Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This dissertation studies the relationship between the existence of multiple means of payment and the effects of monetary policy. Chapter 1 studies the choice of endogenous means of payment when holding money is risky. In steady state equilibrium, the marginal rate of substitution of cash goods for credit goods depends on the crime rate as well as the nominal interest rate. Credit may be used when the return on money is not positive. A positive money injection reduces the crime rate and transactions costs. When the crime rate is positive, welfare increase with inflation, and the Friedman rule is not necessarily optimal. Chapter 2 discusses the risk-sharing role of monetary policy when the asset market is segmented. A fraction of households exchange money for interest-bearing government nominal bonds in the asset market. The government injects money through open market operations with only participating households. In equilibrium, money is nonneutral and there are distributional effects of monetary policy. With idiosyncratic endowment risk, monetary policy cannot perfectly insure households. The optimal money growth rate can be positive and the Friedman rule is not optimal in general. Chapter 3 is built on the work of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 in exploring distributional effects of monetary policy when individuals can choose means of payment among alternatives. In equilibrium, monetary policy has distributional effects. With a positive money injection, some households purchase a greater variety of goods with cash while others purchase a greater variety of goods with credit. Consumption may increase or decrease because household can choose alternative means of payment. Credit is used to dampen fluctuations in consumption arising from monetary policy. The liquidity effect arises under a certain condition.

Det har under en tid diskuterats huruvida den princip som i amerikansk rätt kallas the business judgment rule även förekommer i svensk rätt. Frågan har varit föremål för diskussion i flertalet artiklar och det är därför relevant att utreda huruvida principen förekommer i svensk rätt samt om en sådan princip kan anses vara förenlig med det skadeståndsansvar som styrelseledamöter har enligt 29 kap. 1 § ABL. Denna framställning syftar därför till att ge ett svar på om en princip likt the business judgment rule som förkommer i amerikansk rätt även förekommer i det svenska rättssystemet och om en sådan princip kan anses vara förenlig med 29 kap. 1 § ABL. För att utreda rättsläget har två metoder använts, den rättsdogmatiska metoden och den komparativa metoden, och den juridiska argumentationen i framställningen bygger på lagstiftning, förarbeten, rättspraxis och doktrin. The business judgment rule förekommer i den amerikanska aktiebolagsrätten och principen är en presumtion om att bolagsledningen vid beslutsfattande agerat utifrån en väl informerade grund, i god tro samt i övertygelsen om att beslutet fattats för aktiebolagets bästa. Principen har kommit att ta sin form genom the Supreme Courts i USA och inte direkt genom skriven lag vilket beror på att USA är ett s.k. common law land där rättstillämparen även är skaparen av rättsreglerna. För att principen ska vara tillämplig krävs att fyra rekvisit uppfylls, dessa är att det ska röra sig om ett beslut som fattats av en styrelseledamot och the triads of fiduciary duties. I svensk rätt regleras styrelseledamöters skadeståndsansvar i 29 kap. 1 § ABL och av paragrafen framkommer att en styrelseledamot som inom sitt uppdrag bringar skada till aktiebolaget, aktieägare eller tredje man genom uppsåt eller av oaktsamhet ska ersätta denna skada. Inom ramen för styrelseledamöters skadeståndsansvar enligt 29 kap. 1 § ABL finns såväl ett externt som ett internt skadeståndsansvar. För att en styrelseledamot ska kunna ställas ansvarig för en skada krävs att styrelseledamoten agerat oaktsamt, eller genom uppsåt, samt att det föreligger adekvat kausalitet mellan handlandet och den uppkomna skadan. Efter en genomgång av lagstiftning, förarbeten, prejudikat och doktrin på såväl det amerikanska som det svenska området kan konstateras att the business judgment rule som presumtion inte förekommer i de svenska regleringarna på området, varken i den allmänna skadeståndsrätten eller i ABL. Vissa rekvisit som förekommer i the business judgment rule kan däremot anses förekomma i såväl 29 kap. 1 § ABL som i rättstillämparens bedömningar. Rekvisitet för duty of care kan liknas med den culpabedömning som sker vid utredningen av om en person varit oaktsam i sitt handlande. Högsta domstolen har även i några rättsfall framfört att om en person fattar ett beslut som varit väl motiverat och med en informerad basis bör inte beslutet ifrågasättas, vilket även detta kan liknas med rekvisitet för duty of care samt det tankesätt som finns gällande the business judgment rule. Det kan även konstateras att om en princip likt the business judgment rule skulle komma att bli allmänt vedertagen i svensk rätt torde detta inte stå i strid med 29 kap. 1 § ABL.

This thesis explores the subject of Japanese colonial language education in Taiwan and assimilation between 1895 and 1945. It examines the overall nature of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan through its colonial policies, followed by a review of the history of Japanese colonial language education in Taiwan, the investigation of the Japanese colonial position on language education and assimilation, the establishment of the implementation of Japanese language education in Taiwan in areas of teaching methodologies and textbook compilation, and the determination of the effects of Japanese language education on assimilation in Taiwan. The thesis further seeks to determine the link between a Taiwanese identity and the Taiwanese who were ruled and educated under Japanese colonial rule. The views of both the elite and common Taiwanese who lived through the colonial era are examined.The aim of this thesis is to test the hypothesis whether Japanese colonial education in Taiwan achieved assimilation among the Taiwanese as claimed by Japanese colonial authorities. Through the official facts and figures provided by Japanese colonial authorities, they seemed to prove a successful case of assimilation among the Taiwanese. However, through close scrutiny of these official facts and figures and reality backed up by the oral accounts of the Taiwanese and conscientious observations by the Japanese, it is found that the claims made by Japanese colonial authorities in the case of assimilation through Japanese language education are highly contestable. By interviewing those who experienced Japanese language education during the colonial period, further insights into the formation of post-colonial Taiwanese identities are gained. This study contributes to studies on Taiwans subsequent socio-linguistic developments in the post-colonial period.

While research suggests that peer influence can lead to increases in undesirable behaviours of adolescents, there has been little focus on the specific mechanisms of influence. A relatively small literature examining social interactions between peers has found that the discussion of rule breaking topics by pairs of boys relates to how much problem behaviour the boys engage in. This research is limited by its reliance on a set of similar samples from a North American population base. This thesis explored the relationship between social interaction and behaviour with sample from New Zealand Aotearoa. Nine pairs of Year 10 boys were recruited primarily from two high schools. A half-hour conversation was video taped for each pair. These conversations were coded on the basis of the nature of the talk between pairs of participants following the coding system proposed by Poe, Dishion, Griesler and Andrews (1990). The coded behaviours were analysed and compared to measures of previous rule breaking behaviours. The duration of rule breaking talk was found to correlate with the level of previous rule breaking behaviour. It was not clear whether the amount of rule breaking talk was related to the amount of laughter following it. Possible explanations are discussed. While generalisations from these results are limited by an unexpectedly small sample size, they show similarity to the previous research findings. The findings, the difficulties in recruitment to the research and the implications of these for future research are discussed.

Data mining is increasingly becoming important tool in extracting interesting knowledge from large databases. Many industries are now using data mining tools for analysing their large collections of databases and making business decisions. Many data mining problems involve temporal aspects, with examples ranging from engineering to scientific research, finance and medicine. Temporal data mining is an extension of data mining which deals with temporal data. Mining temporal data poses more challenges than mining static data. While the analysis of static data sets often comes down to the question of data items, with temporal data there are many additional possible relations. One of the tasks in temporal data mining is the pattern discovery task, whose objective is to discover time-dependent correlations, patterns or rules between events in large volumes of data. To date, most temporal pattern discovery research has focused on events existing at a point in time rather than over a temporal interval. In comparison to static rules, mining with respect to time points provides semantically richer rules. However, accommodating temporal intervals offers rules that are richer still. This thesis addresses several issues related to the pattern discovery from interval sequence data. Despite its importance, this area of research has received relatively little attention and there are still many issues that need to be addressed. Three main issues that this thesis considers include the definition of what constitutes an interesting pattern in interval sequence data, the efficient mining for patterns in the data, and the identification of interesting patterns from a large number of discovered patterns. In order to deal with these issues, this thesis formulates the problem of discovering rules, which we term richer temporal association rules, from interval sequence databases. Furthermore, this thesis develops an efficient algorithm, ARMADA, for discovering richer temporal association rules. The algorithm does not require candidate generation. It utilizes a simple index, and only requires at most two database scans. In this thesis, a retrieval system is proposed to facilitate the selection of interesting rules from a set of discovered richer temporal association rules. To this end, a high-level query language specification, TAR-QL, is proposed to specify the criteria of the rules to be retrieved from the rule sets. Three low-level methods are developed to evaluate queries involving rule format conditions. In order to improve the performance of the methods, signature file based indexes are proposed. In addition, this thesis proposes the discovery of inter-transaction relative temporal association rules from event sequence databases.

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Thesis (M. Div.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-94).

<p>A non-corrupt judiciary is a fundamental condition for the endorsement of rule of law and the ability to guarantee basic human rights in society. The judiciary must therefore be an independent and fair body that fights corruption, not the other way around. This essay systematizes different binding and non-binding international, and to some extent regional, norms and standards regarding corruption in the judiciary and judicial independence, and presents potential factors and effects of judicial corruption, through an inventory of documents recognized by organizations such as the United Nations and the Council of Europe. Further, the essay presents different anti-corruption strategies and the dilemma of implementing such strategies with regard to judicial independence. The advantages and disadvantages of different anti-corruption strategies are reviewed through the study of some successful and unsuccessful examples.</p><p>There are several definitions of corruption, this essay emanates from the definition of ‘abuse of office for personal or private gain’, a definition that is wide but yet well recognized. The factors of judicial corruption are many and often overlapping, but they vary from state to state and must hence be analyzed individually to find the factual reasons for what generates corruption. The effects are detrimental and break down the very core of rule of law and corrupt judges neglect fundamental principles such as equality, impartiality, propriety and integrity. With regard to the different factors and effects, the norms and standards, and the anti-corruption strategies, a discussion follows about how to rid the judiciary from corruption with preservation of the respect of judicial independence. The discussion also raises the predicament that malpractice of various fundamental principles e.g. judicial independence can occur and further distort unhealthy judiciaries. The main conclusion regarding anti-corruption strategies is that they must be carefully weighed against the principle of independence.</p>

<p>This thesis is trying to find out whether the five studied countries, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain would have avoided the economic crisis by having an independent central bank.The theory used for our study is the Taylor rule, using statistical data in order to count out the short-term nominal interest rate. Results are compared with the ECB nominal interest rate to see if the difference between the two rates is big. By looking at other macroeconomic data we will try to understand if the fiscal policy could have been conducted in a better way.The results we reached were varying. In the case of Ireland and Spain we could clearly see that a higher interest rate could have drastically altered the outcome, potentially avoiding the crisis. Regarding Italy and Portugal, the current crisis is more due to structural problems and not due to the level of the interest rate. Finally, we could see that Greece could have benefited from a higher interest rate. But we cannot definitely say that this has been the reason for the crisis since the Greek fiscal policy has been poorly conducted.</p>