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(2007)ThesisThe professional profile of researchers is established through communication of scientific work practices, leading to the establishment of a scholarly identity. Understanding scholarly identities is currently addressed through a conceptualisation of research narrative mechanisms. Citation and citing practices are a central component of scientific communication work practices. Therefore understanding these formal communication practices of researchers through their citing behaviours may contribute to the building of scholarly identity. This study is undertaken to understand whether scholarly identity could be informed through the use of citation identities. Studies on the citation identities of individuals were conducted, using authors working in the area of Consciousness, which provided a diverse field of participants for the testing of citation analysis techniques. This is accomplished through methodological development and further examined using a combination of field-level and individual-level analyses. A new methodology was developed for the generation of citing identities, based on the calculation of the Gini coefficient and the citee-citation ratio of authors' citing profiles. The resulting relationship was found to have high levels of consistency across a heterogenous set of researchers. An exploration of identification of author characteristics was subsequently undertaken using the new methodology and existing citation analysis techniques. The techniques were successful in identifying departures from conventional citation practice, highlighting idiosyncrasies well, but otherwise understanding of scholarly identity through citation analysis was only marginally successful. A portion of the difficulty of achieving clarity was the complexity of the Consciousness author set, which was useful for establishing broad applicability of a new methodology, but poor for judging its successful application. In summary, definition of citing identity type offers possibilities for improving the understanding of scholarly identity, but will require further methodology development to reach its full potential.
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(2007)ThesisThe commissariat was the main economic drivers in the colonial economy between 1788 and 1835. It is not frequently discussed in the literature and it was Professor N. G. Butlin who challenged economic historians to write the story of the commissariat in operation. This thesis relates the story of the role and operations of the commissariat in colonial NSW. The commissariat filled many roles, ranging from government store, to financial services provider and a quasi-treasury. It was the main purchaser of local production from local settlers, and offered a novel and creative 'barter system' by exchanging store receipts for goods and services received from local settlers
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(2007)ThesisMajor problems are identified with the use of survey methodology to examine the relationship between market orientation (MO) and firm performance. The research, as it is argued, tells us more about managers' sense-making processes and causal attributions than whether and under what conditions MO drives performance, yet one way causal interpretations are still prevalent in the literature. The psychological mechanisms underlying managers' perceptions are identified and alternative causal paths specified for interpreting prior research results are proposed that also account for otherwise troublesome results. An exploratory experiment is designed to calibrate the extent of managers' attribution biases which is the most important part of the sensemaking framework. Different levels of performance, MO and environmental turbulence are manipulated in case scenarios. The results confirm a culture-centered view of MO and a strong psychological impact of performance on perceived environment turbulence. A multi-method view of studying the MO-performance link is proposed in the final part of the paper.
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(2007)ThesisThe Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) has had significant impact on the theory and practice of investments. However technical trading rules have continued to be used by practioners and have been the focus of many academic studies which have focused on equity, foreign exchange and futures markets. The scarcity of research into technical trading models for fixed income markets is astonishing considering the significant size and consequent investor importance of fixed income markets relative to other financial markets and the extensive application of technical trading models by market participants. This is one of the few studies that develops a technical trading model applicable to fixed income markets. Black (1986) defined Efficient Markets as a market where deviations from fundamental values were short lived and small in magnitude. Fundamental asset values are hard to calculate, but we are able to identify fundamental values for a set of Government Bonds on the principle that yield relativities between such bonds are quite stable except for 'deliberate' changes in trading behaviour. We find that the deviations from fundamental value are short lived and small in magnitude. We exploit deviations from fundamental value by Butterfly Trading strategies; Normal Butterfly trades earning returns from movements in yield curve slope and curvature and Arbitrage Butterfly trades earning returns from yield curve curvature only. After considering transaction costs, we achieve annualised returns of 120bps from our Normal Butterfly trades and 72 bps from our Arbitrage Butterfly trades. Consistent with the risk-return relationship for financial instruments, we find that the returns and the volatility of returns for Normal Butterfly trades are higher than the returns and volatility of returns for Arbitrage Butterfly trades. Normal Butterfly trades are exposed to yield curve slope changes whereas Arbitrage Butterfly trades are not, resulting in higher risk and higher returns for Normal Butterfly trades. This finding is consistent with the results obtained by Fabozzi, Martellini and Priaulet (2005).
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(2007)ThesisThis thesis introduces the application of discrete Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to corporate governance research. Given the presence of many discrete variables in typical governance studies, I argue that this method is superior to standard PCA that has been employed by others working in the area. Using a dataset of 244 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange in the year 2002-2003, I find that Pearson's correlations underestimate the strength of association between two variables, when at least one of them is discrete. Accordingly, standard PCA performed on the Pearson correlation matrix results in biased estimates. Applying discrete PCA on the polychoric correlation matrix, I extract from 28 corporate governance variables 10 significant factors. These factors represent 8 main aspects of the governance system, namely auditor reputation, large shareholder influence, size of board committees, social responsibility, risk optimisation, director independence level, female representation and institutional ownership. Finally, I investigate the relationship between corporate governance and a firm's long-run share market performance, with the former being the factors extracted. Consistent with Demsetz' (1983) argument, I document limited explanatory power for these governance factors.