Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012ECO003.
The focus of this doctoral thesis is on the determination of the implied cost of capital in the equity market. Three issues are investigated in detail: the relations between the cost of equity capital, the credit spread and the economic growth; the links between realized market returns and the cost of capital; and the forecasting power of the implied discount factor in predicting market...
|
We explore how the vertical structure of direct democracy in a federal context affects expenditure decisions of sub-central governments. In so doing we revisit previous research on the effect of direct democratic institution on public policies. Particularly, the effect of upper-level (state) existence of direct democratic control on local expenditure. Empirically we exploit the fact that both...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012INFO002.
In software development, teamwork is essential to the successful delivery of a final product. The software industry has historically built software utilizing development teams that share the workplace. Process models, tools, and methodologies have been enhanced to support the development of software in a collocated setting. However, since the dawn of the 21st century, this scenario has begun...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012ECO002.
The first paper (joint with François Degeorge and Roni Michaely) examines the role of brokers in the performance of securities analysts, after taking into account the inherent abilities of the employed analysts. The question we are asking is if working at a large and resourceful Wall Street firm has overall advantages to the analyst, after controlling for an analyst's inherent ability. From the...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012INFO001.
Creating autonomous agents that learn to act from sequential interactions has long been perceived as one of the ultimate goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Reinforcement Learning (RL), a subfield of Machine Learning (ML), addresses important aspects of this objective. This dissertation investigates a particular problem encountered in RL called representation generation. Two related...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012COM006.
Since the 1990s, a wide debate has been generated around the "learners-new media dichotomy", with a consequent journalistic reverberation. In particular, expressions like “digital natives”, “Y” generation, or “net-generation” contributed to diffuse the hypothesis that– since the 1980s – a generation of learners with typical characteristics related to their great familiarity with...
|
Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012COM005.
Collaborative practices in real groups are rarely studied as they develop in research teams, despite the importance of the topic. The present study aims to address this lack and is focused on how collaboration develops in an academic research team. It draws specific attention to group practices that enhance mutual engagement within the team and the socialization of doctoral students....
|
The purpose of this study is to analyze the level of cost efficiency of Swiss Post’s postal delivery units to enable policy makers’ as well as Swiss Post to decide on the reactions to market changes. In particular, we use different panel data models to assess cost efficiency in these units to account for unobserved heterogeneity. The results from applying Mundlak’s formulation to the...
|
Previous studies have viewed Swiss health-care financing as particularly regressive. However, as the OECD Review of the Swiss Health System (2011) stated, the income-related inequities and the inter cantonal variations are still unexplored due to a lack of available information. The present paper aims to fill this information gap concerning the Swiss health system by exploring the...
|
In: Journal of information science, 2012, vol. 38, no. 4, p. 383-398
Interactive Topic Detection and Tracking (iTDT) refers to the TDT works which focus on user interaction, user evaluation and user interfaces aspects. This article investigates and identifies elements of the design of an interface that aims to facilitate journalists performing TDT tasks such as tracking and detection. It presents an (iTDT) interface called Interactive Event Tracking (iEvent),...
|
