Cette thèse a pour but d’analyser l’émergence et l’évolution de différents discours portant sur la sécurité et la souveraineté arctiques au Canada, pendant la décennie 2000-2010. Notre regard portera plus précisément sur le discours du Grand Nord assiégé. Une de nos questions de recherche fut de comprendre comment des évaluations optimistes et pessimistes du portrait sécuritaire arctique au Canada se sont traduites dans les discours sécuritaires arctiques tenus par différents acteurs politiques canadiens au cours de la décennie 2000-2010. De plus, une deuxième question de recherche se demandera si des groupes de la société civile canadienne ont été à même de formuler des idées sécuritaires alternatives à celles défendues par le gouvernement canadien. Pour ce faire, nous réaliserons une analyse de contenu qualitative de trois différents acteurs politiques canadiens : le gouvernement fédéral, les médias, plus particulièrement les textes d’opinion dans les quotidiens canadiens, et les groupes inuits. Une attention particulière sera portée à trois crises de souveraineté ayant éclaté durant cette période : la crise de l’île de Hans (été 2005), celle du sous-américain USS Charlotte (hiver 2005-2006) et la crise du drapeau russe sous le pôle nord (été 2007). Nos conclusions nous indiquent que le discours pessimiste a été exprimé en tout premier lieu dans les médias canadiens avant d’être inséré dans la rhétorique gouvernementale en 2005. De plus, les menaces étatiques vont davantage mobiliser les différents acteurs politiques canadiens étudiés que les menaces non-étatiques. La menace russe en particulier a été utilisée pour justifier des mesures additionnelles de défense de la souveraineté canadienne en Arctique. Sur notre deuxième question de recherche, nous pouvons observer que la société civile canadienne a été capable d’exprimer des idées sécuritaires alternatives. Par contre, les idées dominantes du continentalisme et du nationalisme ont guidé la politique étrangère canadienne pendant une bonne partie de la décennie, l’internationalisme libéral étant marginalisé par la prédominance de celles-ci. De plus, les groupes inuits ont été les plus à même de formuler des conceptualisations alternatives de la sécurité et de la souveraineté arctiques au Canada.

Nowhere in the world is the demand for peace more prominent and challenging than in Africa. From state collapse and anarchy in Somalia to protracted wars and rampant corruption in the Congo; from bloody civil wars and extreme poverty in Sierra Leone to humanitarian crisis and authoritarianism in Sudan, the continent is the focus of growing political and media attention. This book presents the first comprehensive overview of conflict and peace across the continent. Bringing together a range of leading academics from Africa and beyond, "Peace and Conflict in Africa" is an ideal introduction to key themes of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, security and development. The book's stress on the importance of indigenous Africa approaches to creating peace makes it an innovative and exciting intervention in the field.

(None) Technical Summary of Thesis: The topic of my thesis is currency crisis. Currency crises have been a recurrent feature of the international economy from the invention of paper money. They are not confined to particular economies or specific region. They take place in developed, emerging, and developing countries and are spread all over the globe. Countries that experience currency crises face economic losses that can be huge and disruptive. However, the exacted toll is not only financial and economic, but also human, social, and political. It is clear that the currency crisis is a real threat to financial stability and economic prosperity. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the determinants of currency crises for twenty OECD countries and South Africa from 1970 through 1998. It systematically examines the role of economic fundamentals and contagion in the origins of currency crises and empirically attempts to identify the channels through which the crises are being transmitted. It also examines the links between the incidence of currency crises and the choice of exchange rate regimes as well as the impact of capital market liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises. The first chapter identifies the episodes of currency crisis in our data set. Determining true crisis periods is a vital step in the empirical studies and has direct impact on the reliability of their estimations and the relevant policy implications. We define a period as a crisis episode when the Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) index, which consists of changes in exchange rates, reserves, and interest rates, exceeds a threshold. In order to minimize the concerns regarding the accuracy of identified crisis episodes, we apply extreme value theory, which is a more objective approach compared to other methods. In this chapter, we also select the reference country, which a country’s currency pressure index should be built around, in a more systematic way rather than by arbitrary choice or descriptive reasoning. The second chapter studies the probability of a currency exiting a tranquil state into a crisis state. There is an extensive literature on currency crises that empirically evaluate the roots and causes of the crises. Despite the interesting results of the current empirical literature, only very few of them account for the influence of time on the probability of crises. We use duration models that rigorously incorporate the time factor into the likelihood functions and allow us to investigate how the amount of time that a currency has already spent in the tranquil state affects the stability of a currency. Our findings show that high values of volatility of unemployment rates, inflation rates, contagion factors (which mostly work through trade channels), unemployment rates, real effective exchange rate, trade openness, and size of economy increases the hazard of a crisis. We make use of several robustness checks, including running our models on two different crisis episodes sets that are identified based on monthly and quarterly type spells. The third chapter examines the links between the incidence of currency crises and the choice of exchange rate regimes as well as the impact of capital market liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises. As in our previous paper, duration analysis is our methodology to study the probability of a currency crisis occurrence under different exchange rate regimes and capital mobility policies. The third chapter finds that there is a significant link between the choice of exchange rate regime and the incidence of currency crises in our sample. Nevertheless, the results are sensitive to the choice of the de facto exchange rate system. Moreover, in our sample, capital control policies appear to be helpful in preventing low duration currency crises. The results are robust to a wide variety of sample and models checks.

The aim of this thesis is to identify and assess the reasons of the Turkish financial crises based on various crises model explanations including the first, the second and the third generation models. It is argued that following factors played a crucial role in triggering crises in Turkey. Firstly, under the weak sustainable fiscal policies, implementation of the exchange rate based stabilization program caused the increase in vulnerabilities in the sectoral balance sheets and thus increased the prospective deficit considerations. Secondly, as seen on the international evidence, over-appreciation of the domestic currency put pressure on the current account deficit and other macroeconomic indicators. Thirdly, domestic and external factors also worsen the perceptions on the sustainability of the disinflation program leading to sharp capital outflows. Within this context, fiscal and current account sustainability are empirically tested under the light of the structural break analysis and it is found that fiscal stance and the current account deficit are both weakly sustainable implying the necessity of policy regime changes before the crises period. Having assessed the structural problems of the government, corporate and banking sector&rsquo / s balance sheets, intersectoral risk matrix was constructed to analyze the risk accumulation in the sectors considering the impacts of the exchange rate based disinflation program and the ongoing economic imbalances. Both mismanagement of the risks and the structural weaknesses of some banks led to the deterioration of the expectations about the continuity of the program, by increasing tensions and prospective deficit perceptions in the markets. With speculative attacks, a sharp capital outflow was triggered the crises. It is concluded that the causes of the 2000-2001 Turkish financial crises can be interpreted as an example of financial crises model encompassing all elements of the earlier models except seignorage issues.

El tema de esta tesis es Banca, concentrándose específicamente en el tema de Crisis Bancarias. El Capitulo 1 estudia las crisis bancarias que ocurren debido a problemas de asimetría de información entre los tomadores de préstamos. Dentro del marco propuesto, asimetría de información significa que los títulos sobre préstamos que el banco vende pueden tornarse ilíquidos y/o que pueden ocurrir caídas súbitas en el precio de los títulos. El Capitulo 2 analiza la política de resolución de crisis y muestra como las acciones de un Prestamista de Última Instancia durante una crisis pueden afectar la incidencia/probabilidad de sufrir futuras crisis bancarias. En particular, un Prestamista de Última Instancia más generoso puede contribuir a reducir la frecuencia de las crisis dado que los bancos eligiran proyectos más seguros. El ultimo capitulo de esta tesis vuelve a considerar el tema de la venta de préstamos, a través de títulos emitidos por el banco. En este capítulo se derivan aquellas condiciones para las cuales el mercado es sostenible, en el caso de que exista daño moral por parte de los bancos que realizan los préstamos. En una sección empírica mostramos que hay una relación negativa entre la fracción de préstamos retenida y la probabilidad de default. / The theme of this thesis is Banking, concentrating on banking crises. The first chapter looks at banking crises which occur because of problems of asymmetric information about borrowers. The asymmetric information means that the loan securities that the bank sells can become illiquid and there are sudden drops in securities prices. The second chapter looks at a crisis resolution policy and shows how the actions of the Lender of Last Resort in a crisis can affect the incidence of future banking crises, in particular that a more generous Lender of Last Resort can lead less frequent crises as banks choose safer projects. The final paper returns to the theme of loan sales. We derive conditions for when the market is sustainable in the face of moral hazard by the bank which makes the loan. In an empirical section we show that there is a negative relationship between the fraction of a loan retained and the probability of default

In this thesis I examine, within a behavioural finance framework, the impact on stock prices of order and trade imbalance in three separate but related studies. The first study, chapter two, begins with a question that plagues behavioural finance theories???do the investors most likely to be influenced by the behavioural biases described in the literature, i.e., individual investors, affect stock prices? My data enable me to consider the impact of net individual investor trading for the entire market over several years. I find that net individual investor purchasing Grangercauses stock price changes. The correlation is negative, however, contradicting common sense by demonstrating that individuals investor buying pressure makes prices go down and selling pressure forces them up. More investigation is required. Chapter three references order imbalance results from experimental finance. I use field data to test a robust laboratory model and my modified versions. My findings suggest that, with appropriate modifications, laboratory results can be applied to real financial markets. Chapter four combines the data from the chapters two and three to revisit the question of individual investor impact on stock prices. Other studies have argued that individual investor influence is strongest in smaller capitalization stocks. Moreover, various theories propose that individual investors are the driving force behind the irrational stock prices of a bubble. I focus on the stocks from chapter three, bubble stocks, and ask whether, in the context of the trading of the entire market, individual investor trades are influential. Once again I find Grangercausality, but in the wrong direction. Moreover, the activity and volume of the individual investor category of the holdings data is completely overshadowed by that of the two large investor categories, domestic and foreign institutions. I conclude that individual investor trades are not influential in determining stock prices. This conclusion has important implications for some behavioural finance models of asset pricing. I suggest that emphasis might be better placed on educating individual investors about the errors to which they are prone, rather than on trying to explain market anomalies with those errors.

In this thesis I examine, within a behavioural finance framework, the impact on stock prices of order and trade imbalance in three separate but related studies. The first study, chapter two, begins with a question that plagues behavioural finance theories???do the investors most likely to be influenced by the behavioural biases described in the literature, i.e., individual investors, affect stock prices? My data enable me to consider the impact of net individual investor trading for the entire market over several years. I find that net individual investor purchasing Grangercauses stock price changes. The correlation is negative, however, contradicting common sense by demonstrating that individuals investor buying pressure makes prices go down and selling pressure forces them up. More investigation is required. Chapter three references order imbalance results from experimental finance. I use field data to test a robust laboratory model and my modified versions. My findings suggest that, with appropriate modifications, laboratory results can be applied to real financial markets. Chapter four combines the data from the chapters two and three to revisit the question of individual investor impact on stock prices. Other studies have argued that individual investor influence is strongest in smaller capitalization stocks. Moreover, various theories propose that individual investors are the driving force behind the irrational stock prices of a bubble. I focus on the stocks from chapter three, bubble stocks, and ask whether, in the context of the trading of the entire market, individual investor trades are influential. Once again I find Grangercausality, but in the wrong direction. Moreover, the activity and volume of the individual investor category of the holdings data is completely overshadowed by that of the two large investor categories, domestic and foreign institutions. I conclude that individual investor trades are not influential in determining stock prices. This conclusion has important implications for some behavioural finance models of asset pricing. I suggest that emphasis might be better placed on educating individual investors about the errors to which they are prone, rather than on trying to explain market anomalies with those errors.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-100). Also issued online.

Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2003.

Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2007.