questions of reputation, image, identity and hence marketing and branding become central to the competitive edge (Olins, 1999). Faced with the challenge of a negative image, a country must adopt a proactive stance to correct this image. This is where the question of country branding comes in. Branding a country for many is misconstrued and interpreted to simply mean designing a new logo for their country and possibly a slogan to go underneath it. However country-banding proponents highlight that there is a difference between nation branding and tourism promotion. It helps even less that there are so many communications agencies that perhaps frustrated by lack of pure strategy capacity to sell to governments, have fallen into the habit of i Sibonokuhle GUMPO - 34462481 pandering to this misconception and simply selling logos and slogans to any government prepared to buy them (Anholt, 2003). However faced with the urgent need to address the crippling impact of a negative image, countries like Zimbabwe cannot simply wait and expect things to turn out for the better. Kotler et al (1993) stress that places are not able to respond to negative images concerning their nations as quickly as negative perceptions are built, be it through media, word of mouth or other channels. As a result the importance of a pro-active response cannot be overemphasized. This study explores the current negative image of Zimbabwe and tries to define the root or source of this negative image. Having defined or spelt out what is thought to be the problem, the researcher than explores possible ways of how the stakeholders of Zimbabwe can rebrand their country reflecting on known success stories. Kotler et al (1993) contend that the central tenet of marketing places is that in spite of the powerful internal and external forces that buffet them, places have within their collective resources and people the capacity to improve their relative competitive positions. Zimbabweans in general believe that their situation has been sensationalised by the media and is not a reflection of what is on the ground. By adopting a proactive stance in rebranding their country, Zimbabweans will perhaps finally realise that when it comes to image, “being in possession of the truth is not enough, the truth has to be sold” (Anholt, / Graduate School of Business Leadership / MBL

Peru is one of the leading examples of a primary-product export economy which has failed to achieve a high level of economic development. In this study, two alternative explanatory models of such development failure are tested against evidence drawn from Peru's experience in the 1920's (the culminating decade of a cycle of export growth which began in the 1880's and was brought to a close by the world depression of 1930). The first of the models is drawn from the mainstream of orthodox writing on development. Integration of an economy into international commodity and capital markets is viewed as a positive step towards development, and failure to achieve development is therefore explained by appeal to special obstacles which prevent the working-out of market forces. A variety of such obstacles may be proposed, of which three possibilities are particularly relevant: the absence of a dynamic, responsive elite to initiate and guide a development process; a binding scarcity of capital; and an inability of the local economy to adjust to the technological requirements of development. Because of the existence of such obstacles, the argument runs, the impulse towards growth and modernisation given by integration into the international economic system fails to spread much beyond the export enclaves. Foreign factors of production (particularly capital and technological skills) supplement scarce local factors and thereby increase the strength of the forces working towards development; but in the final analysis development can proceed only as fast as the obstacles are overcome. The second, opposed, model of development failure suggests that market forces themselves work in such a way as to erode the local economy's capacity for development. Integration into the international economy, it is suggested, leads to economic retrogression rather than development, and may destroy a viable pre-existing capacity to generate development. Foreign capital enters the local economy not to fill gaps in its resource endowment, but because of market imperfections. Local enterprises are destroyed and local factors displaced by the process of investment by international firms. As a growing proportion of capital formation takes place in foreign-controlled, rather than locally-controlled, enterprises, the domestic economy's capacity to mobilise and allocate capital falls, and under-employment of local factors increases. Opening the local economy to international market forces also opens for the domestic elite the option of abandoning an entrepreneurial function, and converting themselves into client allies of foreign interests - a 'comprador' class, without commitment to the development of the broader national economy. The State participates also in this process of decay. The thesis of this study is that Peru's experience in the 1920's fails to correspond to the first of these two models, but yields some evidence favouring the second. In Chapter 1, four central issues in the debate are identified, and hypotheses derived from them are then tested in the six subsequent chapters. The four areas selected for investigation are the following: (i) Were there binding factor constraints which ruled out a self-sustaining development process? Attention focusses here particularly on the question whether there existed a 'savings gap', and whether the native elite may have been incapable of meeting the organisational, technological and psychological requirements of a development model. (ii) What is the effect upon income levels and development prospects of the process of foreign direct investment in primary-product export sectors? In particular, does foreign direct investment supplement the local economy's supply of scarce factors, or displace native factors of production from efficient employment? (iii) Does the Government perform satisfactorily as a regulating and bargaining agent, seeking to capture for the host economy the maximum possible gains from export growth in a context of foreign direct investment? The debate here hinges upon the question whether apparent failures of the Government in this role should be attributed to 'softness' or to deliberate policy. (iv) What is the effect upon native enterprises of a process of denationalisation of leading export sectors? The key question here is whether local capital and entrepreneurs displaced from activity in one sector by the arrival of foreign capital were subsequently reallocated towards productive employment in other sectors of the economy, or instead withdrew from active employment or were allocated into activities whose contribution to development was relatively slight. Chapter 2 describes the historical background to the Peruvian economy of the 1920's, indicating that the period since the 1880's had been anything but stagnant. Peru was able, using only local factors of production, to initiate a successful export-led growth process in the late nineteenth century, with important spread effects to other sectors. The country's integration into the international economy, however, quickly opened it to the entry of large international firms, which were welcomed by much of the local capitalist group, and which dominated the economy by the 1920's. Chapter 3 looks more closely at the capability of the native elite, and establishes that the entry of foreign capital was not dictated by any inability of the local economy to mobilise capital or to apply and develop technology, but occurred rather because of differences between foreign and local firms in the perception of risk and calculation of future earnings; of these, the first appears more important. Development along the lines already begun in the 1890's, the chapter concludes, could have been sustained under the control of domestic firms, given the application of appropriate government policy, and continued expansion of export opportunities abroad. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to a more detailed evaluation of the contribution to Peru's development made by the two leading foreign firms, which between them accounted for over half of the country's total export earnings by 1929. The methodology used is adapted from the recent UNCTAD studies of foreign direct investment in manufacturing, and hinges upon the comparison between the actual income effects generated by the foreign firms in practice, and the effects which could reasonably have been expected in the case of local control of those sectors in the absence of foreign capital. In both cases, the conclusion reached is that the net contribution of foreign capital was negligible or negative. Chapter 6 takes up the issue of government policy formation, asking why, if Peru was deriving so little advantage from the presence of foreign capital, the Government did not regulate the foreign firms more stringently. The enquiry takes the form of a detailed case study of the relations between the Government and the largest foreign firm, the International Petroleum Company. The main conclusion is that the Government was an effective and generally skilled regulator and bargainer within the goals which it set itself; but that those policy goals were certainly not optimal from the standpoint of national development. Rather, the Government tended to embody narrow group interests - particularly the interests of Government itself. Since the entry of large amounts of foreign capital in the early twentieth century displaced local entrepreneurs and capital from several export sectors, Chapter 7 considers the possibility that these factors of production might have been reallocated towards other sectors of the national economy, initiating dynamic growth there.

This thesis models the Australian-US Dollar (AUD/USD) exchange rate with particular attention being paid to investor risk aversion. Accounting for investor risk aversion in AUD/USD exchange rate modelling is novel, so too is the method used to measure risk aversion in this thesis. Investor risk aversion is measured using a technique developed in Bliss and Panigirtzoglou (2004), which makes use of Probability Density Functions (PDFs) extracted from option markets. More conventional approaches use forward-market pricing or Uncovered Interest Parity. Several methods of estimating PDFs from option and spot markets are examined, with the estimations from currency spot-markets representing an original application of an arbitrage technique developed in Stutzer (1996) to the AUD/USD exchange rate. The option and spot-market PDFs are compared using their first four moments and if estimated judiciously, the spot-market PDFs are found to have similar shapes to the option-market PDFs. So in the absence of an AUD/USD exchange rate options market, spot-market PDFs can act as a reasonable substitute for option-market PDFs for the purpose of examining market sentiment. The Relative Risk Aversion (RRA) attached to the AUD/USD, the US Dollar-Japanese Yen, the US Dollar-Swiss Franc and the US-Canadian Dollar exchange rates is measured using the Bliss and Panigirtzoglou (2004) technique. Amongst these exchange rates, only the AUD/USD exchange rate demonstrates a significant level of investor RRA and only over a weekly forecast horizon. The Bliss and Panigirtzoglou (2004) technique is also used to approximate a time-varying risk premium for the AUD/USD exchange rate. This risk premium is added to the cointegrating vectors of fixed-price and asset monetary models of the AUD/USD exchange rate. An index of Australia???s export commodity prices is also added. The out-of-sample forecasting ability of these cointegrating vectors is tested relative to a random walk using an error-correction framework. While adding the time-varying risk premium improves this forecasting ability, adding export commodity prices does so by more. Further, including both the time-varying risk premium and export commodity prices in the cointegrating vectors reduces their forecasting ability. So the time-varying risk premium is important for AUD/USD exchange rate modelling, but not as important as export commodity prices.

This thesis models the Australian-US Dollar (AUD/USD) exchange rate with particular attention being paid to investor risk aversion. Accounting for investor risk aversion in AUD/USD exchange rate modelling is novel, so too is the method used to measure risk aversion in this thesis. Investor risk aversion is measured using a technique developed in Bliss and Panigirtzoglou (2004), which makes use of Probability Density Functions (PDFs) extracted from option markets. More conventional approaches use forward-market pricing or Uncovered Interest Parity. Several methods of estimating PDFs from option and spot markets are examined, with the estimations from currency spot-markets representing an original application of an arbitrage technique developed in Stutzer (1996) to the AUD/USD exchange rate. The option and spot-market PDFs are compared using their first four moments and if estimated judiciously, the spot-market PDFs are found to have similar shapes to the option-market PDFs. So in the absence of an AUD/USD exchange rate options market, spot-market PDFs can act as a reasonable substitute for option-market PDFs for the purpose of examining market sentiment. The Relative Risk Aversion (RRA) attached to the AUD/USD, the US Dollar-Japanese Yen, the US Dollar-Swiss Franc and the US-Canadian Dollar exchange rates is measured using the Bliss and Panigirtzoglou (2004) technique. Amongst these exchange rates, only the AUD/USD exchange rate demonstrates a significant level of investor RRA and only over a weekly forecast horizon. The Bliss and Panigirtzoglou (2004) technique is also used to approximate a time-varying risk premium for the AUD/USD exchange rate. This risk premium is added to the cointegrating vectors of fixed-price and asset monetary models of the AUD/USD exchange rate. An index of Australia???s export commodity prices is also added. The out-of-sample forecasting ability of these cointegrating vectors is tested relative to a random walk using an error-correction framework. While adding the time-varying risk premium improves this forecasting ability, adding export commodity prices does so by more. Further, including both the time-varying risk premium and export commodity prices in the cointegrating vectors reduces their forecasting ability. So the time-varying risk premium is important for AUD/USD exchange rate modelling, but not as important as export commodity prices.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2004. / Adviser: Joseph Litvak. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 295-301). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Techn. Univ., Diss/2004--Darmstadt, 2003.