<p> The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of oil income and the gold price fluctuation on the stock market of Iran, and to examine whether consideration of the oil and the gold markets followed by other investment markets, such as the real estate market and the foreign exchange market have any significant impact on the stock market behavior. This study examines the impact of the oil income and gold price fluctuation, as well as other macroeconomic indicators such as housing construction, deposit interest rate, foreign exchange rate, consumer price index, and gross domestic products on the Iranian stock market, as measured by the quarterly data from January 1990 to December 2012. First, regression analysis was applied for oil revenue, housing activities, deposit interest rate, foreign exchange rate, CPI, and GDP to examine the stock market reaction to each market activity. After this, ceteris paribus, oil revenue was replaced with gold price to examine whether the price of gold without consideration of the oil revenue had any impact on the stock market activity. Finally, the model was run to examine the impact of all variables, including oil revenue and gold price, upon stock market activity. In a separate model, this paper also examines the relationship between all of the above-mentioned variables and stock market volatility. In the next phase, the impulse response function based on the vector auto-regression model was generated to examine the behavior of the stock market followed by a shock to each independent variable. Because Iran is an oil-exporting country&mdash;not an oil-importing country&mdash;economic forces, market structure as well as the investment culture and investing policies are different in Iran than in Western nations or other oil-importing countries, it may not be wise or productive to analyze investment in the Iranian stock market from the same perspective or with the same methods used when analyzing investment in Western countries. Because gold, foreign currencies, and the real estate market are the most popular and common investment markets in Iran for domestic investors, this paper aims to determine whether there is any relationship between those markets and the stock market in general from an investment point of view.</p>

<p> The only two certainties in life are death and more uncertainty&mdash;with change the only constant. Rapidly changing environments require speedier response. We do not know what the future holds. Crafting strategy when the future is unknown and unknowable is challenging. The increasing uncertainty and turbulence has seen the gradual replacement of forecasting with scenario planning. Unfortunately, we are still trapped in the Taylorist paradigm that there is always one optimal strategy for any company to pursue. The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 provided a dramatic demonstration of the risk inherent in any strategic plan that relies on a unidimensional view of the future.</p><p> Using this crisis as a Petri dish, this research examined how well scenario planning worked. As the objective of scenario-based strategy development is to improve organizational agility (defined as the speed with which firms sensed and responded to an organizational crisis), the research measured how agile these firms were, measured against an established timeline and a sense and respond model, the Puthenveetil Model.</p><p> This study used a qualitative longitudinal case study method using purposive sampling of 14 firms that used scenario planning in strategy development and examined their strategies during the crisis <i>ex post facto</i>, only to find that most firms did not anticipate the crisis. Of those that did, only two&mdash;General Electric and Herman Miller, firms steeped in the learning/organization development culture&mdash;responded during the pre-crisis period. A surprising finding was that in six of the 14 firms, headcounts increased during this period. As to why so many firms failed to anticipate this crisis, there were three possible explanations: (a) the Cassandra Syndrome, (b) blind confidence in probability, and (c) reactive approach to change. The Puthenveetil Model could be used by individuals and organizations to prepare for the challenges of the VUCA world by hedging against the inevitable surprises that lurk in the background. Uncertainty is not an ally of confidence. Confidence is needed for commitment. Scenario-based thinking should help decision makers think clearly, feel confident, and act decisively.</p>

This dissertation addresses the cause of the U.S. financial crisis of 2007-09. Most existing literature has examined causality from the perspective of market failures in isolated segments of the financial system. In contrast, this dissertation examines the ways in which interactions between various market segments contributed to an increase in financial fragility prior to the crisis. This dissertation begins by distinguishing between two dimensions of fragility which are commonly entangled within the literature. It disentangles these dimensions of fragility by differentiating between fragility relative to an exogenous shock and fragility understood as an unsustainable feedback process. This dissertation then reappraises the securitized banking system as it existed prior to the crisis in light of this distinction by developing a map of the mortgage market credit chain. This map emphasizes the credit flows across multiple links along the chain rather than the risk dispersion properties of any given link. Using this map, this dissertation then develops several empirical models which examine the relationship between each of the links along the mortgage market credit chain. These models examine interactions both between adjacent as well as non-adjacent links along the credit chain. The central empirical finding is that a credit supply shift originated the CDO market in early 2004 which drove an unsustainable credit expansion through its interaction with home price appreciation. In this context this dissertation argues that characterizing home price dynamics over the pre-crisis period as a housing bubble is misleading in the sense that it implies home buyers and their expectations were the central location of an unsustainable feedback process. Rather, home prices are best characterized as having operated as part of a credit bubble centered around feedbacks and expectations in the CDO market. As a result, the crisis can be broadly characterized as the bursting of a credit bubble rather than a housing bubble as is more common.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1929. / Vita. Published also as Studies in history, economics, and public law, ed. by the Faculty of political science of Columbia University, no. 309. Includes bibliographical references (p. 180-184). Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1929. / Vita. Published also as Studies in history, economics, and public law, ed. by the Faculty of political science of Columbia University, no. 309. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 180-184).

This study aims to generate a more robust understanding of public attitudes regarding non-renewable natural resource markets. Employing a comparative-historical case study method, it analyzes three waves of widespread fear that swept the United States over the course of the twentieth century regarding an imminent, irreversible shortage of oil. Each of these periods of fear over oil supply availability coincided with a significant rise in the price of crude oil, only to be followed by a sudden collapse as new production came onstream in response to higher prices. The study utilizes process tracing and pattern matching techniques to examine the linkages between fundamental supply-demand conditions in the crude oil market, oil price movements, and expert predictions of and other public expressions of belief that oil in the United States would become scarcer and more expensive in the future. This dissertation’s core arguments contribute to existing theoretical debates in three ways. First, by providing a comparative historical portrait of cyclical patterns in public and expert beliefs regarding non-renewable resource availability and long-term price behavior, the study puts contemporary debates over the future of oil supply in historical perspective. It allows the rampant claims of, and widespread belief in, a global shortage of oil that have gained popularity over the last decade—most notably, in the so-called “peak oil” movement—to be situated within a broader chronological context. It also extends and deepens earlier historical work analyzing oil shortage scares in the United States, both in terms of their underlying dynamics and their effect on federal government policy relative to the oil industry. Second, the study establishes the link between fundamental supply-demand conditions in the oil market, generally reflected in oil prices, and the degree of media attention given to, and apparent public belief in, an imminent, irreversible shortage of oil in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. In so doing, it demonstrates the applicability of Shiller’s (2000, 2005) conceptualization of new era economic theory formation and popularization to observed phenomena in the oil market, but with a crucial difference. Rather than new era economic thinking taking the form of unbounded optimism about the future, in the case of the oil market new era thinking has tended to be manifested as the pessimistic belief that an impending, irreversible shortage of oil would lead to a long-term, even perpetual, rise in oil prices. The study suggests two modifications to the concept that enhance its greater explanatory leverage with regard to exhaustible resource markets: one, that often the new era predictions most widely cited during shortage scares were actually made prior to the boom in prices, to little fanfare, but subsequently deemed prophetic by new era proponents; and two, that the new era narratives often contained normative elements. Moral judgments—in particular, condemnation of the oil economy’s degradation of the natural environment—have often intertwined with predictions that the oil supply was more limited than widely believed and that prices were destined to continue rising. Third, the study demonstrates that the concept of narratives of decline, as described by Bennett (2001) and Lieber (2008), constitutes a powerful theoretical lens through which to understand trends in popular opinion with regard to non-renewable resource availability, and to asset prices more generally—a link that has heretofore gone unrecognized. It finds that a positive feedback loop tended to exist between popular fears of a new era of oil shortages, marked by a long-term rise in prices, and related narratives of the environmental and relative political-economic decline of the United States.