The important role of efficiency in the health care foodservice sector has been widely addressed in the literature. Different methods for assessing performance have been proposed. In general, most measures were calculated as simple ratios such as food and labour cost per meal or limited...

This thesis gives a voice to the chronically poor people of rural Bangladesh, enabling them to tell their own stories about the nature of their financial decision making which is taking place within the marketing systems that are operating in all poor villages in the region. Financial decision...

Financial planning in its broadest terms is now in the spotlight as it draws interest from a wide range of groups including consumers, regulators, government, the financial services industry, accountants and most importantly educators. This paper presents a descriptive analysis which provides a...

Research in this thesis deals with some unexplored, or only partially explored, issues relating to the information content of volatility of the idiosyncratic component of asset returns at the firm and industry-level, both in the context of developed and emerging stock markets. Specific issues we...

We begin with the outlining the motivation of this research as there are still so many unanswered research questions on our complex financial and economic systems. The philosophical background and the advances of econometrics and econophysics are discussed to provide an overview of the...

A large body of the literature argues that the soundness of financial system is largely determined by the economic and institutional environment in which the financial system works. Drawing on this theoretical underpinning, research in this thesis models financial soundness indicators (FSIs)...

After examining both the interday and intraday return volatility of the Shanghai Composite Stock Index, it was found that the open-to-open return variance is consistently greater than the close-to-close variance. The volatility of interday returns and variance ratio tests with five-minute...

Small- and medium-sized businesses make a significant contribution to the economies of Western countries. Government, industry, and educators commonly train business managers to improve their skills and knowledge in order to improve the performance of these firms. Owner-manager financial skill...

This paper examines whether the firm-level and the industry-level cross-sectional volatility (CSV) contains any incremental information about the future market-level volatility in Australia. We analyze daily equity returns data from 2 January 1992 to 31 May 2004. Using a conditional volatility...

The relationship between stock market development and economic growth has been an important issue of debate. A well functioning stock market can affect economic growth through the channelling of more saving to investment and the improvement of capital productivity with efficient allocation of...