The development of the Personality Audit: a psychodynamic multiple feedback assessment instrument

The Personality Audit (PA) was developed to meet a need for a relatively simple multiple feedback instrument that could clarify the various motivational needs of executives. Using a psychodynamic approach to leadership, the PA allows the test-taker to assess him- or herself in seven personality dimensions important in human behaviour and to identify personal ‘blind spots’. The resulting insights can be used to formulate appropriate leadership development goals.

The objective of this paper is to describe the design and psychometric properties of the PA. This instrument, in contrast with other tools that can be used to clarify the inner theatre of individuals, is designed not only to report information given by the test-taker but also to reflect the perceptions of observers representing both the test-taker's public and private spheres. This paper describes in detail the conceptual foundations of the questionnaire, the psychometric methods used to confirm its validity and reliability, and possible directions for future research.     

Politics, stock markets, and model uncertainty

The available evidence on the effects of political variables on both returns and volatility of aggregate stock indices is scant and mixed. Applying Bayesian Model Averaging to a panel dataset of 17 parliamentary democracies spanning the post-war period until 1995, we test the robustness of political variables in explaining stock returns and stock return volatility. While we find that the influence of political variables on excess returns is weak, there is evidence of some political variables explaining return volatility.     

Bounds for Ratios of Posterior Expectations: Applications in the Collective Risk Model

This paper considers the collective risk model for the insurance claims process. We will adopt a Bayesian point of view, where uncertainty concerning the specification of the prior distribution is a common question. The robust Bayesian approach uses a class of prior distributions which model uncertainty about the prior, instead of a single distribution. Relatively little research has dealt with robustness with respect to ratios of posterior expectations as occurs with the Esscher and Variance premium principles. Appropriate techniques are developed in this paper to solve this problem using the k -contamination class in the collective risk model.     

Credit growth,current account and financial depth

Exploring the determinants and dynamics of the current account balance is one of the priorities of academic literature and policy circles. Although the effects of structural variables are deeply analysed, a lesser attention has been paid to the impact of financial variables. Drawing on standard empirical current account models and with a large sample of industrial and developing countries, we report a significant deterioration in the current account balance in case of an increase in the credit growth. Moreover, we find that this link is substantially stronger for the developing ones motivating a closer examination. Therefore, we further advance our analysis and show that credit growth causes a stronger impact on the current account balance for lower levels of financial depth. In other words, at the early stages of financial development, acceleration in the credit growth might cause a larger deterioration in the current account balance; thus, it might be suggested that monetary policy and macro-prudential measures aimed at preventing financial excess might be more effective to reduce the external imbalances at the early stages of financial deepening.     

Food shopping and town centre vitality: exploring the link

Retail decentralization is associated with town centre decline and a concern for revitalization. Using the case of Llanelli, South Wales, the effects of a new food superstore on shopping behaviours and opinions are explored. Surveys in 1997, 1999 and 2001 reveal a dramatic change in patterns of food shopping, but no real change for purchases of clothing or DIY goods. Disadvantaged consumers, the carless and the elderly, were already heavily reliant on town centre shops before the opening of the new superstore and changes in their shopping patterns were no different from other shoppers. The 'social' vitality of the town centre increased, as did shoppers' satisfaction with town centre shopping, but major spin-off shopping or 'economic' vitality has not yet occurred.     

Optimal regime switching and threshold effects

We consider a general control problem with two types of optimal regime switch. The first one concerns technological and/or institutional regimes indexed by a finite number of discrete parameter values, and the second features regimes relying on given threshold values for given state variables. We propose a general optimal control framework allowing to derive the first-order optimality conditions and in particular to characterize the geometry of the shadow prices at optimal switching times (if any). We apply this new optimal control material to address the problem of the optimal management of natural resources under ecological irreversibility, and with the possibility to switch to a backstop technology.