Cater, Bruce

Universities produce a significant and increasing share of basic research that is later commercialized by firms. We argue that the university's prominence as a producer of basic research is the result of a differential efficiency in research production that cannot be replicated by firms or individual agents - teaching. By using research accomplishments to signal knowledge and attract tuition-paying students, universities are uniquely positioned to undertake certain types of research projects. However, in a market for innovation without patent rights, a significant and increasing number of basic research projects, that are social welfare improving, cannot be initiated by firms or universities. The extension of patent rights to university-generated research elegantly redresses this issue and leaves us to ponder important questions about the future of our innovation-driven economies.

Author Keywords: Innovation, Intellectual Property Rights, Research, Science Technology and Innovation Policy

This paper investigates the effect of listing a stock on the S&P 500 Index on the stock's volatility, using various econometrics models: GARCH and EGARCH. The study mainly addresses three issues; firstly, it analyzes stock volatility in two sub-periods, secondly, it determines whether the announcement can account for the fluctuations in the price of the stock, and finally, it investigates the change in the stock's variance. After isolating the effects of external and industry shock by using the returns on the S&P 500 Index as a proxy, the author finds evidence of structural change in the volatility of stocks after that stock is added to the index. Additionally, the existence of a dominant symmetric effect, which captures the response of volatility to news, indicate that following the onset of including the stock on the index, information flowing into the market increased. However, the rate at which old news is captured in price falls. The empirical evidence also suggests that on average a stocks variance falls and that the announcement to list a stock on the index has little effect on the stock's price.

Author Keywords: EGARCH, GARCH, S&P 500 Index, Symmetric Effect, Volatility

Comprehending the dynamics of infectious diseases is very important in formulating public health policies to tackling their prevalence. Mathematical epidemiology (ME) has played a very vital role in achieving the above. Nevertheless, classical mathematical epidemiological models do not explicitly model the behavioural responses of individuals in the presence of prevalence of these diseases. Economic epidemiology (EE) as a field has stepped in to fill this gap by integrating economic and mathematical concepts within one framework. This thesis investigated two issues in this area. The methods employed are the standard linear analysis of stability of dynamical systems and numerical simulation. Below are the investigations and the findings of this thesis:

Firstly, an investigation into the stability properties of the equilibria of EE

models is carried out. We investigated the stability properties of modified EE systems studied by Aadland et al. [6] by introducing a parametric quadratic utility function into the model, thus making it possible to model the maximum number of contacts made by rational individuals to be determined by a parameter. This parameter in particular influences the level of utility of rational individuals. We have shown that if rational individuals have a range of possible contacts to choose from, with the maximum of the number of contacts allowable for these individuals being dependent on a parameter, the variation in this parameter tends to affect the stability properties of the system. We also showed that under the assumption of permanent recovery for

disease coupled with individuals observing or not observing their immunity, death

and birth rates can affect the stability of the system. These parameters also have

effect on the dynamics of the EE SIS system.

Secondly, an EE model of syphilis infectivity among &ldquo men who have sex with men &rdquo (MSM) in detention centres is developed in an attempt at looking at the effect of behavioural responses on the disease dynamics among MSM. This was done by explicitly incorporating the interplay of the biology of the disease and the behaviour of the inmates. We investigated the stability properties of the system under rational expectations where we showed that: (1) Behavioural responses to the prevalence of

the disease affect the stability of the system. Therefore, public health policies have the tendency of putting the system on indeterminate paths if rational MSM have complete knowledge of the laws governing the motion of the disease states as well as a complete understanding on how others behave in the system when faced with risk-benefit trade-offs. (2) The prevalence of the disease in the long run is influenced by incentives that drive the utility of the MSM inmates. (3) The interplay between the dynamics of the biology of the disease and the behavioural responses of rational MSM tends to put the system at equilibrium quickly as compared to its counterpart (that is when the system is solely dependent on the biology of the disease) when subjected to small perturbation.

Author Keywords: economic and mathematical epidemiology models, explosive path, indeterminate-path stability, numerical solution, health gap, saddle-path stability, syphilis,

As the generation of genetic data accelerates, Big Data has an increasing impact on the way bioinformatics software is used. The experiments become larger and more complex than originally envisioned by software designers. One way to deal with this problem is to use parallel computing.

Using the program Structure as a case study, we investigate ways in which to counteract the challenges created by the growing datasets. We propose an OpenMP and an OpenMP-MPI hybrid parallelization of the MCMC steps, and analyse the performance in various scenarios.

The results indicate that the parallelizations produce significant speedups over the serial version in all scenarios tested. This allows for using the available hardware more efficiently, by adapting the program to the parallel architecture. This is important because not only does it reduce the time required to perform existing analyses, but it also opens the door to new analyses, which were previously impractical.

Author Keywords: Big Data, HPC, MCMC, parallelization, speedup, Structure

ABSTRACT

The Propensity Toward Extremist Mind-Set as Predicted

by Personality, Motivation, and Self-Construal

Nick Fauset

Multivariate regression analyses were used to determine the effects of Personality (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness), Motivation (External, Amotivation, Intrinsic, and Identified), and Self-Construal (Independent and Interdependent) on three domains of Extremist Mind-Set (Proviolence, Vile World, and Divine Power). Participants consisted of first year undergraduate students (209 females, 76 males) enrolled in Introductory Psychology (N=279) and/or Introductory Economics (N=7), whom participated for course credit. The Motivation measure was problematic for students to complete and this variable was dropped from the model due to missing data. Decreases in Neuroticism, Openness, Agreeableeness, and Interdependent were significantly correlated with increases in Proviolence. Decreases in Agreeableness were correlated with increases in Vile World. Decreases in Openness, and increases in Agreeableness and Interdependent were significantly correlated with increases in Divine Power. These observations provide an interesting perspective on the types of Canadian undergraduate students who are more likely to score highly on measures of Extremism.

Keywords: Militant Extremist Mental Mind-Set, Extremism, Personality, Five Factor Model, Motivation, Intrinsic, Extrinsic, Self-Construal, Independent, Interdependent

Author Keywords: Extremism, Militant Extremist Mental Mind-Set, Motivation, Personality, Self-Construal

Health literature has long noted a positive correlation between health and levels of education. Two competing theories have been advanced to explain this phenomenon: (1) education "causes" health by allowing individuals to process complex information and act on it; and, (2) education and health are merely correlated through some third underlying characteristic.

Determining which of these two theories is correct is of importance to public policy. But that task is empirically difficult because, from the standard, static perspective, the theories are observationally equivalent.

We exploit a way in which the two theories have different implications regarding the sort of behaviour we should observe over time. We use smoking as a measure of health behaviour and find that smoking rates between "high" and "low" educated individuals expand when information is hard to process, and then contract as it becomes more easily processable. This approach is then repeated using physical activity as a measure of health-related behaviour to address limitations of the smoking model.

Our novel approach to estimating the differences in the behavioural responses to changes in the processability of health-related information, across education groups, provides strong evidence in support of the view that education and health are causally linked.

Author Keywords: applied statistics, education, health economics, public health, public policy, smoking

In this thesis, we explore the application of the Sinc-Collocation method to an oceanography model. The model of interest describes a wind-driven current with depth-dependent eddy viscosity and is formulated in two different systems; a complex-velocity system and a real-value coupled system. In general, the Sinc-based methods excel over other traditional numerical methods due to their exponentially decaying errors, rapid convergence and handling problems in the presence of singularities at end-points. In addition, the Sinc-Collocation approach that we utilize exploits first derivative interpolation, whose integration is less sensitive to numerical errors. We present several model problems to demonstrate the accuracy, and stability of the method. We compare the approximate solutions determined by the Sinc-Collocation technique with exact solutions and also with those obtained by the Sinc-Galerkin approach in earlier studies. Our findings indicate that the method we utilized outperforms those used in past studies.

Author Keywords: Boundary Value Problems, Eddy Viscosity, Oceanography, Sinc Numerical Methods, Wind-Driven Currents