This two-part paper is intended to explore the task of differentiating a professional gambler from a leisure gambler, specifically, among online poker players. The first part of the study consists of a statistical analysis to identify the requisite number of hands of online poker required to...

Local councils in New South Wales (NSW) have the authority to invest ratepayers' money that is not currently required for any other purpose by the council. At the end of 2006-07 financial year local councils in New South Wales had invested $590 million dollars in structured financial products...

While the low P/E effect has been examined rather extensively in international markets particularly in the US, there is a notable absence of Australian market-based P/E studies. This research examines the relationship between the investment performance of Australian Industrial common stock and...

The academic literature has been reluctant to accept technical analysis as a rational strategy of traders in financial markets. In practice traders and analysts heavily use technical analysis to make investment decisions. To resolve this incongruence the aim of this study is to translate...

The purpose of this paper is to expand the research on momentum strategies in the securities market. Specifically, it examines the momentum anomaly in respect to the commodity futures market, and closely follows recent work as studied by Miffre and Rallis (2007). This study identifies one...

As networks improve and new services emerge, questions arise that affect service deployments and network choices. The Internet is arguably a successful example of a network shared by many services. However, combining heterogeneous services on the same network need not always be the right answer,...

This dissertation contains three essays that can be read independently. The first chapter examines how a debt crisis can occur and persist as a result of unanticipated, transitory, real interest rate and commodity price shocks. Using an optimal stopping framework, the debtor country's optimal...

This study is an empirical analysis of household expenditure behavior using the Linear and Quadratic Expenditure Systems. The expenditure systems are estimated using data collected in 1972 by the Departmento Administrativo Nacional de Estadisticas (DANE) of Bogota, Colombia. The Linear...

My dissertation research is composed of two parts: a theoretical part on semiparametric efficient estimation and an applied part in energy economics under different dynamic settings. The essays are related in terms of their applications as well as the way in which models are constructed and...