While the concept of multipotentiality is often referred to in the giftedness literature, implicit and explicit definitions of the concept change from author to author. Additionally, few empirical studies have been done to provide support for the many anecdotal claims made about multipotentiality. The present nine-year follow-up study (N = 180) of gifted youth (mean age = 20.2 years) provides evidence that many gifted individuals may indeed be multipotentialed. The definition of multipotentiality ("the ability and desire to pursue different activities and goals") used to operationalize the concept was validated by six experts in the field. Degree of multipotentiality was found to be significantly related to SES, verbal IQ, variety of interests and abilities, participation in leisure activities, answer-seeking, attitude towards school, and several scores derived from the 1993/94 administration of the Strong Interest Inventory. Multipotentiality was not, however, found to be related to Holland's (1985) concepts of differentiation, consistency, or vocational identity. It thus appears that experience with activities and perhaps motivation to learn contribute to the phenomenon of multipotentiality. Little evidence was found to support the contention reported in the giftedness literature that multipotentiality leads to career indecision. Additionally, few career-related experiences were found to differentiate between more or less "successful" multipotentialed subjects, although those who scored highest on the Vocational Identity Scale were more active in their career deciding (prioritizing and focusing interests) and less likely to view career planning as a frustrating and on-going process. Direction of causality for all of the mentioned results is unknown, and many avenues for future research including nongifted subjects have been illuminated.

No description available.

The term structure of interest rates as described by yield curves has the potential to contain information about the course of future nominal and real interest rates, inflation and economic activity. The link between the yield curve and these economic variables is formalised via capital asset pricing models. The information in yield curves is examined in a systematic manner using two new term structure data sets. The first one is an extended version of the McCulloch yield data for the United States for the period 1947-91 and the second one is a new highly detailed data set for the United Kingdom supplied by the Bank of England for this study, which consists of daily observations on yields for the period 4th January 1983 to 30th November 1993.Empirical evidence for the United States for the period 1952-91 shows that inflation and real interest rate changes tend to offset each other so that there is no useful information about nominal interest rates. Information about the real term structure is sometimes obscured by the offsetting effects of real interest rates and term premiums. Evidence is presented that shows yield spreads may give more unambiguous signals about economic activity if such activity is measured in relative terms. The better predictive power of UK term structures with regard to nominal interest rates is due to inflation and real interest rates moving together in the same direction. The phenomenon of disinflation can produce highly significant information about the real term structure. For the US and, more particularly, the UK, the predictive power of the yield curve is subject to significant change. The main conclusion reached is that over-reliance certainly should not be placed on the yield curve as a leading economic indicator.

No description available.

The satisfactory measurement of banking output has eluded statistical agencies since the inception of national income accounting. At the heart of the problem is the treatment of interest. Net interest payments are considered part of the output originating in the paying industries. When applied to the banking sector this practice results in unrealistically low or even negative output and an imputation is carried out to rectify the problem. This thesis identifies the problems surrounding the existing concepts and practices, discusses alternatives that have been proposed and develops a new approach to measuring banking output. The rate of interest is decomposed into a transfer and a service part and economic prices for banking services are constructed. Thus, nominal and real banking output are obtained in a straightforward manner. Empirical work points to the viability of the new approach.

This thesis investigates the fundamental assumptions made in recent continuous-time equilibrium models of the term structure of interest rates. It finds that the number and the stochastic processes of state variables are strikingly different from those assumed in the literature. It develops a three-factor empirical term structure model, based on 22 years of cross-maturity time series data. The results show that the price differences, between the well-known Vasicek, and Cox, Ingersoll and Ross models and the three-factor empirical model, for interest-rate sensitive securities are of substantial economic significance.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education. / This thesis seeks to broaden our understanding of how students combine and use information to make a judgement about a subject in which they may be interested. A review and assessment of previous studies is presented, including a discussion of Brunswik's single lens model. A simple idiographic analysis focusing on a person's behaviour across a large number of situations is presented. The emphasis is on the repeated sampling of a person across many situations. The situations in this study contain profiles or collections of information that involve educational descriptions. The profile is in the form of some ratings (or a set of cues) that describe a subject. The findings support earlier studies, which reported individual variation in perceptions of interest and differences in the ability to make accurate judgement of interest. The purpose of this study was to (1) investigate how students use available information to make a judgement in a matter of educational interest; (2) how they perceive the world when it is organised in a particular way; and (3) how students construct their own reality and combine information to judge their own reality. The research question was: Does increasing the correlation between the items of information impact upon the nature of judgements made by people in terms of: (a) the correlation between each item of information and judgement or (b) the multiple correlation between all items and judgement? In the past, interest was regarded as an undifferentiated motivational factor to learning and achievement, thus limiting the scope of the study of interest. This study, however, focuses on how students take into account the relationship between different factors when determining their level of interest in a subject they may be interested in studying. In this context, the ability of students to handle information effectively may positively affect the quality of their judgements in regard to their interest in the subject they are considering studying. The research comprised four separate studies. Participants were university students from three different universities, the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Lagos and Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife. Six different cues were used. Participants were given a booklet comprising 75 judgement profiles. These profiles contained six different cues or informational details. Participants were asked, How interested would you be in taking a subject that has been described in this way?" Participants were also asked to study the cues in the profile and judge their own interest on a scale of 0 (no interest) to 9 (high interest) based on the information described in the profile. Profiles (N=15) were repeated to determine the reliability or consistency of judgement for each participant. Both multiple correlations and cue utilities based on Brunswik's single lens model were computed. In each study, the four most reliable students based on test-retest reliability, were chosen for further analysis. The cues varied in intercorrelation from 0.0, 0.2, 0.5 and 0.8. Generally the results showed that participants were different in terms of their judgments and also varied in their perceptions of the situation. There was a plethora of idiosyncratic responses to the various profiles and cues. This individual variation was consistent even across the four content areas. Overall, the results of the four studies were not substantially different from each other. It shows that policy capturing involves not only attaining some useful measure of cue importance through the procedure of multiple regression but also gaining some knowledge of how cue values are functionally related to judgements. The primary interest is on nonlinear relationships which are additive in nature and addressed the issue of the cue-judgement relationships. The overall depiction showed that multiple correlation and multicollinearity varied from one case study to another. However, the overall results tended to confirm the importance of individual variation in perceptions relating to judgement of interest in a subject as earlier and widely reported in the interest literature. More importantly this study continues to highlight the large individual difference in human judgement and perception of the world in determining whether educational interest or some other factor that may influence the ways in which components of the educational world are intercorrelated. These findings tended to support earlier reports that individuals differ in their ways of making a judgement (Parkin 1993, Armelius & Armelius 1976). Indeed, the result of the study confirmed previous reports on the significant differences that exist in individual perceptions of interest. Taken together, the results of this study support the view that judgement analysis may function as a very important aid to individual student learning and performance on the judgment task. Significantly, the outcome of these four studies, show how students have combined and used information to make a judgement in a subject including how they have constructed their own world of reality.

Thesis (M.S.) -- Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: security; derivatives; forward; measure; binomial tree. Includes bibliographical references (p.34-35).

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62). Also available in electronic version.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Mathematics and Statistics. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-94). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR29633