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published_or_final_version / Statistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

The interest in birds has had a rapid increase since the 1800 century. Nowadays the interest is especially big in the US and UK. The aim of this study was to see if the interest in birds followed the same pattern here in Sweden, as well as to see why people get interested in birds to begin with. To answer the purposes of the study, questionnaires were handed out to people in the age of ten and older. Along with to see how many people were interested in birds, the purpose of the questionnaire was to see whom is interested in birds and if birds had any special meaning to the participants. The study indicated that the interest followed the same path here in Sweden as in the US and UK. Women were more interested in birds than men and the interest increased with age. The average bird enthusiast was a woman between 45 and 54 years old. However one can’t wholly tell why people are interested in birds, since the interest in birds lies within the people themselves. One can though say that birds and birding have physical and psychological health benefits, which could be a reason for their allure.

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The term structure of interest rates shows the relationship between yields of zero-coupon bonds and their maturities. The empirical performance of the single-factor model of the affine term structure models, such as Vasicek (1977) and Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985), has not been entirely satisfactory. The curve fitting methods, and particularly the spline method, used in practice to estimate the term structure are ad hoc and thus subject to arbitrage opportunities. Guo (1998) used the fundamental Partial Differential Equation (PDE) for bond pricing to derive a linear discount function, which is consistent with no-arbitrage. He showed that this is the unique linear solution to the PDE. This solution, the exponential-polynomial model or EP model for short, has n unobserved state factors that drive a stochastic discount process for pricing bonds so as to rule out arbitrage opportunities. In this thesis, we conduct an extensive cross-sectional analysis of the EP model on two different data sets: prices for daily Treasury bills, notes and bonds from the New York Federal Reserve Bank quotation sheets from July 1989 to October 1996, and daily Canadian bills, notes and bonds prices for the time period from June 1992 to May 1995. We estimate the model by applying a minimization criterion. The cross-sectional analysis shows that the EP model is able to describe adequately the term structure of interest rates. For the US data, we find that every term structure from the sampling period can be fully represented by either nine or ten state factors. Eigenvalue analysis indicates that the first three principal components are underlying the term structure movements. We conduct a time series analysis on the three principal components. They are found to be best described by ARMA/GARCH processes. We form two types of GARCH forecasts of the three principal components and test their out-of-sample performance. We conclude that the three principal components are predictable in a statis

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The Islamic prohibition of riba is unequivocal but textually not explicit. The traditional and liberal theological, juridical and philosophical hermeneutical effort has addressed it comprehensively but not conclusively. This inconclusiveness is due to the absence of the identification of the distinctive characteristic of riba, resulting from the use of limited scope pre-defined juridical and economic paradigms employing a contextual exoteric approach, excluding the broader esoteric content. This promotes an internal hermeneutical imbalance between the variables of meaning, application, rationale, underlying cause and consequence of riba, preventing the full convergence and congruence of these narrowly defined paradigms with the broadly implied paradigm in the Qur'an and the Sunna, and obstructing the promulgation of the prohibition. The resolution of this hermeneutical gridlock, predicated upon the discovery of the distinctive rationale and the derivation of the underlying cause of riba prohibition, has a direct bearing on the expansion of scope and unreserved acceptance of the prohibition.

The notion of usury/interest, subsumed under the Arabic term riba and Hebraic neshekh/marbit, has been the center of human attention throughout recorded history, but only as an exclusive economic paradigm subject to toleration, limitation or prohibition. Yet, in a clearly disproportionate treatment, all pristine major world religions consider this "economic act" as the greatest of sins, which, in Islam, additionally attracts the most graphic other-worldly punishments at the extremes of the spectrum. Economic usurpation of greater severity, e.g., theft by stealth and robbery by force do not attract as severe a Scriptural punishment as does "interest-taking" by consent, clearly implying, both scripturally and linguistically, that this seemingly exclusive "economic act" is in fact a sin of greater theological proportions. Yet, casuistry and a non-philosophical approach have so far prevented the extant Judaic, Christian and Islamic scholarship from assessing the depth and breadth of the theology at stake here. Utilizing a semiotic methodology and a philosophical/theological approach, and drawing out the glaring deficiencies of the current scholarship, this work posits that the Arabic riba /Hebraic marbit (growth), by virtue of its intrinsic characteristic of intra-activity as against its binary opposite of inter-activity inherent in bay' (exchange), causes self-emanation, self-subsistence and ex-nihilo creation, which, being exclusive Divine attributes, not only render marbit/riba an act of idolatry/polytheism (Arabic: shirk), but also thereby extend it to all spheres of human action. This diagnosis not only harmonizes the severe ordained punishment with the gravity of the sin, it also bestows perfect hermeneutical calibration to the whole riba paradigm for all monotheist religions, identifying the universal divine law: intra-activity (riba) ---lack of dependence---for the Master (Rabb) and inter-activity (bay')---dependence---for the servant ('abd). This yields the new critical theory of normative human behavior prescribed by "Islam"---the din al-fiṭra, which calls for total human conformity to the design and purpose of human creation in pairs (tathniya: duality), reserving riba (tawḥid : singularity) for the One whose divine attribute it is.