abstract: This study investigates three issues that are relevant for the development of multinational investment banks in China. The first is about the domestic market conditions that are necessary for a country to develop multinational investment banks. The second issue is about the degree to which China has met these conditions. The last issue focuses on the potential strategies Chinese investment banks can undertake to become multinational corporations. To address the first issue, I draw an important distinction between international investment banks and multinational investment banks. For an international investment bank to be regarded as a multinational, I propose that it must have a strong presence (i.e., holding at least one percent of the market share) in at least two of the seven major capital markets in the world. Using this criterion, I identify 25 multinational investment banks. I then analyze their home countries’ domestic market conditions and propose that the following six factors are important to the development of multinational investment banks: the size of the home country’s gross domestic product (GDP), the total capitalization of its domestic security market, the number of its Global 500 firms, the volume of its foreign direct investment (FDI), the internationalization of its currency, and the openness of its capital market to foreign investors. By comparisons, I find that China’s domestic market conditions are comparable to the home countries of multinational investment banks with respect to the size of GDP, total market capitalization, the number of Global 500 firms, and the volume of FDI. What China lags behind are the internationalization of currency and the openness of capital market to foreign investors. Given the current trends of development, it is very likely that China will be able to catch up on the latter within ten years, thus meeting all the conditions necessary for the development of multinational investment banks. Based on the above findings, I suggest that Chinese investment banks seize this historical opportunity, speed up the internationalization of their businesses, and learn from the experiences of global industry leaders to become truly multinational corporations. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Business Administration 2015

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:25:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 PabloGM_DISSERT.pdf: 5790432 bytes, checksum: cb76708cd8a3b4cea9208b8627bcd3ed (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-09-24 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / The goal of our dissertation is to study how the Scandinavian writings produced a Norwegian identity of warlike ideals in a compilation of Icelandic sagas known as Heimskringla and has parts of its content focused on storytelling about a troubled time of Scandinavian monarchies rising between the 8th and 11th centuries, which is called the Viking Age. The Heimskringla, also known as The Circle of the World is a set of writings based on Icelandic oral memory about the Norwegian kings and the conception of a Norwegian territory. While we investigated the relationship between the members of royalty, their companions and the Scandinavian people, we delineate the relationship between memory, identity and war. Our study points out how the Scandinavian war produces, in its storytelling, proper spaces, in socio-political relations among the participants, in the organization of its conflicts or the location of war activities, where places are transformed into essential points in these narratives. The war is both a place of identity statements and a space of practices, necessary for the strengthening of royal power / O objetivo de nossa disserta??o ? estudar como os escritos escandinavos produziram uma identidade da Noruega em ideais b?licos dentro de uma compila??o de sagas islandesas chamada Heimskringla e que tem parte de seu conte?do voltado para narrativas de um momento conturbado do surgimento das monarquias escandinavas entre o s?culo VIII e XI, a chamada Era Viking. O Heimskringla, tamb?m conhecido como O C?rculo do Mundo , ? um conjunto de escritos baseados na mem?ria oral islandesa sobre os reis noruegueses e a forma??o do territ?rio noruegu?s. Na medida em que investigamos a rela??o entre os membros da realeza, seus companheiros e os povos escandinavos, passamos a delinear as rela??es de mem?ria, identidade e guerra. Nosso trabalho pontua a maneira como a guerra escandinava produz, em suas narrativas, espa?os pr?prios, seja nas rela??es pol?tico-sociais entre seus participantes, na organiza??o de seus conflitos ou na localiza??o das atividades guerreiras, sendo que os lugares transformam-se em pontos essenciais dessas narrativas. A guerra ? ao mesmo tempo um lugar de afirma??es identit?rias e um espa?o de pr?ticas necess?rias para o fortalecimento do poder real

A problem in machine translation is how to handle pronouns since languages use these differently, for example, in anaphoric reference. This essay examines what happens to the English third person pronouns he, she, and it when translated into Icelandic. Parallel corpora were prepared by tokenisation and subsequently the machine translation method word alignment was applied on the corpus. The results show that when a pronoun is used to refer to something outside the sentence (extra-sentential), this gives rise to major problems. Another problem encountered was the differences in the deictic strength between pronouns in English and Icelandic. One conclusion that can be drawn is that more research is needed as more reliable ways of handling pronouns are needed in translations. / Ett problem inom maskinöversättning är hur man ska hantera pronomen då språk använder dessa olika, exempelvis vid anaforisk referens. I den här uppsatsen undersöks vad som händer med engelska tredje persons pronomen he, she, och it när de har översatts till isländska. Parallella korpusar gjordes iordning genom tokenisering och därefter användes maskinöversättningsmetoden ordlänkning på korpusen. Resultaten visar att när pronomen används för att referera till något utanför satsen (extrasententiell) är det ett stort problem. Ett annat problem som påträffades gällde skillnader i deiktisk styrka mellan pronomen i engelska och isländska. En slutsats som kan dras är att mer forskning behövs då det behövs mer tillförlitliga sätt att hantera pronomen i översättningar.

This paper addresses two restrictions regarding agreement with nominative arguments in Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions. The first is the reported asymmetry in intervention effects in mono-clausal versus bi-clausal environments. The second regards the well-known Person Restriction that prohibits agreement with non-3rd person arguments. It is argued that both of these phenomena can be viewed as instances of cumulative constraint interaction, where less important constraints in the grammar ‘gang up’ to block some higher constraint. In order to account for this, I adopt a model of syntax with both weighted constraints and serial optimization that is known as Serial Harmonic Grammar in the phonological literature. It will be demonstrated that such a system can offer a more principled analysis of the construction-specific nature of the aforementioned phenomen

The subject matter of this thesis is manuscript and scribal culture in the age of print. Its first part explores the flourishing scholarship of post-medieval scribal culture in Europe and beyond over the past 25-30 years, as well as recent trends and turns in the historiography of printing and of literacy. These studies make a strong case for a radical revision of how these fundamental cultural phenomena should be viewed. As a part of the so-called cultural turn and postmodernist revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s, the new trend has been to reject the dichotomies of manuscript versus print and of literacy versus illiteracy in favour of more ambiguous and complex images where multiple media and modes of transmission and reception coexist and interact with each other. The second part of the thesis deals with literary culture in nineteenth-century Iceland: both the general framework of the production, dissemination and consumption of texts, and the individual case of the farmer, fisherman and scribe Sighvatur Grímsson (1840-1930) and his cultural surroundings. Focussing on Sighvatur’s life between 1840 and 1873, the thesis presents an argument about the function of the scribal medium within a poor, rural, and de-institutionalized society. Central to the theoretical framework is a microhistorical approach and the juxtaposition of both narrow and wide scope, zooming from one individual protagonist out to his local surroundings and communities and further out to Icelandic scribal and literary culture as a whole. The scope of the thesis can be described in terms of four concentric circles: the individual, his intimate community, Icelandic society, and the wider European and global context during the ‘post-Gutenbergian era’.

Avhandlingen tar sin utgångspunkt i två uppslagsord i Svenska Akademiens Ordlista 2006: bautasten och bauta-. Övergripande syfte är att beskriva och förklara lexikala förändringar hos ord bildade med bauta(-) i svenskan under perioden 1664–2006, med särskild hänsyn till dessa förändringars relation till ordens etableringsgrad. Materialet består av 838 belägg för ord bildade med baut- eller böt-, och därutöver undersöks 30 ordböcker. Ordet bautasten är ett isländskt lånord i svenskan. Undersökningen av fornvästnordiska ord visar att bautasteinn kan vara ’sten som är slagen ned i jorden’ eller ’sten rest över en fallen krigare’, två betydelser som kan sammanföras i betydelsen ’minnessten’. Denna betydelse framträder också tydligt i samtliga texter. Historiens höga status under stormaktstiden har haft stor betydelse för att ordet bautasten lånades in i svenskan år 1664. Språkstrukturella faktorer har sannolikt lett till att ordet har uppmärksammats och att det har kunnat användas i svenskan. Under perioden 1664–1790 har etableringsgraden hos bautasten inte har varit hög, men vissa tecken tyder på att den höjs under perioden. Fram till ca 1900 stiger etableringsgraden hos bautasten, men den avtar sedan fram till 1973. I avhandlingen antas att ordets växlande etableringsgrad har varit beroende av synen på historien. I början av 1970-talet stiger etableringsgraden åter hos bautasten och 1985 finns första belägget för bauta- som förstärkande förled, vilket med stor sannolikhet har sin orsak att söka hos den stora populariteten hos och spridningen av seriealbumet Asterix. Förleden bauta- har visat sig vara mycket användbar som förstärkande förled. I materialet finns 3 ord bildade med bauta(-) som inte är etablerade i språksamfundet. / The starting point for the dissertation is two entry words in Svenska Akademiens Ordlista (SAOL 13, 2006): bautasten and bauta-. The overall purpose is to describe and explain lexical changes in words created with bauta(-) in the Swedish language during 1664–2006, placing particular em¬phasis on these changes in relation to the degree of establish¬ment. The material consists of 838 pieces of evidence of words created with baut- or böt- and, in addition, 30 dictionaries are exam¬ined. The word bautasten (‘menhir’, ‘standing stone’) is an Icelandic loan word in the Swedish lan¬guage. The examination of Old West Norse words shows that bautasteinn can be ’sten som är slagen ned i jorden’ (‘stone beaten into the ground’) or ’sten rest över en fallen krigare’ (‘stone erected over a fallen warrior’), two meanings which can be brought together in the meaning ’minnessten’ (‘memorial monument’). This meaning also clearly appears in all texts. The high status of history during the Swedish Age of Greatness was significant for the inclu¬sion of the word bautasten into the Swedish language in 1664. Language-structural factors have likely lead to the word being noticed as well as made it possible to use in the Swedish language. During 1664–1790, the degree of establishment of bautasten was not high, but there are indi¬cations that it increased during the period. Until about 1900, the degree of estab¬lish¬ment of bautasten increased, but then it decreased up until 1973. In the disserta¬tion it is assumed that the varying degree of establishment has been dependent on the view of history. In the beginning of the 1970s, the degree of establishment of bautasten increased once again and in 1985, the first instance of bauta- as an augmentative prefix appears, which most likely can be attributed to the great popularity and wide spread of the cartoon magazine Asterix. The prefix bauta- has proven to be very usable as an augmentative. There are 3 words created with bauta(-) in the material that are not established in the language community

No description available.

Satellite altimetry has been traditionally used in the past few decades to measure elevation of land ice, quantify changes in ice topography and infer the mass balance of large and remote areas such as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Radar altimetry is particularly well suited to this task due to its all-weather year-round capability of observing the ice surface. However, monitoring of ice caps and ice fields - bodies of ice with areas typically smaller than ~ 10,000 km2 - has proven more challenging. The large footprint of a conventional radar altimeter and coarse ground track coverage are less suited to observing comparatively small regions with complex topography. Since 2010, the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite has been collecting ice elevation measurements over ice caps and ice fields with its novel radar altimeter. CryoSat-2’s smaller inter-track spacing provides higher density of observations compared to previous satellite altimeters. Additionally, it generates more accurate measurements because (i) the footprint size is reduced in the along-track direction by means of synthetic aperture radar processing and (ii) interferometry allows to precisely locate the the across-track angle of arrival of a reflection from the surface. Furthermore, the interferometric capabilities of CryoSat-2 allow for the processing of the delayed surface reflections after the first echo. When applied over a sloping surface, this procedure generates a swath of elevations a few km wide compared to the conventional approach returning a single elevation. In this thesis, swath processing of CryoSat-2 interferometric data is exploited to generate topographic data over ice caps and ice fields. The dense elevation field is then used to compute maps of elevation change rates at sub-kilometer resolution with the aim of quantifying ice volume change and mass balance. A number of algorithms have been developed in this work, partly or entirely, to form a complete processing chain from generating the elevation field to calculating volume and mass change. These algorithms are discussed in detail before presenting the results obtained in two selected regions: Iceland and Patagonia. Over Icelandic ice caps, the high-resolution mapping reveals complex surface elevation changes, related to climate, ice dynamics and sub-glacial, geothermal and magmatic processes. The mass balance of each of the six largest ice caps (90% of Iceland’s permanent ice cover) is calculated independently for the first time using spaceborne radar altimetry data. Between October 2010 and September 2015 Icelandic ice caps have lost a total of 5.8± 0.7 Gt a ̄1, contributing 0.016± 0.002 mm a ̄1 to eustatic sea level rise. This estimate indicates that over this period the mass balance was 40% less negative than the preceding 15 years, a fact which partly reflects the anomalous positive balance year across the Vatnaj ̈okull ice cap (~ 70% of the glaciated area) in 2014/15. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how swath processing of CryoSat-2 interferometric data allows the monitoring of glaciological processes at the catchment scale. Comparison of the geodetic estimates of mass balance against those based on in situ data shows good agreement. The thesis then investigates surface elevation change on the Northern and Southern Patagonian Ice Fields to quantify their mass balance. This area is characterized by some of the fastest flowing glaciers in the world, displaying complex interactions with the proglacial environments (including marine fjords and freshwater lakes) they often drain into. Field observations are sparse due to the inaccessibility of these ice fields and even remotely sensed data are limited, often tied to comparisons to the topography in 2000 as measured by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Despite gaps in the spatial coverage, in particular due to the complex topography, CryoSat-2 swath radar altimetry provides insight into the patterns of change on the ice fields in the most recent period (2011 to 2017) and allows to independently calculate the mass balance of glaciers or catchments as small as 300 km2. The northern part of the Southern Patagonian ice field displays the strongest losses due to a combination between ice dynamics and warming temperatures. In contrast Pio XI, the largest glacier on this ice field and in South America, is advancing and gaining mass. Between April 2011 and march 2017, the two ice fields combined have lost an average of 21.29± 1.98 Gt a ̄1 (equivalent to 0.059± 0.005 mm a ̄1 eustatic sea level rise), 24% and 42% more negative when compared to the periods 2000-2012/14 and 1975-2000. In particular the Northern Patagonian ice field, responsible for one third of the mass loss, is losing mass 70% faster compared to the first decade of the 21st century. These results confirm the overall strong mass loss of the Patagonian ice fields, second only to glaciers and ice caps in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, and higher than High Mountain Asia, which all extend over areas ~ 5-8 times larger (excluding glaciers at the periphery of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets).

This thesis takes a fresh, character-based approach to the Íslendingasögur. It is inspired by a narratological study that unites the functional and structural role of characters with their human, individualistic portrayal. My major objective is to demonstrate the important connection between characterisation and structure in the sagas. By drawing attention to characters that I term narrative triggers, I offer a way of reading the sagas that relies both on the narrative conventions of tradition and on the less predictable, personal interactions between the cast of any given saga. In the case of both major and minor figures in the Íslendingasögur a certain type of character is often present to perform necessary motivational functions, allowing the plot to develop. In Part I I emphasise the functional aspect of these characters, before exploring unusual examples that emphasise their individuality in Part II.The motivation of the plot is linked throughout to the figure of the ójafnaðarmaðr. A secondary objective is to provide a clearer understanding of the nature and function of this commonly occurring character type. The ójafnaðarmaðr is frequently alluded to in scholarship,but this thesis provides the first in-depth study of the portrayal of these characters. The quality that informs them (ójafnaðr,‘inequity’, lit. ‘unevenness’) is a threat to one of the core values of saga society and hints at an ‘unbalancing’ of social interactions and of the narrative equilibrium itself. That this unbalance leads to changes in the social structure of the setting is a key factor in driving the plots of the sagas along. For this reason, a detailed examination of the figure of the ójafnaðarmaðr is long overdue: they can be observed to perform a specific narrative function but are always fitted to suit their particular context. Focussing on the structural conventions of character introduction, Part I establishes my methodology and catalogues the examples of characters introduced as ójafnaðarmenn. The scope is limited to those introduced as such because it allows me to establish for the first time the full corpus and conventions of these characters and their introductions. Following developments in our understanding of the oral background to the sagas, my approach to these narratives is built upon the evidence of their shared origins in pre-literate storytelling [...]. The intersection between functionality and individuality in character brings certain aspects of the Íslendingasögur to the fore. Part II of this thesis shows that in combination with the structural markers explored in Part I, the sagas employ the collective perspective of the general public, other characters and ‘irrational’ motivators such as fate to contribute to their techniques of characterisation. Because disruptive qualities speak inherently of a difference in the way an individual sees themselves and in the way the public sees them, or we as an audience are meant to see them, figures termed ójafnaðarmaðr are an ideal focal point for the development of this study.

Foremost, the thesis aims at mapping and analysing several aspects of the Icelandic financial crisis relevant to the practice of risk management, particularly with respect to banking sector. It identifies six possible sources of vulnerability occurring in the pre-crisis period. The domestic banking sector along with the entire Iceland's economy was pressurised by these stressors, which gradually led to the meltdown. The second chapter opens a discussion about the nature and characteristics of uncertainty and risk. It further strives to classify both the degrees of uncertainty and the elements of business and financial risks. The final chapter probes into the trickiness of dependence and expectations (in statistical sense of these terms), especially examining the limitations imposed on linear correlation as well as the violation of the assumptions underlying historical Value-at-risk and Expected shortfall approaches to estimating market risk.