Capital Markets and Foreign Ownership Restrictions: An Empirical Analysis of Emerging Stock Markets

In the 1990s, the hot issue in international finance was the growing interest of portfolio managers in the emerging stock markets. The interest in the emerging markets gained rapid attention, which is evident from the global trends, towards the opening up of economies and financial markets, free capital flow and the privatisation of financial institutions. Earlier the emerging markets were isolated due to several factors that had posed serious problems for international investors. These markets lacked the depth, regulatory framework, and structural safeguards that had characterised the equity markets in the developed world. Capital markets are called integrated, if assets with perfectly correlated rates of returns have the same price regardless of the location in which they are traded. Alternatively, capital market are called segmented, if financial assets traded in different markets “with identical risk characteristics” have different returns due to different investment restrictions.1 Segmentation may be due to individuals’ attitudes, government restrictions over capital movements or irrationality. In the past twenty-five years, modern finance theory has proved to be a major development in finance, which comprises of portfolio theory, capital market theory and efficient market theory. These modern developments can be traced back to the work of Markowitz (1959); Sharpe (1964); Solnik (1974) etc., which assumes that security prices fully reflect all publicly available information. Due to this information, potential investors can gain benefits through international diversification. The major attraction of forming international portfolios lies in the potential for risk reduction through diversification of unsystematic risk.

Pakistani learners' transition into university : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

This study aimed to explore the experiences of Pakistani learners in their transition to university, and to understand how they adapted to the new learning culture in university. Key factors explored included the influence of Pakistani learners’ expectations of and preparedness for university, prior learning experiences and medium of instruction on their transition into university. The research used a mixed methods approach in which data was collected sequentially. The study began with a quantitative questionnaire conducted with 154 first-year undergraduate students enrolled in four majors in the Bachelor of Studies in a public sector university in Pakistan. This was followed by the qualitative phase which consisted of three semi-structured interview rounds with 14 students selected from the participants in the questionnaire that was undertaken over the first semester of their enrolment. The quantitative findings provided a broad picture of the adaptation experiences of the learners and the influence of learners’ prior learning experiences and medium of instruction on their transition experiences. The qualitative findings also provided deeper insights into the transition experiences and how these were influenced and shaped by various pre-university and post-shift factors. Finally, the integration of the two sets of findings provided a more comprehensive understanding of the transition process and how the learners formulated new identities as independent university learners for successful transition into university. The findings of this study revealed that many of the transition experiences of the Pakistani learners in this study are similar to those in the international settings. However, some experiences are of a different nature due to Pakistan’s educational, cultural and historical background as a post-colonial nation. In particular, the country’s parallel public/private school education system and the Urdu/English dual medium of instruction policy have a significant influence on the learners’ transition into university, in shaping the adaptation experiences and the whole transition process. As a result of this study, it is suggested that there is a need to reform the school education system and to review education policies in order to bridge the gap between the school/college and university education and make transition into university a smoother process

A distinguishable single excited-impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate

We investigate the properties of a distinguishable single excited state impurity pinned in the center of a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in a one-dimensional harmonic trapping potential by changing the bare mass of the impurity and its interspecies interaction strength with the BEC. We model our system by using two coupled differential equations for the condensate and the single excited-impurity wave function, which we solve numerically. For equilibrium, we obtain that an excited-impurity induces two bumps or dips on the condensate for the attractive- or repulsive-interspecies coupling strengths, respectively. Afterwards, we show that the excited-impurity induced imprint upon the condensate wave function remains present during a time-of-flight (TOF) expansion after having switched off the harmonic confinement. We also investigate shock-waves or gray-solitons by switching off the interspecies coupling strength in the presence of harmonic trapping potential. During this process, we found out that the generation of gray bi-soliton or gray quad-solitons (four-solitons) depends on the bare mass of the excited-impurity in a harmonic trap

Stock Market in Pakistan: An Overview

This paper reviews the main features of the Stock market in Pakistan focussing on post-liberalization period. The aspects of the market investigated include liberalization of the market, integration the market with the world markets, trading and settlement mechanism, and corporate governance issues. Finally salient features of the market are compared to a selected set of emerging and developed markets. Pakistan’s stock market is smaller in size but is significantly more active than the markets of this size. In recent years the market has provided very high returns to investors. In 2002 the market was declared as the best performing stock market globally.Stock Market, Pakistan

Forecasting Performance of Alternative Error Correction Models

It is well established that regression analysis on non-stationary time series data may yield spurious results. An earlier response to this problem was to run regression with first difference of variables. But this transformation destroys any long-run information embodied in the levels of variables. According to ‘Granger Representation Theorem’ (Engle and Granger, 1987) if variables are co-integrated, there exist an error correction mechanism which incorporates long run information in modeling changes in variables. This mechanism employs an additional lag value of the disequilibrium error as an additional variable in modeling changes in variables. It has been argued that ECM performs better for long run forecast than a simple first difference or level regression. This process contributes to the literature in two important ways. Firstly empirical evidence does not exist on the relative merits of ECM arrived at using alternative co-integration techniques. The three popular co-integration procedures considered are the Engle-Granger (1987) two step procedure, the Johansen (1988) multivariate system based technique and the recently developed Auto regressive Distributed Lag based technique of Pesaran et al. (1996, 2001). Secondly, earlier studies on the forecasting performance of the ECM employed macroeconomic data on developed economies i.e. the US and the UK. By employing data form the Asian countries and using absolute version of the purchasing power parity and money demand function this paper compares forecast accuracy of the three alternative error correction models in forecasting the nominal exchange rate and monetary aggregate (M2).Co-integration, Error Correction Models, Forecasting

Fermions Tunneling from Charged Accelerating and Rotating Black Holes with NUT Parameter

This paper is devoted to the study of Hawking radiation as a tunneling of charged fermions through event horizons of a pair of charged accelerating and rotating black holes with NUT parameter. We evaluate tunneling probabilities of outgoing charged particles by using the semiclassical WKB approximation to the general covariant Dirac equation. The Hawking temperature corresponding to this pair of black holes is also investigated. For the zero NUT parameter, we find results consistent with those already available in the literature.Comment: 21 pages, no figur

KIIT Digital Library: An open hypermedia Application

The massive use of Web technologies has spurred a new revolution in information storing and retrieving. It has always been an issue whether to incorporate hyperlinks embedded in a document or to store them separately in a link base. Research effort has been concentrated on the development of link services that enable hypermedia functionality to be integrate into the general computing environment and allow linking from all tools on the browser or desktop. KIIT digital library is such an application that focuses mainly on architecture and protocols of Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS), providing on-line document authoring, browsing, cataloguing, searching and updating features. The WWW needs fundamentally new frameworks and concepts to support new search and indexing functionality. This is because of the frequent use of digital archives and to maintain huge amount of database and documents. These digital materials range from electronic versions of books and journals offered by traditional publishers to manuscripts, photographs, maps, sound recordings and similar materials digitized from libraries' own special collections to new electronic scholarly and scientific databases developed through the collaboration of researchers, computer and information scientists, and librarians. Metadata in catalogue systems are an indispensable tool to find information and services in networks. Technological advances provide new opportunities to facilitate the process of collecting and maintaining metadata and to facilitate using catalogue systems. The overall objective is how to make best use of catalogue systems. Information systems such as the World Wide Web, Digital Libraries, inventories of satellite images and other repositories contain more data than ever before, are globally distributed, easy to use and, therefore, become accessible to huge, heterogeneous user groups. For KIIT Digital Library, we have used Resource Development Framework (RDF) and Dublin Core (DC) standards to incorporate metadata. Overall KIIT digital library provides electronic access to information in many different forms. Recent technological advances make the storage and transmission of digital information possible. This project is to design and implement a cataloguing system of the digital library system suitable for storage, indexing, and retrieving information and providing that information across the Internet. The goal is to allow users to quickly search indices to locate segments of interests and view and manipulate these segments on their remote computers