In recent years, the IRI has managed to increase its influence in the Middle East. The strategic use of proxy warfare has played a central role as surrounding countries have become destabilised. However, following the positivist logic of structural IR theories, the materially inferior IRI should not be a stronger player in the region’s conflicts than the US and its Arab allies. The Iranian success in proxy warfare, therefore, provides a paradox for the explanatory framework of reductionist IR theories which rely on rational and positivist epistemologies. I argue that this is because these perspectives do not endorse an adequate comprehension of the mutual embedded relations which have served the IRI a strategic advantage in proxy warfare. In a challenge to the parsimonious reductionism of structural IR and security studies, I adopt Feklyunina’s constructivist framework for analysing soft power as a relational identity. Thereby, I switch the focus from a top-down analysis of the IRI to a focus including Iraqi insurgencies’ acceptance or rejection of the IRI’s national identity and foreign policy goals. I argue that identity matter in proxy relations. Hence, I estimate the IRI’s strength in proxy warfare based on potential Iraqi insurgencies’ compatible identities. I employ a longitudinal historical research design tracing the development of collective identities within Iraq. The study finds that the Iraqi Shi’ites share important common facets of their identity with the IRI and have subsequently been willing to fight as proxies against American and Sunni forces in Iraq. However, identity and legitimacy structures in the Middle East are complex, multifaceted, constantly changing, and dependent on context. Iraqi Shi’ites still preserve some reservations and antipathy towards the Iranian regime due to a nationalist sense of community.

The thesis describes a design and implementation of Nemea system module purposed on generation of records about simulated network attacks. This thesis also contains brief description of Nemea system and several network attacks. Finally, part of this work is description of simulated attacks and methods of simulations.

The goal of this thesis is to work out an introduction to the chip packaging and decapsulation. Further can be found a description of a method leading to dacapsulate concrete chips. Final part is devoted to getting chip pictures using microscope and analysis of the pictures afterwards.

There are more and more parents that are considering to purchase smart watches for their kids. The children’s smart watches on the market are usually equipped with many practical functions like the GPS positioning, the camera and the messaging. Among all the smart watches for children, the ones that can be connected via a mobile application called SeTracker are popular for the acceptable prices. These smart watches may have different brands although they come from the same manufacturer company and share the common service and database. The security of the mobile application is essential to the security of the products. But are they designed in a secure way? There were reports about vulnerabilities of the products previously. Unfortunately, the security requirements do not stop upon solving those vulnerabilities. In this project, it was found that the parents can track the kids and communicate with them through the mobile application, but their accounts might be logged on the attacker’s phone at the same time. And it is surprisingly easy to get the password of the users because it is stored in a local file using simple substitution cipher. There are other examples of insecure design in the products. Among them are the unlimited attempts to send and enter verification codes used for changing the password. It seems that the server does not have a complete logging and monitoring mechanism to prevent abnormal behaviors. The security analysis and penetration testing of this project would provide an example of the mobile hacking, and it will also raise a warning on the security of smart devices. / Det finns fler och fler föräldrar som funderar på att köpa smarta klockor till sina barn. De smarta barnklockorna på marknaden är vanligtvis utrustade med många praktiska funktioner som GPS, kamera och meddelanden. Bland alla smarta klockor för barn är de som kan kopplas upp via en mobilapplikation som heter SeTracker populära för de acceptabla priserna. Dessa smarta klockor kan ha olika märken även om de kommer från samma tillverkarföretag och delar den gemensamma tjänsten och databasen. Säkerheten för den mobila applikationen är väsentlig för produkternas säkerhet. Men är de designade på ett säkert sätt? Det fanns rapporter om sårbarheter i produkterna tidigare. Tyvärr slutar inte säkerhetskraven när man löser dessa sårbarheter. I det här projektet fann man att föräldrarna kan spåra barnen och kommunicera med dem via mobilapplikationen, men deras konton kan vara inloggade på angriparens telefon samtidigt. Och det är förvånansvärt lätt att få användarnas lösenord eftersom det lagras i en lokal fil med hjälp av enkla ersättnings-chiffer. Det finns andra exempel på osäker design i produkterna. Bland dem är de obegränsade försöken att skicka och ange verifieringskoder som används för att ändra lösenordet. Det verkar som om servern inte har en fullständig loggnings- och övervakningsmekanism för att förhindra onormalt beteende. Säkerhetsanalysen och penetrationstesten av detta projekt skulle ge ett exempel på mobilhackning, och det kommer också att väcka en varning om säkerheten för smarta enheter.

We numerically investigate the effects that Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores have on portfolio optimization with Modern Portfolio Theory assumptions and how ESG scores correlate with the market returns of a rated company's stock. Additionally, we review and analyze a research paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics regarding ESG investing titled “Responsible investing: The ESG-efficient frontier” by Pedersen, Fitzgibbons, and Lukasz. Our overall goal is provide insight for socially responsible inclined investors, to help them understand what ESG scores tell us and how those scores may effect their overall investment returns."

Financial services institutions maintain large amounts of data that include both intellectual property and personally identifiable information for employees and customers. Due to the potential damage to individuals, government regulators hold institutions accountable for ensuring that personal data are protected and require reporting of data security breaches. No company wants a data breach, but finding a security incident or breach early in the attack cycle may decrease the damage or data loss a company experiences. In multiple high profile data breaches reported in major news stories over the past few years, there is a pattern of the adversary being inside the company’s network for months, and often law enforcement is the first to inform the company of the breach. The problem that was investigated in this case study was whether new information technology (IT) utilized by Fortune 500 financial services companies led to the changes in data security incidents and breaches. The goal of this dissertation is to gain a deeper understanding on how IT can increase awareness of a security incident or breach, and can also decrease security incidents and breaches. This dissertation also explores how threat information sharing increases awareness and decreases information security incidents and breaches. The objective of the study was to understand how changes in IT can influence an increase or decrease in data security breaches. This investigation was a case study of nine Fortune 500 financial services companies to understand what types of IT increase or decrease detection of security incidents and breaches. An increase in detecting and stopping a security incident or breach may have positive effects on the security of an enterprise. The longer a hacker has access to IT systems, the more entrenched they become and the more time the hacker has to locate data with high value. Time is of the essence to detect a compromise and react. The results of the case study showed that Fortune 500 companies utilized new IT that allowed them to improve their visibility of security incidents and breaches from months and years to hours and days.

This thesis evaluates the risk-return characteristics and diversification benefits of fine wine investment. It compares the historical performance of wine to that of equity, fixed income, real estate, and commodities. I calculate the correlation, volatility, and expected returns of these assets to examine whether adding wine to a portfolio increases its risk-adjusted return. I do this through the Markowitz portfolio optimization technique. The findings suggest that wine has a low correlation with traditional assets, providing diversification benefits. My results also show that adding wine to a portfolio increases its risk-adjusted return only when there is an allocation constraint of 0 to 25% per asset. This does not hold, however, when there are no asset allocation constraints.

The dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay investigates the ability of prior returns, relative to some aggregate market returns, to predict future returns on industry style portfolios. By pooling time series of returns across industries for the period between July 1969 and June 2012, we find that prior returns differential predicts one month ahead returns negatively, even in the presence of a set of popular state variables. The predictability remains significant and negative for up to 5 month ahead returns. The predictability is shown to be robust to alternative specifications, estimation methodology and industry classifications. A possible explanation of this finding is based on time–varying (dynamic) loss aversion among investors. More specifically, when combined with house money effects, prior performance has inverse relationship with degree of loss aversion leading to predictability in the next period returns. The second essay examines the nature of time variation in the risk exposure of country mutual funds to the US market movement and to the benchmark foreign market movement. It uses weekly data on 15 closed end funds and 19 exchange traded funds for the sample period between January, 2001 and December, 2012. Conditional factor models are employed to uncover the time variation in the estimated betas through short horizon regressions. The findings of the paper indicate considerable time variation in risk exposure of country mutual funds to the US market and foreign market risk factors. Additional investigation reveals the following observations. First, the US market betas suffer greater variation over the sample period than the target foreign market betas. Second, the overall fluctuation in betas for the closed end funds is found to be higher than that for the exchange traded funds. Third, emerging market funds experience more oscillation in the risk exposure than their developed market counterparts. It is found that a combination of the US macroeconomic state variables and investors’ sentiment can predict future betas significantly. The findings of the paper have important implication for US investors seeking diversification benefits from country mutual funds.

In chapter 1, I investigate the return links and dynamic conditional correlations between the equity and commodity returns for G7 countries from 2000:01 to 2014:10. The commodity futures include BCOM Index which contains the futures and spot price of 22 commodities, Brent and Crude oil futures, gold and silver futures, Wheat, Corn and Soybean futures and CRB index. The finding indicates that during the full sample period GOLD, WHEAT and CORN have the smallest dynamic conditional correlations with all the Equity indexes. In addition, the correlations between the GOLD/Equity pairs are negative during the financial crisis. This fact indicates the benefit of hedging the stock portfolios with gold futures while we have stress in the financial markets. The results from hedging effectiveness suggest that all the commodity/stock portfolios provide better diversification benefits than the stock portfolios. In average, including CRB, BCOM and GOLD futures to the stock portfolios have the highest hedging effectiveness ratios. Chapter 2 investigates the impact of global and local variables on the Sovereign bond spreads for 22 developed countries in North America, Europe and Pacific Rim Regions, using monthly data from January 2010 to March 2015. There are a few main findings of this chaper. First, the global factors are considerably more important in déterminant the sovereign bond spreads for all the regions. Second, for the bond spread of each region over its local government bond, the countries’ domestic fundamentals are found to be more influential determinants of the spreads, compared to the spread over US government bond as a safe haven government bond. Third, the bond spreads in the Eurozone area is less influenced by the global factors compared to the other regions. Fourth, the sovereign bond spreads of all regions are positively related to the US corporate high yield spreads as a proxy of market sentiment and the log of VIX index as measurement for the investor risk aversion. The coefficient of the log of VIX index shows the strong power of the stock market implied volatility on determining the yield spreads in the fixed income market.

This dissertation comprises two essays; the first of which investigates sovereign credit risk interdependencies, while the second examines the reaction of corporate credit risk to sovereign credit risk events. The first essay titled, Characterizing Sovereign Credit Risk Interdependencies: Evidence from the Credit Default Swap Market, investigates the relationships that exist among disparate sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) and the implications on sovereign creditworthiness. We exploit emerging market sovereign CDS spreads to examine the reaction of sovereign credit risk to changes in country-specific and global financial factors. Utilizing aVAR model fitted with DCC GARCH, we find that comovements of spreads generally exhibit significant time-varying correlations, suggesting that spreads are commonly affected by global financial factors. We construct 19 country-specific commodity price indexes to instrument for country terms of trade, obtaining significant results. Our commodity price indexes account for significant variation in CDS spreads, controlling for global financial factors. In addition, sovereign spreads are found to be related to U.S. stock market returns and the VIX volatility risk premium global factors. Notwithstanding, our results suggest that terms of trade and commodity prices have a statistically and economically significant effect on the sovereign credit risk of emerging economies. Our results apply broadly to investors, financial institutions and policy makers motivated to utilize profitable factors in global portfolios. The second essay is titled, Differential Stock Market Returns and Corporate Credit Risk of Listed Firms. This essay explores the information transfer effect of shocks to sovereign credit risk as captured in the CDS and stock market returns of cross-listed and local stock exchange listed firms. Based on changes in sovereign credit ratings and outlooks, we find that widening CDS spreads of firms imply that negative credit events dominate, whereas tightening spreads indicate positive events. Grouping firms into companies with cross-listings and those without, we compare the spillover effects and find strong evidence of contagion across equity and CDS markets in both company groupings. Our findings suggest that the sensitivity of corporate CDS prices to sovereign credit events is significantly larger for non-cross-listed firms. Possible reasons for this finding could in fact be due to cross-listed firms’ better access to external capital and less degree of asymmetric information, relative to non-cross-listed peers with lower level of investor recognition. Our results provide new evidence relevant to investors and financial institutions in determining sovereign credit risk germane to corporate financial risk, for the construction of debt and equity portfolios, and hedging considerations in today’s dynamic environment.