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The femur is the longest limb bone found in humans. Almost all the long limb bones found in terrestrial mammals, including the femur studied herein, have been observed to be loaded in bending and are curved longitudinally. The curvature in these long bones increases the bending stress developed in the bone, potentially reducing the bone’s load carrying capacity, i.e. its mechanical strength. Therefore, bone curvature poses a paradox in terms of the mechanical function of long limb bones. The aim of this study is to investigate and explain the role of longitudinal bone curvature in the design of long bones. In particular, it has been hypothesized that curvature of long bones results in a trade-off between the bone’s mechanical strength and its bending predictability. This thesis employs finite element analysis of human femora to address this issue. Simplified human femora with different curvatures were modeled and analyzed using ANSYS Workbench finite element analysis software. The results obtained are compared between different curvatures including a straight bone. We examined how the bone curvature affects the bending predictability and load carrying capacity of bones. Results were post processed to yield probability density functions (PDFs) for circumferential location of maximum equivalent stress for various bone curvatures to assess the bending predictability of bones. To validate our findings on the geometrically simplified ANSYS Workbench femur models, a digitally reconstructed femur model from a CT scan of a real human femur was employed. For this model we performed finite element analysis in the FEA tool, Strand7, executing multiple simulations for different load cases. The results from the CT scanned femur model and those from the CAD femur model were then compared. We found general agreement in trends but some quantitative differences most likely due to the geometric differences between the digitally reconstructed femur model and the simplified CAD models. As postulated by others, our results support the hypothesis that the bone curvature is a trade-off between the bone strength and its bending predictability. Bone curvature increases bending predictability at the expense of load carrying capacity.

In order to produce work that prompts the viewer to undergo a process of personal exploration resulting in discourse and the understanding of feelings, it is necessary to balance ideals and realities, combine experience and creativity, and blend concepts and materials. Ideals and realities are discussed in this paper, using an approach that concentrates on foundational principles. The ideals of morality, beauty, goodness, acceptance, and unity form a foundation for the motivation behind my work. They are described in relationship to the philosophy of aesthetics. Ideals are contrasted with realities of life which have patterns and rhythms. These repetitive patterns bring experience and predictability, which can give us peace of mind and comfort. Predictability needs to be balanced with creativity, so that life remains interesting and challenging, and so that we can handle the unexpected. There is a natural tension when combining ideals and realities, experience and creativity. Alleviating that tension in my work necessitates working cognitively as well as using the skill of my hands — blending concepts and materials. The balance and tension between ideals and realities, concepts and materials, is discussed in connection with my first installation, Matter Out of Place (2002), and my final project, Perennial (2005). By using principles as a foundation for my work, and incorporating a combination of experience and creativity, concepts and materials, I hope to successfully convey meaning to viewers in a manner that will cause discourse and reflection.

Insider trading occurs daily and previous studies show that trading might even increase during volatile times. The market becomes especially volatile and uncertain during an economic crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to that, previous studies show that the information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders increases during economic crises, giving the insiders an information advantage. Due to that, we investigate whether insiders, specifically CEOs, can use their advantage to predict future profitability during the Covid-19 pandemic in comparison to a time prior. The data consists of insider transactions on the Swedish stock market during 2017 and 2020. To test our hypothesis we use multiple linear regressions to see if there are any connections between our variables. Our results indicate that there is a connection between the volume of insider transactions and whether the pandemic is ongoing or not. However, our results do not indicate that insiders' ability to predict future profitability increases during an economic crisis. Despite that, the results seemingly differ depending on the industry.

Abstract The purpose of this master thesis is to conduct a Qualitative analysis on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on Telus International, a leading provider of customer service and business process outsourcing solutions using the deductive approach to collect the data. Through interviews with key respondents at the company and a review of relevant literature, this study aims to understand the ways in which artificial intelligence is being used at Telus International in the decision making process and the effects it has on the organisation. The findings of this study suggest that AI has had a positive impact on Telus International, providing the organisation with increased efficiency and productivity. However, the implementation of artificial intelligence has also raised concerns about potential job loss and the need for employees to adapt to new technologies. This study highlights the need for organisations to carefully consider the potential impacts of AI and to provide support for employees during the transition. Paper Type: Master Thesis Research Paper

The general focus of my dissertation, which consists of two essays, is on how changes in the financial and economic environment surrounding a firm affect managerial incentives and firm policies regarding investment in physical capital, innovation, equity offerings, and repurchases. The first essay in my dissertation examines how product market competition affects firms' investment decisions. While competition among firms benefits consumers via lower prices, greater product variety, higher product quality, and greater innovation, recent studies provide evidence that competition has been declining in the U.S. economy over the past decade. The evidence shows that American firms' profits are at near-record levels relative to GDP and are persistent. Industries have become more concentrated as a result of mergers and acquisitions, and barriers to entry have risen and the rate of new entry has been declining for decades. Taking these findings at face value, we examine empirically whether companies feel less compelled to invest in physical capital and in research and development because they face fewer threats from rival firms. Using both traditional proxies and recently developed text-based measures of industry concentration, we show that firms operating in competitive industries invest significantly more in both physical capital and research and development relative to their peers in concentrated industries. We also report that the propensity to invest less by managers of monopolistic firms is partially mitigated by superior corporate governance that reduces the agency problem, and by certain product market characteristics such as low pricing power and low product differentiation/entry barriers. However, after accounting for all these mitigating factors, the negative association between industry concentration and investment persists. Our results are robust to including various control variables and exclusion of firms from industries that face significant competition from imports. The results are also robust to controlling for endogeneity caused by missing time-invariant and time-varying industry level factors that could potentially be related to both the level of concentration and investments. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that firms in competitive industries have a greater incentive to invest and innovate to survive and thrive in a competitive environment relative to the managers of the firms in more concentrated industries whose incentive to invest and innovate is to maintain their monopoly rents. Our findings have obvious policy implications in that investment and hence economic growth is being adversely affected in the current era of increasing industry concentration and declining competition. The second essay in my dissertation investigates whether information contained in equity issues and buybacks is fully incorporated into prices such that the market reaction to subsequent earnings announcements is unrelated to those corporate actions. Korajczyk at al. (1991) argue that firms prefer to issue equity when the market is most informed about the quality of the firm to prevent adverse selection costs associated with new equity issues. This implies that equity issues tend to follow credible information releases contained in earnings announcements. However, analyzing a sample of 19,466 SEO pricing dates between 1970 and 2015 and 15,106 buyback announcements between 1994 and 2015 shows that a considerable number of equity offerings and repurchase announcements take place before the announcement of earnings. About 28% of buybacks and 32% of SEO pricings are made in the three weeks prior to an earnings announcement. Given these statistics, we examine whether these corporate actions provide information about upcoming earnings announcements (earnings predictability) to the extent that new information has not been fully incorporated into prices by market participants. We find evidence of earnings predictability: the market reaction to earnings following buyback announcements is higher by 5.1% than the reaction to earnings following equity issues over the (-1,+30) window when four-factor abnormal returns are used; the difference is 2.2% when unadjusted returns are considered. The results are robust to several alternate sample construction methodologies. There are at least two puzzling effects of earnings predictability that are difficult to reconcile with the market efficiency hypothesis. First, there is an incomplete adjustment to SEO pricings and buyback announcements that results in residual market reaction to earnings announcements. Second, prices continue to drift after earnings announcements: upward for buybacks and downward for SEO pricings. Unlike post-earnings announcement drift, the drift documented here does not depend on the market reaction to earnings announcement. We test several reasons for this anomalous behavior including prior returns, price, size of buyback or SEO, analyst forecast errors, and bid-ask spread. We find that information asymmetry proxies partially explain the persistence of earnings predictability following SEO pricings and buyback announcements. / Ph. D. / It is well documented that corporate investments in research and development (R&D) and physical capital are important drivers of economic growth and higher standards of living. Recent articles published by academic community and popular press have provided evidence that the overall competition among U.S. firms has declined. The evidence shows that concentration has increased in 75% of the US industries, the economy has lost about 50% of its publicly traded firms, and the rate of new-business formation has fallen. Given the documented association between corporate investments and economic growth & social welfare, a natural question arising would be whether declining competition is detrimental to investment in both physical capital and R&D. The first chapter of my dissertation aims to answer this question by examining whether companies feel less compelled to invest in physical capital and in R&D because they face fewer threats from rival firms. Our findings show that firms operating in concentrated industries invest significantly less in both physical capital and research and development relative to their peers in competitive industries, consistent with the notion that firms in competitive industries have a greater incentive to invest and innovate to survive and thrive in a competitive environment relative to the managers of the firms in more concentrated industries whose incentive to invest and innovate is to maintain their monopoly rents. Our findings have obvious policy implications in that investment and hence economic growth is being adversely affected in the current era of increasing industry concentration and declining competition. The wealth of the shareholders of publicly traded firms is tied to managers’ decisions about corporate actions such as equity offerings, buybacks, dividends, and mergers as these actions can potentially affect the stock prices and the value of shareholders’ portfolios. The second part of my dissertation investigates whether buybacks or equity offerings announced within a few weeks prior to earnings provide information about upcoming earnings announcements to the extent that new information has not been fully incorporated into prices by market participants. We find that earnings coming after equity offerings are likely to contain bad news and earnings coming after buybacks are likely to contain good news. This implies that buying the shares of the companies that announce a buyback before their earnings and short selling the shares of the companies that issue equity before their earnings will yield a significant return for the investors.

Die folgende Arbeit befasst sich mit der Vorhersagbarkeit und der zeitlichen Struktur von Indizes der klimatischen Variabilität des tropischen Pazifiks, bekannt in der Jahrzentenskala als El-Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Untersucht wurden die Zeitreihen der Anomalien und Persistenzen der Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), den Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) und die Meeresoberflächentemperatur (SST). Methoden der dynamischen und bedingten schannonschen Entropien wurden für die Untersuchung der Vorhersagbarkeit von symbolischen Sequenzen der Zeitreihen angewendet. Die Untersuchung der bedingten Entropien für symbolische Sequenzen ergibt, dass die meist vorhersagbare Evente von ENSO nach konstanten Teilsequenzen stattfinden. Für mehrere Evente sind zeitliche Korrelationen nachweisbar, die die Vorhersagbarkeit eines Symbols nach einer Teilsequenz in Funktion derer Länge bestimmen. Die Evolution nach Teilsequenzen, die Übergangszuständen entsprechen, sind mit vergleichsweiseniedrigeren Vorhersagbarkeiten versehen. Dabei ist auf die meist vorhersagbaren Teilsequenzen im Detail eingegangen. Es wurde weiterhin festgestellt, dass sich die SST in den meisten Fällen als die zuverlässigste Informationsquelle erweist. Die Analyse der Waveletspektren der Zeitreihen zeigt starke Periodizitäten der Ordnung zwischen 2 und 4 Jahren, die zwischen 1900 und 1960, und 1970 und 2000 in ENSO auftreten. Es besteht Evidenz dafür, dass diese Frequenzkomponenten nicht von einem gefiteten Markovprozess erster Ordnung zurückzuführen sind. Eine Steigung der Frequenzkomponenten zu niedrigeren Perioden ist weiterhin in den Anomalien der Meerestemperatur vorzuweisen. / This doctoral thesis is concerned with the problems of the predictability and the temporal structure of indices of the climatic variability in the tropical Pacific, which is known in the scale of decades as El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). For this purpose, time series of the anomalies and persistences of the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) and of the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) were investigated. Methods of the dynamical and conditional shannon entropies were applied for the investigation of the predictability of symbolic sequences derived from the time series. The investigation of the conditional entropies for symbolic sequences shows that the most probable Events of ENSO occur after constant short sequences. Time correlations are found for several events; these determine the predictability of a sequence as a function of its length. The evolutions of short sequences representing transitions between ENSO states are relatively less predictable. The most predictable short sequences have been studied in detail. It was further found that, in most cases, SST is the most reliable information source. The analysis of the wavelet spectra of the time series shows strong periodicities of 2 to 4 years, which appear between 1900 and 1960, and between 1970 and 2000 in ENSO. There is evidence of a non-markovian process being responsible for these frequency components. Furthermore, the anomalies of the SST series show a gradient of frequency components towards smaller periods.

This thesis consists of four self-contained papers related to the change of market structure and the quality of equity market. In Paper [I] we found, by using of a Flexible Dynamic Component Correlations (FDCC) model, that the creation of a common cross-border stock trading platform has increased the long-run trends in conditional correlations between foreign and domestic stock market returns. In Paper [II] we study whether the creation of a uniform Nordic and Baltic stock trading platform has affected weak-form information efficiency. The results indicate that the stock market consolidations have had a positive effect on the information efficiency and turnover for an average firm. The merger effects are, however, asymmetrically distributed in the sense that relatively large (small) firms located on relatively large (small) markets experience an improved (reduced) information efficiency and turnover. Although the results indicate that changes in the level of investor attention (measured by turnover) may explain part of the changes in information efficiency, they also lend support to the hypothesis that merger effects may partially be driven by changes in the composition of informed versus uninformed investors following a stock. Paper [III] analyzes whether the measured level of trust in different countries can explain bilateral stock market correlations. One finding is that generalized trust among nations is a robust predictor for stock market correlations. Another is that the trust effect is larger for countries which are close to each other. This indicates that distance mitigates the trust effect. Finally, we confirm the effect of trust upon stock market correlations, by using particular trust data (bilateral trust between country A and country B) as an alternative measurement of trust. In Paper [IV] we present the impact of the stock market mergers that took place in the Nordic countries during 2000 – 2007 on the probabilities for stock price jumps, i.e. for relatively extreme price movements. The main finding is that stock market mergers, on average, reduce the likelihood of observing stock price jumps. The effects are asymmetric in the sense that the probability of sudden price jumps is reduced for large and medium size firms whereas the effect is ambiguous for small size firms. The results also indicate that the market risk has been reduced after the stock market consolidations took place.

My thesis will focus on optimal investment decisions, especially those that are planned for longer investment horizon. I will review the literature, showing that changes in investment opportunities can alter the risk-return tradeoff over time and that asset return predictability has an important effect on the variance and correlation structure of returns on bonds, stocks and T bills across investment horizons. The main attention will be given to pension funds, which are institutional investors with relatively long investment horizon. I will find the term structure of risk-return tradeoff in the empirical part of this paper. Later on I will add some variables into the model and investigate whether it can improve the results. Finally the optimal investment strategies will be constructed for various levels of risk tolerance and the results will be compared with strategies of Czech pension funds. I am going to use data from Thomson Reuters Datastream, Wharton Research Data Services and additionally from some other sources.

The predictability of the US-based international mutual fund returns has received renewed consideration in recent academic studies. This dissertation extends recent research by exploring the 2,479 daily return observations covering the period from January 4, 1993 to October 31, 2002 for all categories of international mutual funds. This exploration splits the sample, uses the initial sub-sample to investigate return patterns of international mutual funds and develops trading rules based on the predictable return patterns, and tests those rules on the holdout sample. The empirical findings suggest that smart investors may earn higher riskadjusted returns by following daily dynamic trading strategies. The excess returns earned by investors are statistically and economically significant, irrespective of load or no-load mutual funds and even in the presence of various exchange restrictions and regulations.