Thesis (Ph.D.)--Flinders University, National Institute of Labour Studies. / Typescript bound. Includes bibliographical references: (leaves 268-295) Also available online.

Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008. / Full text also available online. Scroll down for electronic link.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 2002. / Added t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references.

This paper is intended to better understand the effects of speculation on crude oil prices. While speculation has many benefits such as increasing market liquidity and bearing market risks that other wish to offset, speculation can also create unwanted market volatility and economic bubbles. During the past decade, crude oil prices have been extremely volatile causing increased controversy between investors and regulators regarding the role that oil speculation has played in the price of crude oil. This report examines the relationship between crude oil spot and futures prices to determine the role arbitragers, speculators, and hedgers have had in crude oil pricing. / text

This thesis includes one essay on incomplete information and two essays on the capital market implications of asymmetric information. The acquisition of information and its dissemination to all economic units are central activities in capital markets. Limits to information diffusion may exist when market participants have limited processing ability or when market structure causes information asymmetry to persist. Merton (1987) proposes a simple capital market equilibrium model with incomplete information, in which difference in a stock’s investor recognition affects its cost of capital. Myers and Majluf (1984) lay out the theoretical foundation for the role of asymmetric information in corporate finance and its capital market implications. The first essay tests and offers support to Merton’s (1987) theory. In the U.S. market, using the breadth of ownership among retail investors as a proxy for investor recognition, I show that a long-short portfolio based on the annual change of shareholder base earns a compounded annual abnormal return of 6.42% after controlling for the Fama-French three factors. These results are more pronounced among young, low visibility and high idiosyncratic volatility stocks. Moreover, I present evidence that the investor recognition effect can explain approximately 20% of the puzzling net equity issuance effect documented by Pontiff and Woodgate (2008). The second essay suggests a novel signaling mechanism in the framework of asymmetric information. When a firm’s convertible debt is issued, it is not only determined by the fundamentals of the firm such as past stock performance, but also related to whether this performance is realized during the tenure of current CEO who decides the issues. I define the performance that the current CEO achieves in the firm ever since the CEO comes to the helm as CEO-specific performance. Higher CEOspecific performance leads to (1) a higher probability of convertible issues, and (2) a less negative abnormal stock return in response to the convertible issue announcement, controlling for other firm characteristics. These evidences indicate that CEO-specific performance serves as a credible information signal to influence the adverse selection costs between the firm and outside investors in convertible bond financing. The third essay explores the possibility of asymmetric information in explaining the pronounced share issue anomaly in the cross-sectional variations of stock returns, as documented by Pontiff and Woodgate (2008). A lot of equity share issue and repurchase actions are actively determined by the decision of corporate stakeholders, such as employees at the stock options exercises. As these stakeholders hold a large amount of private information about the firm, it is in their optimal decisions to try to time the exercise of their share purchase activity, but outside investors are likely to fail to interpret the information revealed from these actions. I present strong evidence that a negative relation between share issues and stock returns is affected to a greater extent when the information asymmetry problem is more severe. / published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

 This thesis contains two pieces of empirical study on market efficiency. The first essay tests the semi-strong form of market efficiency in the U.S. We use sell-side analyst target prices as publically available information and test the performance of a mean-variance optimized portfolio which is based on the Treynor and Black model. We focus on constituents of S&P 500 index as our sample universe. During the period of beck-testing from 2004 to 2010, we find that the dynamically rebalanced portfolio beats the market in 6 out of 7 years and that the strategy generates significant risk-adjusted abnormal returns. In the second essay we study the post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD) phenomenon, a well-documented market anomaly, on the French stock market. Our empirical study devises a difference-in-difference policy experiment to test if trading activities by individual investors contribute to the magnitude of PEAD. We exploit a recent policy reform on the French stock market, which significantly increased speculative trading costs of individual investors and reduced their trading activities. The impact of reform is found twice as large on individual contrarian traders than momentum traders. Using a group of unaffected stocks to control for potential non-experimental factors, we find magnitude of PEAD dropped significantly after the reform in the experimented group but not in the experimented group but not in the control group. / published_or_final_version / Economics and Finance / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Shek Wu Hui (石湖墟) is the traditional market town area of Sheung Shui. Its history can be dated back to over 300 years ago.1 After its re-establishment after the complete fire destruction in the 1950s, its new market town layout arrangement has more or less been retained since then. For a long time, Shek Wu Hui was where small businesses clustered. Due to its location far away from the city centre of Hong Kong, these businesses mainly served the local residents in the neighbourhood. The small retail businesses underwent fairly gradual changes. But that was the case until mid-2000s. In 2003, Individual Visit Scheme was implemented, allowing citizens from selected cities in Mainland China to visit Hong Kong. Since Sheung Shui is the first town to come across in Hong Kong after crossing the Lo Wu border control point, it has become an increasingly popular place for mainlanders to purchase commodities, and later the parallel trading activities start to soar. With the influx of visitors and the increase in parallel trading activities, itis observed that the retail businessesin Shek Wu Hui have undergone rapid changes. This leads to the key research questions for this dissertation: what is the historicalidentity of Shek Wu Hui as a market town, and has it been able to retain this historical identity despite the changes in the retail businesses? In conservation, the heritage significance of a place includes its social value, which is measured by the collective attachment to the place by people, especially the stakeholders. As someone who grew up in the Shek Wu Hui neighbourhood, the author has much attachment to the place. This is the personal reason behind the motivation to carry out this research. --------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ --------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ / published_or_final_version / Conservation / Master / Master of Science in Conservation

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My dissertation explores ways in which poetic utterances actually do speak against the received idea of poetry as an atemporal and unearthly genre and subtly present their own social and economic agendas. I read the canonical and non-canonical texts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian poetry with an eye for uncovering the economic and social dynamics of these texts, unveiling their intricate and complicated relations to issues of censorship, copyright, professionalization of literature and the literary market, fashion, marital conventions and practices, the transition from gentry-oriented literature to a bourgeois reading public, formation of national identity, imperial conquests, etc. I argue that poetry in the nineteenth century often did engage the relevant issues of the day, just as the novel did, but it was (and is) the dominant mode of reading that prevents us from recognizing the political and economic inventory of verse. I focus on situations of implicit dialogue, where poetic texts respond to or engage the themes and ideas upheld by the novelistic tradition and often promote a very different, or at least an unfamiliar, disposition of forces in society. My dissertation argues for a new practical mode of reading poetry, a mode of reading which goes against the grain of both the existing scholarship on poetry and also the self-imposed vow of being "somewhat stupid," of refusing or being unable to converse about and investigate social, economic, and political realia. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

In the past few years there has been a dramatic change in the orientation of marketing, and strategic thinking has become the order of the day. More and more attention has been paid to the competitor. Competitive marketing in general has become an area of primary concern to marketers, managers, and businessmen. Despite its potential, however, competitive marketing strategy has received relatively little attention in the marketing literature. Few studies have provided analytical techniques for gaining a clearer understanding of industries and competitors, and those that have emerged are considered to lack breadth and comprehensiveness. This study of competitive marketing strategy represents a step towards bridging this gap, by reviewing the concepts and issues related to the practice of competitive strategy and its relation to corporate success. It shows how marketing factors, besides others, shape the competitive position of firms within an industry or any industry within the world market place. A general view of competitive marketing strategy is presented and thereafter illustrated with specific evidence about the competitive dilemma facing the British car industry. It is hoped that this work will not only provide help for practitioners who need to develop an appropriate strategy for a particular business, or scholars trying to understand competition better, but also be of help to analysts and policy makers within government who wish to understand the pressures that affect the competitive position in an industry or the whole economy in the world trade scene. The study generally makes the point that it is, after all, the practice of competitive marketing strategies within individual businesses that largely determines national competitiveness.