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The Gilbertine order was unusual in that it was founded for both men and women who lived in adjacent enclosures. The order had its origins in the Lincolnshire village of Sempringham where St Gilbert founded the order in the 1130s. The canons followed the rule of St Augustine and the nuns the rule of St Benedict. The history of the order has been extensively researched by Brian Golding from its foundation until the beginning of the fourteenth century. However, there has been little substantial research on the order in the period from the fourteenth century until its dissolution in 1539. This dissertation continues the work carried out by Golding and examines the later years of the order’s history and its dissolution. The main themes of this work are the recruitment of men and women into the order during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the spiritual lives of the nuns, the impact of the dissolution on the lives of the men and women of the order, and their careers after the dissolution. The study will show that in common with other religious orders there was a decline in the popularity of the Gilbertines in the later Middle Ages, and also a relaxation of the rules the nuns followed. In the period after the dissolution, the thesis will demonstrate that the social and economic position of former Gilbertine canons was much better than that of former nuns.

This paper is primarily concerned with the fundamental properties of a linear algebra of finite order over a field. A discussion of linear sets of finite order over a field is used as an introduction to these properties.

The dissertation is a comparative study of the government counter terrorism policies of the liberal democratic nations of Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It includes reference to the threat of terrorism as a modem phenomenon beginning in the period of the 1960s decade. While discussion centres on policies of response, attention is also given to policy measures which have developed as an outcome of those policies. The dissertation is comprised of five chapters. Chapter one is devoted to terrorism as a threat to national and international security and stability. The context describes problems associated with definition of terrorism, motivational aspects, the aims and strategies of terrorists, group infrastructure, and factors and implications of current and future importance. Chapter two is concerned with an examination of general policies of response adopted by the three subject nations. Discussion relates to characteristics of policy, the philosophy of the use of force, policy development, fundamental policies, and the translation of those policies into direct (active) and indirect (passive) measures. Chapter three provides a description of the decision-making and crisis-management machinery peculiar to Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom in regard to counter terrorism activity. Chapter four reviews a range of resources and capabilities available to those nations for response to the threat of terrorism. Specifically included are factors of policy, experience, infrastructure, law enforcement agencies, the armed forces, legislation, and the role of the media. Chapter five summarizes general comments on strengths and weaknesses of the policies and policy measures presented in the preceding chapters. Many of the salient points are contained in the observations put forward in chapter five, but some judgements must necessarily be left to a reading of individual chapters. In conjunction, chapter two includes a brief commentary on the Cycle of Activity involving the threat of terrorism and the mechanics of governmental reaction to that threat. Acting upon the Cycle is a spectrum of other factors,' termed the Envelope of Influences, which has. a significant effect upon all the components. The Envelope is a combination of such influences as environment, history, culture, precedent, ideas, pressure groups, et al, which must be taken into consideration when assessing policy and policy measures. Judgements of policy and policy measures (taking into account the Envelope) were based upon four principal aspects of governmental performance; 1. Perceptiveness; 2. Capacity to Adapt to New Challenges; 3- Practicality; and, 4* Adherence to Legal, Democratic, and Moral Principles. The context of chapter five, as well as that of chapters two, three, and four, reflects that approach.

acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Joel Leger

In the first essay, we provide new evidence on the relationship between order flow and prices, an issue that is central to asset pricing and market microstructure. We examine proprietary data on a broad panel of NYSE-listed stocks that reveal daily order imbalances by institutions, individuals, and market makers. We can further differentiate regular institutional trades from institutional program trades. Our results indicate that order imbalances from different trader types play distinctly different roles in price formation. Institutions and individuals are contrarians with respect to previous-day returns but differ in the effect their order imbalances have on contemporaneous returns. Institutional imbalances are positively related to contemporaneous returns, and cross-sectional evidence suggests this relationship is likely to be the result of firm-specific information institutions have. Individuals, specialists, and other market makers appear to provide liquidity to these actively trading institutions. Our results also suggest a special role for institutional program trades. Institutions choose program trades when they have no firm-specific information and can afford to trade passively. As a result, program trades provide liquidity to the market. Finally, both institutional non-program and individual imbalances have predictive power for next-day returns. In the second essay, based on daily shorting flow data for a large sample of NYSE-listed stocks, we show that short sellers enhance the relative efficiency of transaction prices. We also provide new evidence on the recent suspension of the Uptick Rule for Regulation SHO Pilot stocks. Relative to matched control stocks, pilot stocks experience some improvement in price efficiency associated with increased shorting activity after the tick test was suspended. The third essay studies demutualization of stock exchanges. Using panel data on 132 major stock exchanges in 114 countries from 1990 to 2003, we examine the effect of demutualization on an exchange’s performance in its primary product markets: trading and listings. We document some evidence that demutualization is associated with improved competitiveness in attracting trading volume. Results on listings following demutualization are weak.

Abstract A stochastic model for orderbook dynamics is proposed in Cont et al.(2010) and empirically evaluated in thisthesis. Arrival rates of limit, marketand cancellation orders are described interms of a Markov chain where thearrival rates are exponentiallydistributed. The model not onlyconsiders the best bid and ask queuesbut also additional price levels of theorder book. Methods for computingseveral quantities important to highfrequency trading are proposed usingLaplace transforms and continuedfractions. These quantities includeconditional probabilities such as theprobability of a price increasedepending on the profile of the orderbook. Computing these probabilities aresupposed to be easy enough to computeanalytically. However this was not thecase. We failed in the inversion of theLaplace transform methods and the mainreason is that the instructions in Contet al. (2010) are not adequate when itcomes to perform the inversion. Hence wedraw the conclusion that the method isno good for predicting short termbehavior of limit order books. For longterm applications the model can be usedto simulate the order book with goodresults.

In the first essay, we provide new evidence on the relationship between order flow and prices, an issue that is central to asset pricing and market microstructure. We examine proprietary data on a broad panel of NYSE-listed stocks that reveal daily order imbalances by institutions, individuals, and market makers. We can further differentiate regular institutional trades from institutional program trades. Our results indicate that order imbalances from different trader types play distinctly different roles in price formation. Institutions and individuals are contrarians with respect to previous-day returns but differ in the effect their order imbalances have on contemporaneous returns. Institutional imbalances are positively related to contemporaneous returns, and cross-sectional evidence suggests this relationship is likely to be the result of firm-specific information institutions have. Individuals, specialists, and other market makers appear to provide liquidity to these actively trading institutions. Our results also suggest a special role for institutional program trades. Institutions choose program trades when they have no firm-specific information and can afford to trade passively. As a result, program trades provide liquidity to the market. Finally, both institutional non-program and individual imbalances have predictive power for next-day returns. In the second essay, based on daily shorting flow data for a large sample of NYSE-listed stocks, we show that short sellers enhance the relative efficiency of transaction prices. We also provide new evidence on the recent suspension of the Uptick Rule for Regulation SHO Pilot stocks. Relative to matched control stocks, pilot stocks experience some improvement in price efficiency associated with increased shorting activity after the tick test was suspended. The third essay studies demutualization of stock exchanges. Using panel data on 132 major stock exchanges in 114 countries from 1990 to 2003, we examine the effect of demutualization on an exchange’s performance in its primary product markets: trading and listings. We document some evidence that demutualization is associated with improved competitiveness in attracting trading volume. Results on listings following demutualization are weak.

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We proposed new variance estimators for the poststratified estimator of the population total in two-stage sampling. The linearization or Taylor series variance estimator and the jackknife linearization variance estimator are popular for the poststratified estimator. The jackknife linearization variance estimator utilizes the ratio, ^Rc, which balances the weights for the poststrata while the linearization or Taylor series estimator does not. The jackknife linearization variance estimator is equivalent to Rao's (1985) adjusted variance estimator. Our proposed estimator makes use of the ratio, ^R c, in a different shape which is naturally derived from the process of expanding to the second-order Taylor series linearization, while the standard linearization variance estimator is only expanded to the first-order. We investigated the properties and performance of the linearization variance estimator, the jackknife linearization estimator, the proposed variance estimator and its modified version analytically and through simulation study. The simulation study was carried out on both artificially generated data and real data. The result showed that the second order accurate variance estimator and its modified version could be very good candidates for the variance estimation of poststratified estimator of population total.