This dissertation is comprised of three essays in the areas of financial economics and macroeconomics. The general equilibrium nature of the macroeconomy is seen through the ways in which firms, govemments, and households interact in the labor, output, financial, and money markets. This dissertation focuses on two of the markets that comprise the macroeconomy; namely, the financial markets and the labor market. The essays examine how different sectors within the financial sector react to changes in the overall financial market, how movements in financial variables such as interest rates provide information on changes in economic activity, and how labor market conditions respond to unanticipated changes in real economic activity. Each essay also incorporates time series econometric techniques that allow me to analyze the interactions and responses of some macroeconomic variable(s) to changes in other macroeconomic variables. Following is a brief synopsis of each essay.
The first essay is entitled "Sector Index Returns and the Market: A New Study of Beta Stability." A number of studies have estimated beta's for a variety of securities and examined their stability over time, however, no study has focused on the betas of individual sector indexes. This is quite surprising given the proliferation of index investing over the last decade. I estimate betas for the returns on the S&P capital goods index, financial index, industrials index, transportation index, and utilities index, using the composite index as a proxy for the market. An underlying assumption of CAPM is that beta is inter-temporally stable. However, the underlying stucture of markets may change over time for a number of reasons (e.g., financial innovation, money supply shocks, deregulation, stock market crash, etc.). Some studies have suggested betas may be time-varying (Fabozzi and Francis, 1978; Brooks, Faff, and Ariff, 1998; Stokes and Neuburger, 1998). I perform a series of tests to check both the inter-pehod and intraperiod stability of these sector index betas over time. The analysis involves obtaining recursive and rolling regression estimates of the betas, and a number of diagnostic tests to detect stuctural breaks and auto-regressive conditional heteroscedasticity. The results enable me to identify periods of instability and stability, as well as changes in beta over time. I am able to attribute most of the major changes in sector index betas to particular economic events and, as such, provide investors with useful information about how future events are likely to affect these index returns.
Gender mainstreaming is a concept that most find easy to agree with, but fewer consistently do well. The same can be said of disaster risk reduction. When these two issues are brought together in efforts to mainstream gender into disaster risk reduction, governments and practitioners have found a gap in policy and practical guidance. They know why they should do it, but not always how. This is not because the task is inherently difficult; rather, there is not enough precedent guidance and practical understanding.
To respond to this, UNISDR has stepped up its efforts in support of mainstreaming gender perspectives into disaster risk reduction since 2006. This publication is the result of extensive consultations and a response to the call for clear policy and practical guidance for mainstreaming gender perspectives into disaster risk reduction.
Since the pioneering work of Hasselmann (1976) there has been considerable scientific debate as to how much coupled ocean-atmospheric climate variability can be simply explained as a red noise ocean mixed-layer response to white noise atmospheric forcing. For example, modeling studies into causes of mid-latitude ocean variability often focus on to what extent the variability involves coupled ocean-atmosphere feedbacks (Latif and Barnett 1994; Latif and Barnett 1996; Latif et al. 1996; Blade 1997; Latif 1998; Barsugli and Battisti 1998; Barnett et al. 1999; Bretherton and Battisti, 2000; Ferreira et al. 2001; Liu et al. 2002; Wu et al. 2003) versus the uncoupled response to atmospheric stochastic white noise forcing (Hasselmann 1976; Frankignoul and Hasselmann 1977; Frankignoul et al. 1997; Jin 1997; Saravanan and McWilliams 1998; Weng and Neelin 1998; Xie et al. 2000; Miller and Schneider 2000; Seager et al. 2001; Schneider et al. 2002; Qiu 2003; Wu and Liu 2003). The coupled feedbacks are either viewed as a generalization of the Hasselman (1976) theory to include local air-sea interactions which amplify the low frequency response without any preferred time scale (Barsugli and Battisti 1998; Bretherton and Battisti 2000) or as involving a “delayed oscillator” due to ocean memory whereby the variability has some preferred time scale (i.e., Latif and Barnett 1994; 1996; Schneider et al. 2002).
Generally, the coupled air-sea feedbacks are stable requiring atmospheric stochastic forcing, and the inclusion of ocean dynamics is thought to enhance the variability (Barnett et al. 1999). The uncoupled stochastic forcing of the ocean includes a number of proposed physical mechanisms for the preferred low frequency. These mechanisms include oceanic advection processes associated with the mid-latitude gyre (Saravanan and McWilliams 1998), an atmospheric pattern of forcing with a preferred length scale or position (Weng and Neelin 1998; Qiu 2003; Wu and Liu 2003), the dynamical adjustment of the extra tropical ocean circulation via long baroclinic Rossby waves (Jin 1997), and Ekman pumping (Frankignoul et al. 1997; Xie et al. 2000; Miller and Schneider 2000; Seager et al. 2001; Schneider et al. 2002). Another possibility is that tropical forcing via some atmospheric “bridge” acts as a source of North Pacific decadal variations, which may or may not be amplified by coupled feedbacks (Nitta and Yamada 1989; Trenberth 1990; Graham et al. 1994; Zhang et al. 1997; Alexander 1992; Miller et al. 1994; Jacobs et al. 1994).
