Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2009. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 133-146). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--Guo li zheng zhi da xue.

Thesis--Nederlandsche Economische Hoogeshool, Rotterdam. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: p. [159-160].

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

The proposed thesis comprises two essays on international investment. Each essay proposes a new theory and provides empirical evidence. The first essay develops a three-moment international asset-pricing model (TM-IAPM) under full integration and deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) that prices coskewness. The model also embeds the standard IAPMs as special cases when explicit restrictions are imposed. We further apply the model to investigate the time-series behavior of market, size, value, and momentum premiums in the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom equity markets. We find that the model explains most of the variation of these premiums during the 1980s and 1990s and that the coskewness risk is more important than covariance risk. We also find that the model performs well out-of-sample. The direct implication of our result is that linear IAPMs are misspecified and that investors should use nonlinear models to price international assets. The second essay proposes a way to disentangle the test of market efficiency from the test of the postulated equilibrium model. Indeed, the efficient market hypothesis, which stipulates that prices fully reflect available information, is one of the most important building blocks in finance and economics. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on this important issue since the methodologies used to test market efficiency are subject to the well-established joint-hypothesis problem. We derive three propositions that build on the well-known Sharpe ratios with the specific aim to split the test from the joint-hypothesis into two separate tests. We apply the new approach to examine the efficiency of the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom markets over the period 1981-2000. Our results suggest that the rejection of the efficient market hypothesis may be premature. We thoroughly discuss the bias underlying the traditional approaches and propose a way to solve the problems.

ABSTRACT This thesis addresses the linguistic production of Spanish preterit and imperfect in the Mexican community that reside at the south of the state of Louisiana. More precisely in Baton Rouge, Scott and Lafayette. Other literature have worked this topic noticing a variation while the past tense is used, among others are Silva-Corvalán (1994) noticed that the Mexican community in Los Ángeles, California uses the imperfect in preterit context with stative verbs. Montrul (2009), on the other hand, notices similar behavior in heritage speakers and Delgado-Díaz (2013) suggested that same behavior in the use of these forms can be seen in Puerto Rico and Buenos Aires dialects. However, this study uses a quantitative statistical method to test this Mexican community production of preterit and imperfect forms as past expression. The participants were divided into two groups with age of arrival to United States as a criteria of categorization. This allows to study syntactic and morphological acquisition under Critical Age Hypothesis Lenneberg (1967) and Patkowski (1980) perspectives. The results showed that Mexican community that lives at south Louisiana make variations during production of both forms, preterit and imperfect. These variations were found in different linguistic context and presented similarities with other linguistic models such as monolingual Spanish and bilingual English/Spanish communities. The findings, here, can be useful for future research in a variety of linguistic perspectives and interests.

No description available.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) present an interesting area for linguistic and social research, being a setting for of computer-mediated communication (CMC) that is task-oriented in nature and often requires high level of cooperation between players. This study investigates how Spanish-speaking players of the MMO Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn use the linguistic phenomena of discourse markers, laughter and politeness to structure their communication and their community. Through analysis of in-game conversations gathered from a community of said players, this study demonstrates how each of these phenomena work together to build a community based on inclusive language and positive reinforcement.