The Media and Economic Crisis in Korea circa 1993 to 2003

This thesis aims to investigate the relationship between the media and economic change in Korea. The main claim is that the press played an important role in creating the economic crisis. The Korean press's excessive swing to the right contributed remarkably to positioning neo-liberalism as the mainstream ideology of the society. In particular, their discourse practices for `Globalisation' accelerated the trend of `retreating state and expanding market'. They hampered rational public debates, distorted economic policies and ultimately led to the crisis. The Korean press neglected to watch the problems of the chaebol (Korean conglomerates) and even encouraged the chaebol's over-investment. They failed to warn against the imminent currency crisis, partly due to their patriotic stance. By contrast, some influential members of the foreign press, particularly based on Wall Street, carried many critical reports reflecting the interests of international financial capitals. Their exaggerated reports enabled them to exert self-fulfilling effects. When the currency crisis arrived in Korea, both the domestic and foreign press played a considerable role in aggravating and transforming it into a chronic economic crisis, by supporting the IMF's mistaken prescriptions such as belt-tightening policies and selling companies abroad. The Korean case suggests that when the media abandon their obligation as a warning system and offer misleading views on socio-economic realities, the public sphere can be damaged. In a severely damaged `public sphere', it was very difficult for many important decisions such as company decisions, government policies and IMF prescriptions to secure rationality. In short, the Korean case shows that the media can deform the public sphere and thereby have negative effects on the economy, contributing to a crisis. From this perspective, two traditions of media studies - the public sphere and media influence - can be combined. The existing studies on media influence tend to favour a rather limited model of influence. However, given that the deformation of public sphere is one form of media influence, the limitation of this model is clear

Analysing behavioural factors that impact financial stock returns. The case of COVID-19 pandemic in the financial markets.

This thesis represents a pivotal advancement in the realm of behavioural finance, seamlessly integrating both classical and state-of-the-art models. It navigates the performance and applicability of the Irrational Fractional Brownian Motion (IFBM) model, while also delving into the propagation of investor sentiment, emphasizing the indispensable role of hands-on experiences in understanding, applying, and refining complex financial models. Financial markets, characterized by ’fat tails’ in price change distributions, often challenge traditional models such as the Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM). Addressing this, the research pivots towards the Irrational Fractional Brownian Motion Model (IFBM), a groundbreaking model initially proposed by (Dhesi and Ausloos, 2016) and further enriched in (Dhesi et al., 2019). This model, tailored to encapsulate the ’fat tail’ behaviour in asset returns, serves as the linchpin for the first chapter of this thesis. Under the insightful guidance of Gurjeet Dhesi, a co-author of the IFBM model, we delved into its intricacies and practical applications. The first chapter aspires to evaluate the IFBM’s performance in real-world scenarios, enhancing its methodological robustness. To achieve this, a tailored algorithm was crafted for its rigorous testing, alongside the application of a modified Chi-square test for stability assessment. Furthermore, the deployment of Shannon’s entropy, from an information theory perspective, offers a nuanced understanding of the model. The S&P500 data is wielded as an empirical testing bed, reflecting real-world financial market dynamics. Upon confirming the model’s robustness, the IFBM is then applied to FTSE data during the tumultuous COVID-19 phase. This period, marked by extraordinary market oscillations, serves as an ideal backdrop to assess the IFBM’s capability in tracking extreme market shifts. Transitioning to the second chapter, the focus shifts to the potentially influential realm of investor sentiment, seen as one of the many factors contributing to fat tails’ presence in return distributions. Building on insights from (Baker and Wurgler, 2007), we examine the potential impact of political speeches and daily briefings from 10 Downing Street during the COVID-19 crisis on market sentiment. Recognizing the profound market impact of such communications, the chapter seeks correlations between these briefings and market fluctuations. Employing advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, this chapter harnesses the power of the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm (Devlin et al., 2018) to extract sentiment from governmental communications. By comparing the derived sentiment scores with stock market indices’ performance metrics, potential relationships between public communications and market trajectories are unveiled. This approach represents a melding of traditional finance theory with state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, offering a fresh lens through which the dynamics of market behaviour can be understood in the context of external communications. In conclusion, this thesis provides an intricate examination of the IFBM model’s performance and the influence of investor sentiment, especially under crisis conditions. This exploration not only advances the discourse in behavioural finance but also underscores the pivotal role of sophisticated models in understanding and predicting market trajectories

\u3ci\u3eThe Conference Proceedings of the 1997 Air Transport Research Group (ATRG) of the WCTR Society Vol. 1, No. 3\u3c/i\u3e

UNOAI Report 97-4https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/facultybooks/1155/thumbnail.jp

The tobacco industry in South Korea since market liberalisation : implications for strengthening tobacco control

This research analyses transnational tobacco companies' (TTCs) broader strategies for market access and demand creation through understanding market liberalisation in South Korea's tobacco industry from the late 1980s in order to inform the strengthening of tobacco control policies within the country and other emerging markets. The research is mainly based on internal tobacco industry documents, made publicly available through litigation. Detailed analysis of industry documents related to South Korea has not been undertaken to date. Semistructured interviews and additional primary and secondary sources served as important supplementary data sources. The key finding of this research is that the market access strategies of TTCs, including direct and indirect lobbying on trade policies, were a response to South Korea's export-oriented economic development model and its negative attitude towards foreign investment. This was undertaken within the context of the transformation of the world trading system from the 1980s which created pressure on the country to open its market. After liberalisation, various aggressive marketing tactics to create demand for foreign brands were used by TTCs. The competition this engendered played a key role in the transformation of the Korean tobacco monopoly into a private, competitive business which emulated and refined the tactics used by TTCs. This, in turn, increased the extent and intensity of the aggressive marketing of tobacco products in Korea overall. Total volume of cigarette sales increased 25% as a result, making Korea the 8th largest tobacco market in the world by 1992, whilst smoking prevalence increased among young adults and females. The research concludes that a fuller understanding of TTCs' strategies for global expansion can be derived by locating them within the economic development models of specific countries or regions. Such analysis, in turn, offers important lessons for strengthening global tobacco control. Of foremost importance is the need for emerging markets to appropriately balance economic and public health policies when considering liberalisation. The South Korean experience also demonstrates that comprehensive tobacco control policies, as set out by the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, must be implemented prior to any market liberalisation and strictly enforced within a competitive market environment

AI-powered Fraud Detection in Decentralized Finance: A Project Life Cycle Perspective

In recent years, blockchain technology has introduced decentralized finance (DeFi) as an alternative to traditional financial systems. DeFi aims to create a transparent and efficient financial ecosystem using smart contracts and emerging decentralized applications. However, the growing popularity of DeFi has made it a target for fraudulent activities, resulting in losses of billions of dollars due to various types of frauds. To address these issues, researchers have explored the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to detect such fraudulent activities. Yet, there is a lack of a systematic survey to organize and summarize those existing works and to identify the future research opportunities. In this survey, we provide a systematic taxonomy of various frauds in the DeFi ecosystem, categorized by the different stages of a DeFi project's life cycle: project development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. This taxonomy is based on our finding: many frauds have strong correlations in the stage of the DeFi project. According to the taxonomy, we review existing AI-powered detection methods, including statistical modeling, natural language processing and other machine learning techniques, etc. We find that fraud detection in different stages employs distinct types of methods and observe the commendable performance of tree-based and graph-related models in tackling fraud detection tasks. By analyzing the challenges and trends, we present the findings to provide proactive suggestion and guide future research in DeFi fraud detection. We believe that this survey is able to support researchers, practitioners, and regulators in establishing a secure and trustworthy DeFi ecosystem.Comment: 38 pages, update reference

Diversity and Inclusion in Japan

Alcantara, Shinohara, and their contributors evaluate the current state of diversity and inclusion (D&I) within business and higher education in Japan, and the importance of D&I to the growth of Japan’s economy and the enrichment of its society. Japan is widely understood to be a homogenous and patriarchal society, and while this is changing and was never wholly accurate, it certainly faces challenges in becoming more diverse and inclusive, particularly in its business and higher educational cultures. Grounded in research and offering best practices, the chapters in this book analyze critical issues relating to D&I in Japan at the individual, organizational, and industry levels. They present both a longitudinal analysis of the evolution and performance outcomes of D&I policies in Japanese corporations across industries, and rich studies of different underrepresented groups in Japan. These groups include immigrants, women, and people with disabilities. The contributors prescribe policies for promoting D&I in higher education, within businesses and at the governmental level. This book is an essential contribution to D&I discourse in the Japanese context that will be of great value to scholars of Japanese society and business, and an important extended case study for those looking at D&I more widely

Financial market regulation in the wake of financial crises: the historical experience

The focus of the present volume - which originates from a workshop held at the Bank of Italy on 16 and 17 April 2009 - is the regulatory response given to financial crises in the past, across countries. Alongside the scholarly interest of such a review its aim is also to offer some insights that may be useful in re-designing regulation in the present time of distress. Financial crises have been examined under many perspectives, including that of regulatory failures. The studies assembled in this volume, which touch on a significant array of countries, can be viewed as part of a historical survey on this issue. The basic question is whether regulatory responses form a pattern, and more specifically, whether they tend to be biased with respect to an optimum, however defined. In the end, rather than finding one pattern of response, we were able to identify the "disturbances" which most often enter the post-crisis decisional process. The awareness of such factors, and some knowledge of their functioning, are instrumental in understanding (for academics) and in governing (for policy makers) the response to major financial crises.Financial crises, financial regulation, economic history

Diversity and Inclusion in Japan

Alcantara, Shinohara, and their contributors evaluate the current state of diversity and inclusion (D&I) within business and higher education in Japan, and the importance of D&I to the growth of Japan’s economy and the enrichment of its society. Japan is widely understood to be a homogenous and patriarchal society, and while this is changing and was never wholly accurate, it certainly faces challenges in becoming more diverse and inclusive, particularly in its business and higher educational cultures. Grounded in research and offering best practices, the chapters in this book analyze critical issues relating to D&I in Japan at the individual, organizational, and industry levels. They present both a longitudinal analysis of the evolution and performance outcomes of D&I policies in Japanese corporations across industries, and rich studies of different underrepresented groups in Japan. These groups include immigrants, women, and people with disabilities. The contributors prescribe policies for promoting D&I in higher education, within businesses and at the governmental level. This book is an essential contribution to D&I discourse in the Japanese context that will be of great value to scholars of Japanese society and business, and an important extended case study for those looking at D&I more widely

Stock bubbles: The theory and estimation

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This work attempts to make a breakthrough in the empirical research of market inefficiency by introducing a new approach, the value frontier method, to estimate the magnitude of stock bubbles, which has been an interesting topic that has attracted a lot of research attention in the past. The theoretical framework stems from the basic argument of Blanchard & Watson’s (1982) rational expectation of asset value that should be equal to the fundamental value of the stock, and the argument of Scheinkman & Xiong (2003) and Hong, Scheinkman & Xiong (2006) that bubbles are formed by heterogeneous beliefs which can be refined as the optimism effect and the resale option effect. The applications of the value frontier methodology are demonstrated in this work at the market level and the firm level respectively. The estimated bubbles at the market level enable us to analyse bubble changes over time among 37 countries across the world, which helps further examine the relationship between economic factors (e.g. inflation) and bubbles. Firm-level bubbles are estimated in two developed markets, the US and the UK, as well as one emerging market, China. We found that the market-average bubble is less volatile than industry-level bubbles. This finding provides a compelling explanation to the failure of many existing studies in testing the existence of bubbles at the whole market level. In addition, the significant decreasing trend of Chinese bubbles and their co-moving tendency with the UK and the US markets offer us evidence in support of our argument that even in an immature market, investors can improve their investment perceptions towards rationality by learning not only from previous experience but also from other opened markets. Furthermore, following the arguments of “sustainable bubbles” from Binswanger (1999) and Scheinkman & Xiong (2003), we reinforce their claims at the end that a market with bubbles can also be labelled efficient; in particular, it has three forms of efficiency. First, a market without bubbles is completely efficient from the perspective of investors’ responsiveness to given information; secondly, a market with “sustainable bubbles” (bubbles that co-move with the economy), which results from rational responses to economic conditions, is in the strong form of information-responsive efficiency; thirdly, a market with “non-sustainable bubbles”, i.e. the bubble changes are not linked closely with economic foundations, is in the weak form of information-responsive efficiency

Sticky Power

Modern civilization revolves around money. However, money is a paradox. It is nothing more than a representation of and medium for decentralized networks of social trust, but its production is controlled by highly centralized networks of firms, places, and governments, and there is never enough of it to go around. Moreover, given that the creation of money, as credit, is based on expectations, money is at its heart an instrument for human agency to change the future. At the same time, however, the financial systems that produce money are deeply rooted in the past, and perpetuate themselves through history. This book seeks to deepen our understanding of the paradox of money, by introducing a novel conceptual lens—that of Global Financial Networks—to cast new light on the geography, history, politics, and sociology of finance from the middle ages to the global financial crisis and beyond. It shows that the power of finance is inherently “sticky”; with what are generally assumed to be new innovations such as “offshore” finance actually dating back centuries, and the architecture of global financial networks more broadly adapting to the rise and fall of empires and new technologies while changing surprisingly little in their basic character; or at most changing very slowly. A recognition of the mechanics of this durability, it is argued, calls for a new approach to reforming finance which is less reactively focused on regulation, and more proactively focused on building new institutional systems with a long-term “sticky power” of their own