The thesis consists of three self-contained essays on public policy in the macroeconomy. “Government Policy in the Formal and Informal Sectors” quantitatively investigates the interaction between the firms' choice to operate in the formal or the informal sector and government policy on taxation and enforcement. Taxes, enforcement, and regulation are incorporated in a general equilibrium model of firms differing in their productivities. The model quantitatively accounts for the keys aspects in the data and allows me to back out country-specific enforcement levels. Some policy reforms are analyzed and the welfare gains can be fairly large. “Determinants of Capital Intensive and R&D Intensive Foreign Direct Investment” studies the determinants of capital intensity and technology content of FDI. Using industry data on U.S. FDI abroad and data on many different host countries' institutional characteristics, we show that there is a differential response of FDI flows to investment climate according to the capital intensity of the industries receiving the investments. We find that better protection of property rights has a significant positive effect on R&D intensive capital flows. We find evidence that an increase in workers' bargaining power results in a reduction of both kinds of FDI. “Ambiguity Aversion, the Equity Premium, and the Welfare Costs of Business Cycles” examines the relevance of consumers’ ambiguity aversion for asset prices and how consumption fluctuations influence consumer welfare. First, in a Mehra-Prescott-style endowment economy, we calibrate ambiguity aversion so that asset prices are consistent with data: a high return on equity and a low return on risk-free bonds. We then use this calibration to investigate how much consumers would be willing to pay to reduce endowment fluctuations to zero, thus delivering a Lucas-style welfare cost of fluctuations. These costs turn out to be very large: consumers are willing to pay over 10% of consumption in permanent terms.

This study explores patterns of language learning strategies and the degree of tolerance of ambiguity of Korean Naval Academy midshipmen. The subjects, 377 midshipmen, were divided into three groups according to class, major, and proficiency, and the results were analyzed by group. The study also sought to find out relationships between motivation, attitude, language learning strategies, and tolerance of ambiguity. For the study, the Strategy Inventory Language Learning (SILL for ESL/EFL) developed by Oxford (1990a) and the Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale by Ely (1995) were used, along with items about motivation and attitude toward language learning.It was found that the language learning strategy mean and tolerance of ambiguity mean were not high overall. The proficiency levels showed significant mean differences: the high proficiency level students showed a significantly higher mean use of language learning strategies and tolerance of ambiguity than did the low and mid proficiency level students. With respect to class levels, there were no significant mean differences relating to language learning strategies. The seniors' mean of tolerance of ambiguity, however, was significantly higher than that of the other class levels. For major, there were no significant differences in the use of language learning strategies and tolerance of ambiguity. Correlations between tolerance of ambiguity and language learning strategies were significant and positive, although modest.The midshipmen's means of motivation and attitude were comparatively high. It was also found that while motivation showed a strong correlation with language learning strategies, attitude showed a strong correlation with tolerance of ambiguity. Through the analysis of six open questions, in addition, it confirmed that the Korean midshipmen generally did not use active strategies in learning English, although high proficiency level students used more than the mid or low proficiency ones. / Department of English

The main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the effects of acquiring a second language (L2) at later periods of language development and native-like homonym processing in the first language (L1) from the perspective of Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP) using a cross-modal lexical decision task. To date, there is a lack of neurophysiological investigations into the effect that acquiring an L2 can have on processing strategies in the L1, and whether or not there is a precise age at which L2 exposure no longer affects native-like language processing. As such, my goal is to pinpoint this sensitive period specifically for homonym processing. To achieve this, I will present and discuss the results of two studies. The first study employs behavioural response measures using a cross-modal lexical decision task where participants simultaneously heard a sentence and made a decision to a visually-presented pseudoword or real word. The second study employs ERP measures using a novel ERP paradigm which investigates not only the main objective of this dissertation, but the second objective as well. This second objective is for this dissertation to become the first to evaluate the outcome of combining the cross-modal lexical decision task with ERPs. The behavioural and neurophysiological results for the monolingual group support the Reordered Access Model (Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988) while the results for the bilingual groups do not. The results of the current studies indicate that those bilinguals who acquired French as an L2 rather than as a second native L1 show increasing divergence from monolingual native speakers in L1 homonym processing, with later acquirers exhibiting an exponentially marked divergence. This was found even though the task was carried out in English, the L1 (or one of the L1s) of all participants. The diverging performances of the bilinguals from the monolinguals were apparent in behavioural responses as well as in the amplitude, scalp distribution, and latency of ERP components, These differences were unique to each group, which supports the hypothesis that the acquisition of an L2 influences processing in the L1 (Dussias & Sagarra, 2007). Specifically, the early and late bilingual groups exhibited a marked divergence from the monolingual group as they revealed syntactic priming effects (p<.001) as well as lexical frequency effects (p<.001). They also revealed the greatest P600-like effect as they processed target words which were inappropriately- related to the priming homonyms (such as skin in Richard had a shed in the back of the garden). This suggests a heightened sensitivity to surface cues due to the L2 influencing homonym processing in the L1 (Cook, 2003; Dussias & Sagarra, 2007). Comparatively, the monolingual group revealed equal N400-like effects for lexical ambiguities overall compared to the unrelated conditions, and a context-by-frequency-interaction slowing their processing of the target word that is appropriately-related to the subordinate reading of the priming homonym, suggesting that they are not as sensitive to these same surface cues. Importantly, these results confirm that using ERPs along with a cross-modal lexical decision task is a promising paradigm to further study language processing.

A decision to recall products by firms can lead to negative consequences such as erosion of shareholder wealth and loss of customer goodwill. Further, the way a recall is managed can lead to more negative consequences than the recall decision itself. Therefore the manner in which firms manage such decisions can help mitigate these negative consequences. This thesis examines two such decisions: recall restitution and time to recall. A firm’s decisions on restitution offered to affected customers and time to recall may evoke conflicting reactions from shareholders and customers, where serving the interests of one stakeholder affects the interests of the other. While higher restitutions and faster recalls improve customer goodwill, they lead to erosion of shareholder wealth. This finding is used to hypothesize the influence of organizational characteristics (position of the firm in the value chain, firm’s internal operations, and firm’s recall experience), and key crisis factors (ambiguity and severity) on these decisions. This thesis uses data on toy recalls issued in the U.S. from 1988 to 2011. The results show that firms tend to favor shareholders by offering lower restitutions to affected customers when they are situated farther from the customer in the supply chain, when they have more experience with recalls, when the crisis is severe, and when the cause of the crisis is ambiguous. When the recall is due to the internal operations of the firm, restitution offered to affected customers is lower only when the severity of the recall is high. Firms issue recalls quickly when the crisis is severe in order to reduce customer hazards and avoid negative publicity. Severe recalls, however, may be delayed when firms are experienced in recall management, and when such recalls are caused by the internal operations of the firm. The findings of this thesis highlight one of the dilemmas that firms face in a crisis decision making situation and help foster an understanding of the conditions under which firms manage shareholder versus customer reactions in order to mitigate the negative consequences of recall management decisions.

<p>This dissertation develops a "politics of ambiguity" through case studies of affect in contemporary works by European, American and Singaporean composers. While studies of intercultural music have focused on narratives of power relations (e.g. orientalism, postcolonial ambivalence), a new method of interpretation can be based on the affective ambiguity that arises from intercultural encounters, indicating a less than totalitarian power and thus forming a basis for political struggle. The focus is on three pieces of music by American-born John Sharpley, Belgium-born Robert Casteels, and Singaporean Joyce Koh, who hail from across the globe and incorporate Asian musics, arts, and philosophies into a variety of modernist, neo-romantic, and postmodern musical idioms. Modalities of ambiguity include: perceptual focus on musicalized Chinese calligraphy strokes, versus perceptual liminality arising from modernist technique; the musical embodiment of Buddhist disembodiment; and, ambiguous relationality of intercultural sounds. Liminality, disembodiment, and relationality mark the cessation of identity politics in favor of a form of cultural hermeneutics that pays heed to the complex interaction between society, sonic media and the neurophysiology of listening.</p> / Dissertation

The main motivation behind this thesis is the lack of belief subjectivity in problems of contracting, and especially in problems of demand for insurance. The idea that an underlying uncertainty in contracting problems (e.g. an insurable loss in problems of insurance demand) is a given random variable on some exogenously determined probability space is so engrained in the literature that one can easily forget that the notion of an objective uncertainty is only one possible approach to the formulation of uncertainty in economic theory. On the other hand, the subjectivist school led by De Finetti and Ramsey challenged the idea that uncertainty is totally objective, and advocated a personal view of probability (subjective probability). This ultimately led to Savage's approach to the theory of choice under uncertainty, where uncertainty is entirely subjective and it is only one's preferences that determine one's probabilistic assessment. It is the purpose of this thesis to revisit the "classical" insurance demand problem from a purely subjectivist perspective on uncertainty. To do so, we will first examine a general problem of contracting under heterogeneous subjective beliefs and provide conditions under which we can show the existence of a solution and then characterize that solution. One such condition will be called "vigilance". We will then specialize the study to the insurance framework, and characterize the solution in terms of what we will call a "generalized deductible contract". Subsequently, we will study some mathematical properties of collections of vigilant beliefs, in preparation for future work on the idea of vigilance. This and other envisaged future work will be discussed in the concluding chapter of this thesis. In the chapter preceding the concluding chapter, we will examine a model of contracting for innovation under heterogeneity and ambiguity, simply to demonstrate how the ideas and techniques developed in the first chapter can be used beyond problems of insurance demand.

Although the earliest known literary evidence for a dual-sexed divinity on Cyprus dates to the fifth century BCE, archaeological evidence indicates there was a tradition on the island of sexually ambiguous imagery which predates the literary sources. This information prompted the present research, which traces the tradition back to the earliest known examples on Late Neolithic Cyprus, and tracks its evolution through to the Cypro-Archaic period. Rather than rely upon descriptions, photographs and drawings presented in consulted publications, the various international museums that house the figures were visited by the writer in order to physically examine the images. Controversial aspects of these figures were discussed with senior museum staff and/or curators. If figurines were unavailable for viewing, where possible, photographs were acquired from the relevant museums, and controversial aspects of the figures discussed by email. As a result, the majority of the images discussed in this thesis have been examined and photographed by the author. A catalogue of the sexually ambiguous imagery for Cyprus from the Neolithic to the Cypro-Archaic period has been compiled and is included in this work. It is proposed that the imagery is of Cypriot innovation, and consists of proto-anthropomorphic, anthropomorphic and half-animal, half-human representations. The genre is influenced from its earliest period by the figurative art of the Syro-Anatolian mainland, but from the Late Bronze Age onwards, influences from the western Mediterranean and Aegean are also evident. Despite the periods in which there is little evidence for figurine production, sexually ambivalent imagery re-emerges when figurative evidence is once more apparent in the archaeological records. Furthermore, stylistic continuity of the genre from one period to the next is also apparent. This continuity is regardless of the cultural changes which occur intermittently during the seven millennia period relevant to this study. Although it is not until the Cypro-Geometric period that there is firm evidence to support a religious interpretation of sexually equivocal imagery, it is suggested that the genre from the earliest period was at least associated with fertility, and perhaps religious cult.

In all natural languages, ambiguity is a universal phenomenon. When a word has multiple meaning depending on its contexts it is called an ambiguous word. The process of determining the correct meaning of a word (formally named word sense) in a given context is word sense disambiguation(WSD). WSD is one of the most fundamental problems in natural language processing. If properly addressed, it could lead to revolutionary advancement in many other technologies such as text search engine technology, automatic text summarization and classification, automatic lexicon construction, machine translation and automatic learning agent technology. One difficulty that has always confronted WSD researchers is the lack of high quality sense specific information. For example, if the word "power" Immediately preceds the word "plant", it would strongly constrain the meaning of "plant" to be "an industrial facility". If "power" is replaced by the phrase "root of a", then the sense of "plant" is dictated to be "an organism" of the kingdom Planate. It is obvious that manually building a comprehensive sense specific information base for each sense of each word is impractical. Researchers also tried to extract such information from large dictionaries as well as manually sense tagged corpora. Most of the dictionaries used for WSD are not built for this purpose and have a lot of inherited peculiarities. While manual tagging is slow and costly, automatic tagging is not successful in providing a reliable performance. Furthermore, it is often the case that for a randomly chosen word (to be disambiguated), the sense specific context corpora that can be collected from dictionaries are not large enough. Therefore, manually building sense specific information bases or extraction of such information from dictionaries are not effective approaches to obtain sense specific information. A web text, due to its vast quantity and wide diversity, becomes an ideal source for extraction of large quantity of sense specific information. In this thesis, the impacts of Web texts on various aspects of WSD has been investigated. New measures and models are proposed to tame enormous amount of Web texts for the purpose of WSD. They are formally evaluated by experimenting their disambiguation performance on about 70 ambiguous nouns. The results are very encouraging and have helped revealing the great potential of using Web texts for WSD. The results are published in three papers at Australia national and international level (Wang&Hoffmann,2004,2005,2006)[42][43][44].

This research documentation explores representations of the Holocaust in the visual arts in relation to the post-Holocaust ??ripple effect????the impact of the Holocaust on the world today, in both the wider arena of global political conflicts and in the lives of individuals. In the following chapters, I address the complex ethical and political aspects of representations of the Holocaust in the context of the evolution of Holocaust awareness and memorialisation. I also investigate recent developments in art and theory that challenge prevailing conventions governing Holocaust representation, especially how the relationship between the perceived political exploitation of the Holocaust and the intergenerational effects of Holocaust trauma is addressed. Given these are sensitive and contentious issues I discuss my studio work in terms of how trauma affects the political rather than as an overt polemically/politically motivated art. I examine my attempts to bypass controversy (maintaining respect for victims and survivors), yet maintain engagement with these issues in my art. In doing this I aim to liberate both my art and the viewer from habits of perception in regard to the subject. From this principle I propose a ??strategic?? form of self-censorship that paradoxically gives me the freedom to do this. This strategy enables me to create an art of ambiguity, which exists in an amoral zone. The art evokes reflective thought, uncertainty and ambivalence, where references to the Holocaust or political content are often not explicit, leaving room for lateral and open readings. My work, which incorporates interdisciplinary methods, is often based on photographs from a variety of sources. I also create three dimensional constructions. The sourced images and the constructions are disguised, decontextualised, cropped, erased or digitally altered, and also experiment with optical illusion. Through transformative processes these images are changed into drawings, paintings, photographs. This research documentation acknowledges the gap between the gravitas of the subject with its ethical and geo-political complexities and my idiosyncratic, subjective, introverted approach to making art. I conclude that there is potential in the exploration of an ??anxiety of representation?? in relation to the Holocaust in the contemporary context.

Although the earliest known literary evidence for a dual-sexed divinity on Cyprus dates to the fifth century BCE, archaeological evidence indicates there was a tradition on the island of sexually ambiguous imagery which predates the literary sources. This information prompted the present research, which traces the tradition back to the earliest known examples on Late Neolithic Cyprus, and tracks its evolution through to the Cypro-Archaic period. Rather than rely upon descriptions, photographs and drawings presented in consulted publications, the various international museums that house the figures were visited by the writer in order to physically examine the images. Controversial aspects of these figures were discussed with senior museum staff and/or curators. If figurines were unavailable for viewing, where possible, photographs were acquired from the relevant museums, and controversial aspects of the figures discussed by email. As a result, the majority of the images discussed in this thesis have been examined and photographed by the author. A catalogue of the sexually ambiguous imagery for Cyprus from the Neolithic to the Cypro-Archaic period has been compiled and is included in this work. It is proposed that the imagery is of Cypriot innovation, and consists of proto-anthropomorphic, anthropomorphic and half-animal, half-human representations. The genre is influenced from its earliest period by the figurative art of the Syro-Anatolian mainland, but from the Late Bronze Age onwards, influences from the western Mediterranean and Aegean are also evident. Despite the periods in which there is little evidence for figurine production, sexually ambivalent imagery re-emerges when figurative evidence is once more apparent in the archaeological records. Furthermore, stylistic continuity of the genre from one period to the next is also apparent. This continuity is regardless of the cultural changes which occur intermittently during the seven millennia period relevant to this study. Although it is not until the Cypro-Geometric period that there is firm evidence to support a religious interpretation of sexually equivocal imagery, it is suggested that the genre from the earliest period was at least associated with fertility, and perhaps religious cult.