In this dissertation, I examine three questions of relevance to macroeconomists. Chapter 1 investigates how the interconnected production and trade credit networks of firms lead to the propagation of financial shocks. Chapter 2 documents that conditional moments of the price change distribution are extremely informative and yield new insights on the dynamics of price changes in the economy. Chapter 3 offers a detailed investigation of the foreign exchange risk premium through the inflation-indexed bond market structure. In Chapter 1, I study the transmission of firm-level shocks in the economy. Firms are connected through the production network. At the same time, the production linkages coincide with financial linkages because of delays to input payments. Idiosyncratic shocks can spillover in the network through production and financial linkages among firms and generate aggregate economic fluctuations. Chapter 1 investigates how these interconnected production and financial linkages lead to the propagation of financial shocks both upstream and downstream. First, I show that financial shocks can propagate upstream if there are financial linkages of firms and financial frictions in trade. Second, I find, based on the input-output matrix and the bond yield data in the U.S., upstream propagation of financial shocks is stronger than downstream propagation. Third, I elaborate a DSGE model that can capture this pattern of shocks and generate quantitative predictions. Fourth, I demonstrate that credit policies would have a stronger impact if liquidity were transferred to downstream sectors after aggregate liquidity shocks. The second chapter documents the price setting behaviour of firms. The effectiveness of monetary policy depends both on the presence and the forms of nominal rigidities in price setting. Understanding the dynamics of price changes (when and how price changes) is necessary to determine the true degree of monetary non-neutrality. Chapter 2 shows that conditional moments, which have been seldom used, are extremely informative and yield new insights on the selection effect of price changes. It documents the predictions of a broad class of existing price setting models on how various statistics of the price change distribution change with the rate of aggregate inflation. Notably, menu cost models uniformly feature the price change distribution becoming less dispersed and less skewed as inflation rises, while in the Calvo model both relations are positive. Using a novel data set, the micro data underlying the U.S. CPI from the late 1970's onwards, Chapter 2 evaluates these predictions using the large variation in inflation over this period. Price change dispersion does indeed fall with inflation, but skewness does not, meaning that none of the existing models can fit these patterns. It then presents a model that does, in addition to matching the price change moments that existing models do. The model features random menu costs. With a menu cost distribution that gives a significant probability to free price changes, and a high probability to very high menu costs, the model predicts a flat inflation-skewness relation. This menu cost distribution moves the model close to a Calvo model, and the model therefore exhibits a much higher degree of monetary non-neutrality than the Golosov and Lucas (2007) model, and higher even than in the subsequent menu cost models such as Midrigan (2011). Finally, the last chapter investigates an important input in firms' and households' investment decisions process - risk premium of the foreign exchange market. Risk premium in the foreign exchange market has been a prominent research topic in international macroeconomics for decades. For example, it plays an important role in explaining the well-known interest parity puzzle and in investigating the foreign exchange market structure. Chapter 3 offers a detailed investigation of the foreign exchange risk premium using a novel structural relationship in the inflation-index bond market, firstly introduced by Clarida (2012). Unlike the conventional VAR approach, this approach estimates risk premium through the non-arbitrage relationship between investing inflation-indexed bonds from two countries and works on the market information set. There are two main findings. First, the estimated risk premium is able to forecast subsequent exchange rate changes. Second, contrary to the original finding of Meese and Rogoff (1983) that, even given the ex post realizations of fundamentals, exchange rate changes are difficult to explain, there are in fact periods in which exchange rate movements are driven largely by the fluctuation in the fair value.

<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> <p align="left">The aim of this study is to investigate the repair bond strength of composite resin following micromechanical and chemical means of retention in improving the repair of composite resin specimens.</p> </font></font></p>

Titel: Bonds antagonister - En kvalitativ studie om hur hotbilder förändrats genom åren Handledare: Lennart Hast Examinator: Thomas Knoll Rapport: Kandidatuppsats Utbildning: Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap 61-90 hp HT -2012 Syfte: Vårt syfte är att redogöra om hotbilder i James Bondfilmerna och de verkliga hotbilderna som finns i vårt samhälle stämmer överens och påverkar varandra. Frågeställning: Hur har fiendebilden förändrats i Bondfilmerna genomtiderna? Metod: Observation av James Bondfilmer Resultat: Resultatet visar att Bonds antagonister har ändrats med åren och liknar de hotbilder som figurerar i dagens samhälle. Vi kan även se att media målar upp stereotypa bilder av de vi skall se som hotbilder. Nyckelord: James Bond, antagonist, hotbild, stereotyp

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In this paper, there are two major investments consisted of ¡§Failure Mechanism of Inner Lead Au-Sn Bonds in Tape Automated Bonding (TCP) Packages¡¨ and ¡§Cu Wire bond microstructure analysis and failure mechanism¡¨. In view of the advantages of low cost, simple manufacturing process and significant miniaturization in size, TCP technology is widely applied in consumer electronic products. Inner lead bonding (ILB) process is especially crucial for the production of high quality TCP packages and components. The ILB process is extremely dynamic since the bonding time is around 0.2 second to complete the thermo-compress and soldering processes. The composition of liquid pool varied with the bond temperature and pressure and is crucial to exhibit different structure. One type of unusual failure bond happened during the process parameters optimization. ILB joints microstructure was examined by electron microprobe (EPMA) for detail phase analysis. The phase formation sequence of normal and failure bonds can be explained from the Au-Sn-Cu ternary phase diagram and thermo-chemistry data of Au-Sn binary. According to Part I study, the hypo-eutectic composition (<30 at% Sn) liquid pool could maintain the normal ILB bonds. And the hyper-eutectic composition (>30 at% Sn) has the potential risk to form this unusual failure bond. In the Part II study, copper wire bonding samples were aged at 205¢XC in air from 0 h to 2000 h. It was found that the bonding of a Cu wire and an Al pad formed Cu9Al4, CuAl, and CuAl2 intermetallic compounds, and an initial crack was formed by the ultrasonic squeeze effect during thermosonic wire bonding. The cracks grew towards the ball bond center with an increase in the aging time, and the Cl ions diffused through the crack into the ball center. This diffusion caused a corrosion reaction between the Cl ions and the Cu-Al intermetallic phases, which in turn caused copper wire bonding damage.

A simple theoretical method for calculating electronic band structures of wurtzite materials based on the bond-orbital models is presented. This method can be used to study many problems such as band mixing and effects of external fields (electric field, magnetic field, and unaxial stress, etc.), since it can reproduce fairly accurate lowest conduction-band and top three valence-band structures. This method is very similar to LCAO method; however, it is much simpler and requires less computational effort than LCAO method.

For the passed few years, bond funds have been becoming the most popular investment instrument for all investors. Because the values of those bonds invested by bond funds were not marked to market, the net asset values of bond funds may be greatly distorted. As the interest rates rise, most structured inverse-floating rate bonds invested by bond funds suffer enormous capital losses and greatly impact the bond fund yields. In order to protect the general public, the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) of R.O.C. requested all the bond funds to sell out all inverse-floating rate bonds at the fund company shareholders¡¦ expense to correct the distortion by the end of 2005. To understand the effect of these inverse-floating rate bonds on bond fund performance, this paper analyzes the relationship between the fund allocation and fund performance, using grouping analysis and rolling window method, to find out the most important factors affecting fund performance. Bond funds are found to generally allocate their asset in three categories - corporate bonds, government bond repurchases and short term deposits. It was found that how the fund allocates its asset has different effects to bond fund performance in different times. Before September 2005, funds with more corporate bonds performed better, but after September 2005, funds with more government bond repurchases performed better. There is no single asset allocation category always leads to superior fund performance. After further studying various bond funds portfolio rebalancing data, it is found that funds with better performance have smaller and slower portfolio adjustments after the FSC request. This may reflect a fact that the better funds are holding less structured products, such like inverse-floating rate bonds, so that they can maintain a better performance when reducing corporate fund holdings. Bond funds favored by the general public, indicated by having a greater increment in fund asset sizes during the period of April 2005 through August 2006, also show similar properties.

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Use of hydrogen bonding as internuclear connecting information to better determine molecular structure or dynamics.

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