Thesis (Ph. D.)--Texas State University-San Marcos, 2006. / Vita. Appendices: leaves 113-117. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-129).

The high flow-performance sensitivity in open-end municipal bond funds motivates fund managers to actively manage funding liquidity risk and reduce the costs of flow-driven transactions. Funds with volatile past flows build up liquidity buffers by holding more cash and liquid municipal bonds in their portfolios. Funds rely on cash and liquid securities in flow management. Unconventional liquidity management tools, such as cross-trading between funds in the same family, are used by municipal bond funds in extreme situations. Fund families coordinate cross-trades between open- and low-value closed-end funds only when open-end funds are in distress.

I examine the motivations of mutual fund families when deciding what mutual funds to launch, when to launch them, and how they are going to be launched. I begin by analyzing the influence of investor preferences on the flow to open-end mutual funds by associating flow to a fund with the degree to which the fund has an in-favor or trendy name. Results show that funds which conform to market-wide trends generate significantly higher inflows compared to less trendy funds. In my third chapter I examine the decision to launch a fund and show that investment companies have motivation, in the absence of any investment ability, to launch a trendy fund. Launching a trendy fund is beneficial to the fund family, generating additional revenue through fee collection, but is potentially harmful to investors with trendy fund startups underperforming non-trendy fund startups by over 1% per year. My fourth chapter examines the process of mutual fund incubation and shows that funds generate greater inflows post-incubation as a result of investors' positive response to incubation period performance. However, incubation appears to be used for reasons beyond generating a track record of performance. Specifically, fund families are more likely to release underperforming incubated funds if they are struggling to attract inflows to a large objective class.

Despite rational thinking suggesting that a country rich in resources should have higher socioeconomic growth and development,the results of many resource rich countries have not been encouraging. This phenomenon has been studied widely and has been termed the resource curse and denotes how a country with abundant natural resources tends to have lower economic growth and generally display poorer development levels than countries with fewer natural resources. The Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) has been proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a tool to curb the resource curse and many resource rich countries have recently started SWFs. The recent activity of SWFs has sparked a lot of interest in this topic but most of the studies conducted to date have failed to determine the effect of the SWF on a country’s socioeconomic development and on its ability to mitigate the resource curse. This research is unique in that it establishes the impact of the creation of a SWF on the socioeconomic performance of resource rich countries by examining the Human Development Index of these countries. In addition,the research examines the key success factors of a SWF and establishes a framework that can be used to ensure that the SWF is effective. The study has found that the establishment of a SWF is not a guarantee of success and that governance is the most significant success factor in a SWFs effectiveness. As a result, the SWF is proposed as one solution to the resource curse and a SWF framework is presented with governance as a key success factor. This research is particularly relevant to the resource dependent economies of Africa that have lagged the rest of the world in many socioeconomic measures such as the Human Development Index and income inequality. The effective deployment of a SWF is one option that these economies can utilise to!ensure that their resource riches are translated into socioeconomic development. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / zkgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

The Master thesis "Analysis of selected investment funds in the Czech republic" deals with collective investments with focus on mutual funds. The first part is dedicated to definition of the term collective investments, its history and general characteristics of mutual funds. The middle part is dedicated at firts to the czech market of collective investment and the analysis of this market. The last part focuses on comparison of the performance of selected funds and its characteristics.

This thesis focuses on private information dissemination and its impacts on financial markets. Specifically, we study issues arising when there are skilled individuals able to extract anticipative information about future prices. The first model considers a continuous time economy that is populated by informed and uninformed investors as well as active unskilled investors, and investigates the existence of noisy rational expectations equilibria and their properties. Equilibria are derived in closed form and their properties analyzed. Informed trading is found to reduce price volatility. The second model is based on the idea that besides exploiting their private information for trading purposes, informed agents might want to offer wealth management services to uninformed investors in exchange for a fee. A market for active funds emerges, and the process of anticipative information dissemination is endogenized. In this chapter, heterogenous risk averse investors can invest in the active fund. Low risk tolerance investors are found to be strictly better off with the active fund. Fund size is not a reliable indicator of managerial skill. The market reacts to the manager's increasing risk-taking behavior by reducing the volatility and risk premium.

The diploma thesis deals with the implementation of a Business Intelligence solution for the endowment fund helping with debt relief for people and thus replaces the current process of manually created reports. The main goal of this solution is to bring to the endowment fund the opportunity to make faster and better decisions, as well as many other benefits associated with Business Intelligence.

Classical decision-making theory suggests that decisions made by an individual or a team of decision makers should lead to the same performance outcome. Conversely, behavioral decision-making theory argues that decisions made by teams result in superior micro or macro forecasts and performance outcomes. Our tests using mutual funds support the classical decision-making theory. The empirical results are time invariant and robust with respect to the selected index or model specification.

No description available.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Nuclear Science and Engineering, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "This study is part of a research project sponsored by EDF at MIT"--P. 3. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-178). / During the past twenty-five years, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been progressing toward a more risk-informed, performance-based regulation. This regulatory framework has effectively supported the development of online maintenance practices. In France, while the safety authority has been encouraging particular risk-informed applications, PRA (Probabilistic Risk Assessment) techniques have not penetrated the nuclear regulatory framework and industry to the same extent. After presenting relevant differences between the French and US nuclear industries and regulatory frameworks, the development and use of risk-informed applications in both countries are reviewed. In the United States, these techniques are usually well-accepted and have brought positive results regarding operational performance, plant safety and regulatory efficiency. In France, there have been in some cases difficulties regarding the acceptability of these techniques with the safety authority, but also within the operating company. While PRA results are commonly used in the US at the operational level through the use of risk-monitors, there appear to be in France obstacles to such practices. Online maintenance regulations and practices are then presented. US technical specifications provide much flexibility to voluntarily enter technical specifications action statements for online maintenance. As a result, following the implementation of the Maintenance Rule, online maintenance has been increasingly applied, leading to operational as well as safety improvements. In France technical specifications are more restrictive regarding these aspects, and online maintenance of safety-significant systems is often not allowed or allowed under restrictive conditions. A case study concerning the maintenance of emergency diesel generators and emergency core cooling systems is presented to illustrate and study these points in more detail. Finally, possible directions to facilitate the implementation of an online maintenance strategy in France are identified, and their implications are discussed. / by Edouard Verdier. / S.M.