In this study we look at the problem of analysing survival data in the presence of longitudinally collected covariates. New methodology for analysing such data has been developed through the use of hidden Markov modeling. Special attention has been given to the case of large information volume, where a preliminary data reduction is necessary. Novel graphical diagnostics have been proposed to assess goodness of fit and significance of covariates. The methodology developed has been applied to the data collected on behaviors of Mexican fruit flies, which were monitored throughout their lives. It has been found that certain patterns in eating behavior may serve as an aging marker. In particular it has been established that the frequency of eating is positively correlated with survival times. / Thesis (Ph.D, Mathematics & Statistics) -- Queen's University, 2010-04-26 18:34:01.131

Despite the Family Code of 2000 that raised the legal age at marriage to 18 for both sexes; early family formation is still a common practice which affect many children in Ethiopia. Previous research has shown that girls in rural areas are more disadvantaged and suffer the consequences of early marriage the most. The purpose of this thesis is to study the risk factors for early marriage for both girls and boys in an urban area, Shashemene. Also, using longitudinal data, trends in early family formation between 1973 and 2008 have been analyzed with an event history approach. The data were collected as part of the project “Changing Ethiopia: Urban livelihood, gender, and ethnicity in Shashemene after 35 years: A case study”. The discrete-time complementary log-log regression estimates have provided evidence of gender inequality in early marriage formations, showing that girls are more prone to experience early marriage than boys. While area of birth (rural-urban) has no direct impact on the risk of early marriage, it is found that living in an urban area offsets the effect of area of birth, suggesting a selection process into migration. It is also found that school attendance decreases the likelihood of early marriage, while literacy has little effect. Moreover, among people living in Shashemene, religious affiliation has more impact on early marriage risks than ethnic identity and the first language. Finally, there was little evidence on period and cohort effects for early family formation.

This paper examines childbearing among Polish migrant women and their descendants in Sweden. While many studies have focused on immigrants' childbearing in relation to women in the destination country, this study uses a country-of-origin and a country-of-destination approach in order to more thoroughly examine the socialization, selection and adaptation hypotheses. Using a piecewise-exponential model, the transitions to first and second births are analyzed using Swedish register data and the Polish Generations and Gender survey (GGS). The results show that the Polish stayers and the first-generation have relatively similar fertility behavior in the transition to first birth but not in the transition to second birth. However, parts of the similarity in the transition to first birth can be attributed to marital status selection. By examining the 1.5-generation and the second-generation in relation to Swedish natives, it is possible to see fertility convergence across generations, both when it comes to timing and quantum. This study also shows that family migrants have higher risk of having a first child compared to migrants moving for other reasons. However, in the transition to second birth, there is no difference.

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本論文主要目地是在研究財務比率對上市公司發生下市事件之預測。我們運用歷史事件研究法和Cox迴歸模型去研究上市公司發生下市事件之原因。同時，我們也針對Cox迴歸模型和Logit模型在發現對下市事件有顯著影響的財務比率作比較。 / This study applies the event history analysis and the Cox regression model to examine the causes of firm delisting, and also compares the performance of the Cox regression model with that of the logit model in detecting factors that have a statistically significant impact on the delisting event. The empirical results show that the hazard rate of firm delisting increases with the ratio of current liabilities to current assets, a binary variable indicating if the total liabilities of a firm is greater than its total assets, and a binary variable indicating if the net income of a firm was negative for the last two quarters, while the hazard rate of firm delisting decreases with increases in the firm size and the ratio of funds provided by operations to total liabilities.

Organizations play key roles in modern societies. The importance of organizations for a society requires an understanding of organizations. In order to fully understand public organizations, it is necessary to recognize how organizational settings affect subjects of organizations and organizing. Although public and private organizations interrelate with each other, the two types are not identical. In this dissertation, I attempt to describe public organizations in their own setting by discussing three important topics in public organization theory: (1) innovation adoption in the public sector; (2) representative bureaucracy; and (3) decline and death of public organizations. In Chapter II, I scrutinize early adoption of innovations at the organizational level and explore which public organizations become early adopters in the diffusion process. The adoption of an innovation is directly related to the motivation to innovate. That is, organizations performing poorly will have a motivation to seek new solutions. I estimate the strength of the motivation by observing prior performance. The main finding of the second chapter is that performance-based motivation has a twofold impact on early innovation adoption: negative for organizations with low performance, but positive for those with very high performance. This study estimates top 3.8% as the turning point defining which organizations attain outstanding performance and show the positive relationship between performance and innovation adoption. In Chapter III, develop a theoretical framework for predicting and explaining active representation in bureaucracy and test two hypotheses from the framework to test its validity. First, active representation requires the loss of organizational rewards. Second, a minority group mobilizes external support to minimize the cost of active representation. These findings support that active representation is a political activity in which bargaining between formal and informal roles occurs. In addition, I add evidence to the literature demonstrating that the two prerequisites – policy discretion and a critical mass – must be satisfied for active representation to occur. In Chapter IV, I argue that organizational change is a result of a relationship between an organization and the environment. And, I suggest and advance the theory of organizational ecology for examining environment effect on organizational decline and death. The theory has been extensively studies in the business sector, so I advance the theory to be applicable to the public sector. First, I add political variables, such as change in the executive branch and the legislature, unified government, and hypothesize that (1) an organization established by a party other than the one in the executive branch in any given year will be more likely to be terminated or decline; that (2) an organization established by a party other than the one in the legislature in any given year will be more likely to be terminated or decline; and that (3) if an unfriendly party controls both the executive branch and the legislature, organizations established by other parties are more likely to be terminated or decline. Second, the effect of the economic environment on the life cycle of public organizations is not as straightforward and simple as their effect on business firms.

The distribution of the population has multiple implications on regional development and planning. In-migration is frequently seen as the only possible solution in order to rejuvenate the population and stimulate regional development in sparsely populated regions. A population increase results in greater tax revenues, meaning that local authorities can plan for their inhabitants and expenditures in a more sufficient way. In addition, certain professionals are needed in order to support essential local services such as schools and hospitals. Place marketing with the intention of attracting in-movers has become increasingly popular, especially for rural, sparsely populated Swedish municipalities. Still, the outcome from place marketing efforts are dubious and in addition, migration has a temporal aspect and individual migration propensity usually fluctuates over time. This begs the question – how long do in-movers stay? Is there potential for long lasting development in sparsely populated regions connected to in-movers or is it temporary? This study focuses on the duration of time until an in-mover re-migrates from Region 8 in northern Sweden and which socioeconomic and demographic factors that influences the out- migration. This is studied by applying an event history method with discrete-time logistic regressions. The study follows individuals in working age that moved to any of nine specified municipalities in Västerbotten and Norrbotten County, sometime between 2000 and 2011. Questions posed for the study is: i) On average, how long did people who moved to Region 8 between the years 2000-2011 stay in the region? ii) What are the socioeconomic and demographic factors that influence the out-migration from the region? iii) Do the influencing factors differ between women and men? The results show that the time perspective matters as the risk of moving out was highest in the initial years and that it declines with time. 30 % of the sampled in-movers had moved out again within the time of observation, and on average the in-movers stayed for nine years. The regression results indicated that the factors that had the greatest influence on the out- migration was unemployment, being between 20-26 years old, high education, having and unemployed partner, and having children below school age. Women had a slightly lower likelihood of moving out compared to men, and the most prominent influential factor to outmigration that varied between women and men was unemployment.

Ce travail est divisé en deux grandes parties. La première explore la notion d’événement dans une perspective multidisciplinaire, à partir de l’histoire, la sociologie, l’ethnologie, la philosophie, la communication et la linguistique. Le but de ce parcours notionnel est double :tout d’abord, illustrer comment les sciences humaines évoluent (depuis les années 1950) vers une approche langagière de l’événement, et en deuxième lieu, nous doter des outils conceptuels nécessaires pour montrer que l’événement médiatique est une construction sociale dans laquelle le langage joue un rôle central. Cette construction est régulée par des routines de rédaction journalistiques, des contraintes matérielles (i. e. l’espace disponible pour rédiger des titres), des représentations et des habitus de lecture. En amont de la nomination par le média, des protocoles sociaux implicites règlent ainsi la mise en mots de l’événement. Cela explique l’énorme consensus dans la nomination d’événements à l’intérieur d’un même espace historico-géographique. <p>La réflexion théorique sur l’événement a également permis d’observer le fonctionnement singulier du discours d’information, notamment en regard du discours historique, tout spécialement à partir de leur saisie particulière du temps, à savoir, les temps courts des médias et les temps long ou mi-longs de l’histoire. Cette forme d’appréhender le temps n’est pas sans conséquences sur les modes de nomination des médias, car ils ont besoin de nommer toute occurrence jugée événementielle, souvent sans le recul nécessaire pour les intégrer dans un récit global. La pratique conduit en effet le discours de l’information à produire une grande quantité de désignants qui pourront être mémorisés par les lecteurs sans pour autant produire de véritables connaissances. Malgré cette hypertrophie, l’événement médiatique constitue un repère collectif primordial pour organiser le vécu public. En ce sens, il est à distinguer du fait divers, qui n’organise pas le temps social mais produit, au contraire, des discours répétitifs, ancrés sur des archétypes et non sur l’actualité. Dans sa fonction cathartique, le fait divers présente une mise en récit du dysfonctionnement de la société et, dans sa répétitivité, n’a pas besoin d’être mémorisé par le discours social. Comme corollaire, il produit moins de dénominations et plus de séquences narrativisées. Ainsi, un fait divers peut accéder au statut d’événement en fonction de la place que le discours d’information −et la société− lui accorde, à la fois dans l’espace public et dans la matérialité du support écrit. <p>En tant que construction sociale, l’événement médiatique n’est pas un objet discret. Non seulement il n’est pas disponible tel quel avant l’acte de nomination, mais il n’est pas immédiatement disponible et perceptible. Comme d’autres réalités sociales ou institutionnelles, les événements ont une « ontologie subjective » mais sont perçus comme objectifs. Dans ce cadre, l’instance de médiatisation est fondamentale pour donner corps à l’événement et l’ériger en objet d’intérêt public. La question qui se pose est celle de la mise en forme de l’événement en consensus avec le corps social. Si nous considérons les événements comme des faits institutionnels, il devient évident que leur mode de donation est médiatisé par le biais d’une instance socialement légitimée à laquelle on accorde cette mission :les médias. Le mécanisme de médiation qui intervient ici est la déférence :nous déférons aux journalistes la tâche d’identifier, de décrire et de nommer les événements publics. <p>L’analyse des désignants d’événements dans une perspective linguistique (sémantique et syntaxique) s’avère ainsi fondamentale pour interroger les représentations mobilisées par le média. En effet, ces séquences linguistiques, largement partagées par le corps social, sont des prêts-à-dire capables de condenser une énorme quantité d’information sur l’événement, de ses données les plus objectives (où, quand, quoi) aux plus subjectives (images, représentations) mais partagées intersubjectivement. La deuxième partie de cette thèse aborde la description de ces séquences linguistiques, dans une démarche qui va de la sémantique lexicale à la sémantique discursive. Les désignants d’événements sont envisagés sous leur forme expansée, c’est-à-dire comme des expressions définies formées à partir d’un nom événementiel, nom qui dénote un événement en langue (attentat, catastrophe, crise, etc.). Cette base lexicale sert à catégoriser l’événement −en fonction de cadres cognitifs communs−, orientant le sens et affectant les représentations des lecteurs. <p>Parmi les différentes formes, nous distinguons des expressions définies complètes (la guerre en Irak, le massacre de la place Tiananmen, les attentats du 11 septembre, l’affaire du voile) et incomplètes (la crise, la canicule, le tsunami). Ces dernières se caractérisent par la présence d’un opérateur indexical qui fait référence au moment de l’énonciation et ont donc une capacité plus faible à stocker la mémoire de l’événement. Une fois le moment discursif passé, ces expressions ont tendance à être complétées par un complément (i. e. la canicule de 2003). Les expressions définies complètes présentent, elles, une tendance à la condensation. Elles produisent ainsi des mots-événements :des toponymes et des dates en fonction événementielle (que nous appelons héméronymes), ainsi que des désignants occasionnels (Tiananmen, le 11 septembre, le voile, respectivement). Malgré l’effacement du nom événementiel présent dans la dénomination originelle (massacre, attentat, affaire), celui-ci est pour ainsi dire enregistré par l’expression restante, et sert par là à orienter le sens de l’expression. La preuve qu’un sens notionnel a été enregistré par ces expressions est qu’elles peuvent être réutilisées dans des emplois métaphoriques, pour des événements de même nature (le 11 septembre de l’Europe, un Tiananmen à l’iranienne, tsunami financier). L’approche discursive permet également de distinguer des dénominations et des désignations, moins figées et à plus forte valeur axiologique, mais qui contribuent également à la construction de l’événement. Si Mai 68 peut être catégorisé comme une révolte, une révolution ou un mouvement par la presse et par les principaux acteurs sociaux, il peut également être qualifié de coup d’épée dans l’eau ou de rupture culturelle. Les premières constituent des séquences largement partagées dont le but est de catégoriser, mémoriser et retracer l’événement, tandis que les secondes expriment surtout le point de vue d’un énonciateur ou groupe, et ont par là un contenu axiologique plus évident. <p>Nous essayons de montrer que la description linguistique est une condition nécessaire pour décrire la capacité mémorielle de ces désignants, qui ont des degrés de stabilité et de figement différents. L’établissement des différentes catégories (expressions définies complètes et incomplètes, xénismes, mots-événements accidentels, toponymes événementiels et héméronymes) permet d’étudier leur capacité mémorielle en fonction de leur morphologie. En effet, moins le désignant a de contenu lexical, plus il a de facilité à circuler dans des contextes qui ne sont pas celui d’origine. Ainsi, les toponymes et les héméronymes ont une plus grande capacité d’évocation, en raison de leur proximité avec le nom propre. Dans le discours d’information, ils fonctionnent comme des outils cognitifs qui servent à mémoriser des événements, des images et des discours sur les événements.<p><p> / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Emerging markets such as India have witnessed waves of domestic and cross-border mergers and acquisitions. This historical analysis, which consists of two parts, tests central tenets of resource dependence theory. The first part entails an analysis of the transition in public policy governing corporations between 1991 and 2005. The second part tests hypotheses derived from resource dependence theory relating to a firm’s decision to acquire. The analysis explores the factors that explain why firms engage in mergers and acquisitions by examining three specific policy periods (i.e., 1991-1996, 1997-2001 and 2002-2005). The findings from the historical analysis suggest that firms did not merely react to the conditions (i.e., constraints on capital) in their environment by undertaking merger and acquisition activity, but attempted to alter them as resource dependence theory suggests. Findings from the event history logit model also support resource dependence theory. Overall, the study shows that merger and acquisition activity increased during a period of intense deregulation (i.e., 1991-2005) brought about by the adoption of neo-liberal reforms, change to the multilayer subsidiary form, deregulation of the banking and financial sectors’ and reforms in foreign direct investment and equity markets. During this period of uncertainty, firms controlling more resources in terms of earnings, efficiency and number of subsidiaries were more likely to undertake acquisition activity as they have leverage in organization-environment relationships. The effect of number of subsidiaries on acquisition activity was the most consistent across policy periods’. This dissertation is organized in the following manner: Following the introductory chapter, Chapter II is a historical examination of the three policy periods and includes an analysis of the effect of the political-legal environment on mergers and acquisitions between 1991 and 2005. Chapter III reviews the propositions of resource dependence theory that pertain to organizational change and presents research hypotheses related to mergers and acquisitions. Chapter IV describes the data, measurement and methodology employed in the quantitative analysis. Chapter V presents the findings from the quantitative analysis and discusses the results. The concluding chapter (Chapter VI) includes a presentation of the theoretical findings and discussion of the limitations and scope of the study.