In recent years and as a result of the increasing pace of advances in technology and especially developments in the use of ICT in schools, teachers are now expected to make routine use of ICT in their teaching. This research sought to obtain deeper insight into Saudi secondary school teachers' ICT usage and its relation with ICT educational policy, teachers’ perceptions and attitudes towards the use of ICT in the teaching and learning process, and their envisions of possible and preferable usage of ICT in education in the future. The study utilised a sociocultural approach: data was collected via interviews and self completed questionnaires. A total of 14 interviews were conducted with teachers, ICT coordinators and head teachers, and 266 teachers drawn from ten secondary schools in Riyadh City completed the questionnaire. The findings indicate there is widespread use of ICT in secondary schools and most teachers have positive views towards ICT. Teachers pointed to a number of motivators summarised in this formula: internal incentives + school encouragement = competent ICT use in education. Three main factors were found to be hindering teachers' ICT use: time constraints, lack of training, and financial issues. Teachers’ ICT use is guided by policies: the research found that teachers’ ICT use is more influenced by schools’ policy than Ministry of Education policy which they are either unaware of or do not fully understand because of difficulties in implementing it. Finally, teachers anticipated future changes in their role to a facilitator and advisor. Teachers hoped for comprehensive improvement of education, radical curriculum change, and continuous teacher training.

This PhD thesis provides an analysis of how an adaptive governance approach can be applied to address existing and emerging challenges in global governance with a focus on marine, wild-capture fisheries. All the papers share a coupled social-ecological framing while providing diverse but complementary perspectives. Paper I provides a lens through which it is possible understand the types of interactions that link social and ecological components of fisheries systems at the global scale. The key result of this paper was the development of a marine social-ecological framework to guide future modelling and scenario analysis. Paper II describes the process of emergence and spread of new ideas in marine governance using Marine Spatial Planning as an illustrative case study. The study shows how governance innovations may contribute to resolving the mismatches between the scale of ecological processes and the scale of governance of ecosystems. A key finding of the paper is the identification and explanation of the mechanisms by which informal networks of actors are able to influence the emergence and spread of new governance forms from the local to the global scale. Paper III focuses on governance of ocean areas beyond national jurisdiction. The key finding from this paper is the urgent need for existing and emerging governance institutions to build capacity for responding to the challenges facing governance of marine fisheries. These challenges arise from unexpected shifts in markets, technology and society. Paper IV develops a set of four imaginative but plausible ‘radical’ futures for global fisheries drawing on trends compiled from a diverse evidence base. The four resulting narratives aim to act as lenses for engaging debate and deeper reflection on how non-linear changes in technology and society might radically shift the operating context and core assumptions of fisheries governance in the future. These papers make a novel contribution to Sustainability Science through their focus on 1) the conditions for, and mechanisms of emergence of diverse and divergent governance forms, 2) the role of agency in complex actor settings, 3) the need for governance institutions to not only deal with, but also be able to anticipate surprise, and 4) the development of scenarios of marine social-ecological futures using a creative and rigorous narrative approach. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

The objective of the thesis is to analyze the copper futures market in London Metal Exchange (LME) and to recommend appropriate hedging strategy in copper futures market to the Erdenet Mining Corporation in Mongolia. It uses daily official settlement copper prices of LME in the spot and 3 month futures markets from 2000-2014. Initially, we use cointegration test and ECM to investigate the copper market efficiency. Then OLS, ECM, GARCH, EGARCH and ECM-GARCH models are employed to compute different optimum hedge ratios. Finally, the hedge effectiveness is measured based on minimization of the value of AIC and SBIC. Our result indicate that copper futures market is inefficient. Hedge effectiveness comparison concludes that ECM model gives the best hedging performance. However, ECM-GARCH is accounted to be the best model for hedging strategy since it captures the time-varying conditional heteroscedasticity to ECM model. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

We consider agent trading futures on a market with small transaction costs. Her capital is deposited on a money market account, where compounding is possible. Arithmetic Brownian motion with random coefficients is considered as a model for futures strike price. The coefficients are assumed to be bounded Itô processes with bounded coefficients. Under these assumptions, an almost optimal interval strategy is derived, which almost maximizes expected utility in certain stopping times under hyperbolic absolute risk aversion utility function. Furthermore, under logarithmic utility function the derived strategy almost maximizes expected utility in wide class of (integrable) stopping times.

1 Legal Issues of Derivatives Abstract Derivatives symbolize one of the most successful instruments of international markets in 20. century boosted by ongoing globalization and never-ending technological progress. Though origins of derivatives could had been found in Ancient times, the real "explosion" of derivatives has blown in last two centuries. The essential objective and purpose of the thesis is firstly to analyse the true meaning and definition of the term "derivative" and surrounding legal issues and secondly to provide comprehensive list of basic derivatives according to the historical and financial-economic indicators. My thesis consists of six chapters. First two introductory chapters deal with the general aspects of derivatives, such as definition and legal nature. Derivatives, generally speaking, are legal contracts between market participants allowing contracting parties to transfer risks connected with particular underlying to another party or speculate on market movements in order to gain profits. Derivatives are traded in both, standardized and OTC markets, which embodied them with ultimate flexibility and range. Assessing true legal nature of derivatives stands for one of the main issues concerned by academics and practitioners, in particular whether derivatives fall under the category of...

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This write-up is submitted in partial fulfilment of the Master of Management Degree in Finance and Investments Degree. / Growth in commodity exporting economies, such as South Africa, is highly dependent on the revenue generated from exports. It is thus evident that as commodity prices fluctuate, income and the balance of payments will be accordingly impacted. This is further exacerbated by strong dependence on the imports of certain commodities. Oil is one such commodity on whose imports South Africa is highly dependent. Although natural gas is also imported, it is in lower quantities and is as such expected to impact South Africa to a lower extent. Coal, on the other hand, is among the main commodity exports and was expected to have an impact on (and be impacted by) South African macroeconomic fundamentals. In this study, we use a VECM and MGARCH model to test the interaction between South African macroeconomic variables and these three commodities. Our VECM findings indicate that oil and exchange rates are inflationary. This implies that an increase in oil prices and/or exchange rates (indicating a depreciation of the Rand against the U.S. Dollar) results in an increase in inflation. Inflation, on the other hand, propagates higher coal prices and to a lesser extent, higher interest rates. We account the latter to South Africa’s inflation targeting regime and the former to demand and supply dynamics which occur at RBCT as production costs increase (short-term coal export contracts and spot market sales). Natural gas is found to have weak impacts on interest rates and exchange rates. Our MGARCH model shows that only the innovations in natural gas and oil prices spillover into interest rates and exchange rate. There is no direct spillover captured. However, there is strong direct spillover from oil to inflation. Lastly, interest rates are found to have a strong direct volatility spillover to both oil and natural gas. We attribute this to the exchange rate impact that interest rates have and is supported by the exchange rate impact on commodity price volatility. We conclude that an in-depth understanding of triggers is pertinent for monetary and fiscal policy decisions in South Africa. Although the South African economy is relatively diversified compared to other developing countries, commodity price fluctuations do have a significant impact on economic performance. / MT2017

This dissertation investigates two fundamental questions related to how well exchange-traded funds that hold portfolios of fixed-income assets (bond ETFs) proxy for their underlying portfolios. The first question involves price/net-asset-value (NAV) mean-reversion asymmetries and the effectiveness of the arbitrage mechanism of bond ETFs. Methodologically, to answer the first question I focus on a time-series analysis. The second question involves the degree to which average returns of bond ETF shares respond to changes in factors that have been found to drive average returns of bond portfolios. To answer this question I shift the focus of the analysis to a cross-section asset pricing test. In other words, do bond ETF share prices track the value of their underlying assets, and are they priced by investors like bonds in the cross-section? The first essay concludes that bond ETF shares exhibit mean-reversion asymmetries when price and NAV diverge, along persistent small premiums. These premiums appear to reflect the added value that bond ETFs bring to the fixed-income asset market through smaller trading increments, greater liquidity, and the ability to buy on margin and sell short. The second essay concludes that market, bond-specific, and firm-specific risk factors can help to explain the variation in U.S. bond ETF average returns, but only size seems to be priced in the cross-section of expected returns. This is not surprising as the sample used in the asset pricing tests is limited to the period 2007-2010, which corresponds to the "great recession", and size has been interpreted in the asset pricing literature as a state variable that proxies for financial distress and is highly dependent on the phase of the real business cycle. / The two essays together suggest that bond ETFs can be used in trading strategies based on taking long and short positions in fixed-income assets, especially when trading in portfolios of fixed-income assets directly is not feasible. / by Charles W. Evans. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar as relações entre a atividade de negócios, representada pelas variáveis de contratos em aberto e volume negociado, o conteúdo informacional dos diferentes grupos de participantes, categorizados pela bolsa brasileira, e a volatilidade diária e intradiária dos preços futuros para boi gordo, café arábica e milho, contratos agropecuários de maior liquidez na BMF&BOVESPA. O ferramental metodológico foi baseado nos trabalhos de Bessembiender e Seguin (1992), Daigler e Wiley (1999) e Wang (2002), amparados, majoritariamente, pela teoria de microestrutura de mercado e noise trading. Os resultados encontrados sugerem que existe relação entre contratos em aberto, volume negociado e volatilidade dos preços futuros. No caso de contratos em aberto, foi encontrada uma relação negativa (positiva) entre a série esperada (não esperada) e volatilidade, sendo que o impacto da série não esperada é superior, em magnitude, ao da série esperada. Para o volume negociado, em geral, há evidência de um efeito positivo do volume negociado (tanto esperado como não esperado) sobre a volatilidade, sendo que a série esperada apresentou maior impacto do que a série não esperada. Quanto ao conteúdo informacional dos participantes, no modelo com volatilidade diária, encontrou-se evidência de que choques de demanda de pessoa jurídica não financeira contribuiu para o aumento da variação dos preços futuros de boi gordo. No contrato de café arábica, o modelo sugere que choques de demanda de pessoa física influencia a volatilidade de forma positiva, enquanto que no contrato de milho, choques de demanda de todas as categorias de agentes, com exceção da pessoa jurídica não financeira, aparentemente atuam de forma a incrementar a volatilidade dos preços futuros. Desta forma, a separação da posição líquida não esperada e a avaliação do impacto positivo dos choques de demanda sobre a volatilidade sugerem que tais investidores são não informados. No âmbito da análise da volatilidade intradiária, os resultados obtidos são, majoritariamente, similares aos encontrados no modelo que analisa a volatilidade diária. Ademais, a regressão quantílica possibilitou o mapeamento completo dos impactos das variáveis analisadas, mostrando que há diferenças significativas em relação à influência das séries nos diferentes quantis da distribuição condicional da volatilidade, tanto diária quanto intradiária. / The objective of this study is to investigate the relationships between business activity, represented by the variables of open interest and trading volume, the information content of different groups of participants, categorized by the Brazilian exchange, and daily and intraday volatility of futures prices for live cattle, arabica coffee and corn, which are the Brazilian agricultural contracts that have greater liquidity. The methodological tool was based on the works of Bessembiender and Seguin (1992), Daigler and Wiley (1999) and Wang (2002), supported mostly by the market microstructure theory and noise trading. The results suggest that there is a relationship between open interest, trading volume and volatility of future prices. Particularly for open interest, is was found a negative relationship (positive) between the expected series (unexpected) and volatility, and the impact of unexpected series was superior in magnitude comparing to the expected series. For the traded volume, in general, there was evidence of a positive effect of trading volume (both expected and unexpected) on the volatility, and the expected series showed greater impact than the series unexpected. As for the informational content of the participants, considering the model that explains the daily volatility, is was found evidence that demand shocks non-financial corporation contributed to the increase in variation of live cattle futures prices. For the arabica coffee contract, the model suggests that demand shocks of individual influences positively the volatility. For the corn contract, demand shocks of all categories of participants, with the exception of non-financial corporation, apparently act in order to increase the volatility of future prices. Thus, the separation of the unexpected net position and the evaluation of the positive impact of demand shocks on volatility suggest that such investors are not informed. In examining the intraday volatility, the results obtained are mostly similar to those found in the model which analyzes the daily volatility. The quantile regression permitted the complete mapping of the impacts of the variables analyzed, showing that there are significant differences regarding the influence of the variables in the different quantiles of the conditional distribution of volatility, intraday as much daily.

by Lee Yiu Cho. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 47). / ACKNOWLEDGMENT --- p.iii / ABSTRACT --- p.iv / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.v / LIST OF CHARTS --- p.vi / Chapter / Chapter I. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter II. --- THE HANG SENG INDEX OPTION --- p.3 / Chapter III. --- LITERATURE REVIEW --- p.6 / Chapter IV. --- METHODOLOGY & DATA COLLECTION --- p.9 / Methodology --- p.9 / The Black-Scholes Model --- p.9 / Data Collection --- p.11 / Data Manipulation --- p.13 / Limitation of Data --- p.14 / Chapter V. --- EMPIRICAL RESULTS --- p.16 / General Trading Pattern --- p.16 / Comparison of Actual and Theoretical Premiums --- p.17 / Analysis for 2 Sub-periods --- p.19 / Correlation Between Deviations and Variables --- p.22 / The Degree of in-the-money or out-of-the-money --- p.22 / Actual Premium Level --- p.23 / Transaction Volume --- p.25 / Chapter VI. --- CONCLUSION --- p.26 / CHARTS --- p.29 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.47