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To find solutions to complex problems, engineering practice needs to adapt and embrace diverse thinking. The lack of female participation in engineering fields, in the western world including New Zealand, at the tertiary education level (post secondary/high school level e.g., university, polytechnic, etc.) has been a barrier for diversity, equity and innovation in both the industry and academic professions. Non-diverse professions miss out valuable contributions and new ways of approaching problems that a varied workforce brings. New Zealand needs to mitigate the gender bias to ensure a diversity of skills and knowledge in the engineering profession is fostered. This paper presents findings from three studies as part of a larger research project aimed at investigating influencing factors that contribute to female participation in engineering studies at the tertiary level in New Zealand. In the three studies researchers explored student teachers, current polytechnic engineering students and high school students’ perceptions, experiences, and influences related to engineering. The first study investigated future teachers of children aged 11-13 years perceptions of engineering and engineers. The second study investigated the impacts and influences that led domestic and international female engineering students choose the Civil Engineering programme at Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec). The third study investigated the impacts and influences that led to Year 12 and 13 students to enrol in a trades engineering related course at Wintec. The three completed studies deployed qualitative research methods using focus group and individual interviews. The first study found that participants held very strong stereotypical views about who engineers are and described them as: white, male, middle-aged, good at maths and science who may be antisocial, and that they design and build stuff while getting dirty. The second study found that barriers to selection of engineering for women include the school system; lack of career and subject choice guidance available to students at school, lack of promotion of the profession, and society’s perception of engineers as being masculine. The third study found that young women were exposed to strong stereotypical thinking and behaviours throughout their lives that could potentially steer them away from a career in engineering. Other barriers included a lack of timely, accurate career advice, outdated school facilities and inauthentic enactment of curriculum. However, exposure to positive role models and strong support networks, along with developing self-efficacy, assisted them to overcome these barriers enabling them to explore engineering as a potential career pathway. Given the strong stereotypical views about engineering from future teachers, incorrect perceptions about engineering in society and lack of engineering career and subject choice guidance available to students at school, it is not surprising that there is a shortage of females entering engineering fields in New Zealand.

The inclusion of emojis when solving natural language processing problems (e.g., text‐based emotion detection, sentiment classification, topic analysis) improves the quality of the results. However, the existing literature focuses only on the general meaning transferred by emojis and has not examined emojis in the context of investor sentiment classification. This article provides a comprehensive study of the impact that inclusion of emojis could make in predicting stock investors’ sentiment. We found that a classifier that incorporates domain-specific emoji vectors, which capture the syntax and semantics of emojis in the financial context, could improve the accuracy of investor sentiment classification. Also, when domain-specific emoji vectors are considered, daily time-series of investor sentiment demonstrated additional marginal explanatory power on returns and volatility. Further, a comparison of conducted cluster analysis of domain-specific versus domain-independent emoji vectors showed different natural groupings of emojis reflecting domain specificity when special meaning of emojis is considered. Finally, domain-specific emoji vectors could result in the development of significantly superior emoji sentiment lexicons. Given the importance of domain-specific emojis in investor sentiment classification of social media data, we have developed an emoji lexicon that could be used by other researchers.

The rarity of rights issues in the United States makes it difficult to examine the choice between alternative seasoned equity offering (SEO) methods in that market. In Australia, however, both rights issues and private placements are prevalent. We therefore use the Australian market to test whether regulation influences a firm’s choice between rights issues and private placements. When a firm decides to issue seasoned equity in Australia, regulation favours private placements if the issue is small or needs to be completed quickly. Consistent with regulations affecting the choice between SEO types, our empirical results provide evidence that firms in Australia are more likely to choose a private placement for small issues or when taking advantage of temporary periods of overvaluation. JEL Classification: G12, G14

There has been substantial growth in the incorporation of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues into investment decisions, and this trend has been motivated by the societal benefits that are achieved when socially responsible firms have access to cheaper capital. While the benefits with ESG investing are apparent, we investigate the possible downside of the trend towards ESG by examining how this approach to investing might affect market efficiency. ESG is now a highly salient aspect of an investor’s information set and, given cognitive limitations, investors might devote substantial resources to examining ESG characteristics to the detriment of other firm fundamentals. Consistent with salience theory, we report that this over-emphasis on ESG results in the market overreacting to news about ESG controversies. This over-reaction is more pronounced within smaller firms and stocks that were held by more transient investors before the announcement. Contrarian investors are likely able to profit from the unpopular strategy of buying stocks after bad ESG news is released.

Myopic investors focus on short-run price changes rather than long-term fundamental value, resulting in an overweighting of public information and a slow diffusion of fundamental news. Such processing of information can produce price drifts similar to those seen in behavioral models of momentum. We explore the impact of myopia over an international sample, finding that momentum is stronger in more myopic countries, and this relationship is magnified where the proportion of funds under delegated management is high. We therefore argue that investor myopia, which arises due to agency issues in delegated funds management, is an important determinant of momentum.

Evidence of a negative relationship between extreme positive returns and future returns has been reported in developed markets (Bali, Cakici, & Whitelaw, 2011; Zhong & Gray, 2016). This study examines this “MAX anomaly” across advanced emerging markets, which are characterised by a higher level of limits to arbitrage compared with developed markets, but lower financial frictions than their secondary emerging counterparts. The MAX anomaly is shown to be larger in magnitude in advanced emerging markets compared with developed markets. Our results support the proposition that the MAX anomaly is a pervasive anomaly that is related to mispricing.

A feature of the Australian equity market is that, unlike all other equity markets, private placements and rights issues are used more frequently than public offerings. This study examines time-variation in these types of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), to examine choice between them, and to enhance our understanding of the reasons for time-variation in SEOs. Time-variation in information asymmetry, the demand for capital, and investment sentiment, together with market timing, are explanations for this cyclicality in SEO issuance; although the drivers of time-variation differ across SEO types. Time-variation in the demand for capital has a statistically and economically significant impact on time-variation in private placements, while time-variation in investor sentiment has a statistically and economically significant impact on the prevalence of rights issues. Market timing and information asymmetry do not have explanatory power for variation in SEO activity.

Studies that seek to examine the impact of sentiment in financial markets have been affected by inaccurate sentiment measurement and the use of inappropriate data. This study applies state-of-the-art techniques from the domain-general sentiment analysis literature to construct a more accurate decision support system that generates demonstrable improvement in investor sentiment classification performance compared with previous studies. The inclusion of emojis is shown significantly improve sentiment classification in traditional algorithms. Moreover, deep neural networks with domain-specific word embeddings outperform the traditional approaches for the classification of investor sentiment. The approach to sentiment classification outlined in this paper can be applied in future empirical tests that examine the impact of investor sentiment on financial markets.

This study is the first to examine liquidity commonality, a measure of liquidity risk, in the U.S. secondary corporate loan market. Liquidity commonality varies substantially across market states, being completely absent during more benign market conditions. The results have implications for banking portfolio management, the pricing of liquidity risk and for regulators interested in the time-variation of liquidity risk in illiquid markets.

Despite an extensive number of studies documenting evidence of seasonal anomalies in developed markets, relatively few studies have comprehensively examined these anomalies within emerging markets. Testing the robustness of seasonal anomalies in emerging markets would first, help to examine the theoretical explanations that have been proposed and second, provide an out-of-sample result for these seasonality anomalies. This study examines the efficiency of advanced emerging markets by testing five seasonal anomalies: the month of the year, other January, day-of-the-week, holiday, and week 44. Evidence is reported that is consistent with all of these seasonal anomalies with the exception of the other January effect; supporting the argument that advanced emerging markets are less than perfectly efficient.

We determine the conditional expected logarithmic (that is, continuously compounded) return on a stock whose price evolves in terms of the Feller diffusion and then use it to demonstrate how one must know the exact probability density that describes a stock’s return before one can determine the correct way to calculate the abnormal returns that accrue on the stock. We show in particular that misspecification of the stochastic process which generates a stock’s price will lead to systematic biases in the abnormal returns calculated on the stock. We examine the implications this has for the proper conduct of empirical work and for the evaluation of stock and portfolio performance.

Noise trader models of market behaviour propose that investor sentiment affects market responses to corporate announcements. As beliefs can be cross-sectionally heterogeneous, firm-specific investor sentiment may differ from aggregate levels of investor sentiment. Previous studies, which focus exclusively on market-level investor sentiment measures, are likely to have under-stated the economic magnitude of the role that sentiment plays in corporate announcement returns. We provide the first theoretical model for the relative importance of firm- and market-level investor sentiment for corporate announcement returns. We also demonstrate empirically that firm-level investor sentiment has marginal explanatory power beyond market-level investor sentiment for merger and acquisition announcement returns, turnover and long-run reversals. It is also shown that firm-level investor sentiment dominates when there is high divergence in investor sentiment across firms, whereas the effect of market-level investor sentiment increases during hot market periods.

Dual-class shares often violate the ‘one share-one vote’ principle, thereby creating the potential for agency problems. We develop a model of time-variation in the pricing of these agency problems, as reflected by the voting premium. A key implication of this model is that insiders face a trade-off between the private benefits of control and the value of their cash-flow claims on the firm, resulting in a negative relationship between the voting premium and the expected present value of firm cash flows. As predicted by this model, we report empirical evidence consistent with ‘flights-to-control’, where the voting premium increases substantially during financial crises and when negative earnings surprises are announced. These relationships are accentuated for firms where agency problems might be expected to be more pronounced. The average voting premium is also shown to decrease around events that reduce the ability for insiders to extract private benefits of control.

Owing to the discrete disclosure practices of the Reserve Bank of Australia, this paper provides new evidence on the channels of monetary policy triggered by central bank actions (monetary policy announcements) and statements (explanatory minutes releases), in the Australian equity market. Both monetary policy announcements and explanatory minutes releases are shown to have a significant and comparable impact on the returns and volatility of the Australian equity market. Further, distinct from US and European studies that find strong evidence of the interest rate, bank loan and balance sheet channels and no evidence of the exchange rate channel following central bank actions, this paper finds that monetary policy impacts the Australian equity market via the exchange rate, interest rate and bank loan channels of monetary policy, with only weak evidence of the balance sheet channel of monetary policy. These channels are found to be operating irrespective of the trigger (monetary policy announcements or explanatory minutes releases), though results are somewhat weaker when examining the explanatory minutes releases. These results have important implications for central bank officials and financial market participants alike: by confirming a comparable avenue to affect monetary policy; and providing an explication of its impact on the Australian equity market.

The level of firm investment, along with firm profitability, has been shown to be empirically powerful asset pricing factors in the US and other markets. The q-factor model of Hou, Xue, and Zhang (2014), and the 5-factor model of Fama and French (2014a), both rely on factors capturing the interrelationship of firm investment and profitability. The models struggle in relation to small, high-investing and low-profitability stocks, a characteristic that is common to Australian firms. Using a sample of Australian stocks over the sample period of 1975-2013, we show that the profitability factor is virtually non-existent, despite numerous tests and iterations of the factor. The addition of a profitability factor provides trivial explanatory power when compared to firm size and investment. We interpret these results as evidence that the investment-profitability rationale that underpins both models is incomplete. Further, we confirm the results of Fama and French (2014a), who report that the explanatory power of the HML factor is subsumed when combined with investment and profitability. Finally, we provide the setting for a comparison of the q-factor and 5-factor models. Given our findings regarding the profitability and HML factors, we report no dominant model across a range of testing assets.

Innovative seismic technologies enable us to achieve higher quality seismic images and reservoir models while reducing the cost of seismic acquisition and processing. A great example of these innovative methods is blended acquisition, in which multiple sources are firing within a shorter time window that result in significantly shorter acquisition time. The utilization of surface multiples, which can be considered as a natural form of blending is not yet very well established by the industry. However, recently much more attention has been drawn to the possibility of utilizing surface multiples in seismic imaging, rather than removing them. Surface multiples can be considered as secondary sources that illuminate the subsurface many times at different angles. Therefore, they have a significant potential to overcome the shortcomings of seismic acquisition by filling the illumination gaps resulting from imperfect acquisition, especially in sparse acquisition geometries. In this work we discuss the possibilities of improving the quality of seismic images in sparse node acquisition by utilizing surface multiples. We investigate two separate acquisition scenarios, namely, sparse node coverage and sparse node sampling. The impact of including surface multiples will be analyzed for these scenarios.

Trend extrapolation in financial markets has been well documented, however it is contentious as to which trends will be extrapolated or mean reverted. This paper examines whether investors are more likely to extrapolate trends that they perceive to be salient, thereby providing an empirical test of the behavioural models of momentum. We employ an investment strategy that exploits trend salience by considering both the magnitude and the persistence of recent return performance. Consistent with behavioural models of momentum, an investment strategy based on trend salience significantly outperforms traditional momentum strategies and is not explained by the four-factor model. The relative performance of the trend salience signal is robust across different investment horizons and size-sorted portfolios, although is time-varying; the strategy does not outperform momentum in “down” markets or periods of high volatility in the formation period where trends are more difficult to identify.

Despite considerable empirical evidence reporting a negative relationship between net share issuance and subsequent returns, it remains unresolved whether this anomaly is explained by risk or investor irrationality. This study examines the net share issuance anomaly using seasoned equity offerings before and after the introduction of an imputation tax system. We report robust evidence of a negative relationship between net share issuance and returns post-imputation, but no relationship pre-imputation. Our results provide evidence to support the international pervasiveness of the net share issuance anomaly, but more importantly suggest that this anomaly may be explained by risk.

The Melbourne Cup is a major horse racing event that is colloquially known as the ‘race that stops the nation’ in Australia. We use constituent stock intraday volume data on the Australian Securities Exchange S&P/ASX 200 equity index from 2003 to 2013 within a regression framework to examine whether this major horse race reduces investor attention. Results show that trading volume on the Australian equity market is significantly reduced during and immediately surrounding the running of the Melbourne Cup, supporting the claim that this is the ‘race that stops the equity market’.

Momentum strategies have been reported to be successful across a range of different markets and asset classes. Three possible explanations for momentum have been hypothesised: risk, return continuation and excessive co-movement of stock returns compared with dividends. Lewellen (2002) adds to this literature by providing evidence of strong momentum returns in style portfolios that can be explained by negative cross-serial correlation, a result which supports the excess co-movement hypothesis. We report robust evidence of style momentum in the Australian market and use the Jegadeesh and Titman (1995) return decomposition to show that this momentum strategy is predominately explained by positive autocorrelation. Our results support the return continuation hypothesis and confirm Chen and Hong's (2002) assertion that Lewellen's (2002) explanation of style momentum returns does not stand up out-of-sample.

Summary In conventional seismic processing, the surface-related and internal multiples are considered as coherent noise, which are required to be removed prior to the migration. This is mainly due to the fact that that the conventional forward model used in the migration process is designed for the primary wavefield and not the total wavefield that includes all the multiples. Therefore, in case multiples are not suppressed prior to the migration, they generate cross-talk in the seismic image. However, recently much more attention has been drawn to the possibility of utilizing multiples in seismic imaging, rather than removing them. This is mainly due to the fact that the multiples can be considered as secondary sources that illuminate the subsurface many times. Therefore, they have a significant potential to overcome the shortcomings of seismic acquisition by filling the illumination gaps resulting from imperfect acquisition, especially in sparse and NAZ acquisition geometries. In this abstract we have studied the migration of surface multiples in Deep-water OBN data from the Julia field in the Gulf of Mexico. Our results from the migration of surface multiples show significant improvement in certain parts of the seismic image in comparison to the industry standard RTM mirror migration image.

This article examines the influence of liquidity risk on the U.S. secondary corporate loan market (herein loan market). The authors empirically disentangle the impact of both loan-level liquidity shocks and systematic liquidity risk from default risk. Loans that experience shocks to either liquidity or default risk experience ongoing price declines, complementing evidence presented elsewhere of price momentum in loan markets. The prices of loans with high liquidity risk are significantly discounted when market liquidity is low, consistent with the time-varying funding liquidity constraints of financial intermediaries. In keeping with a close link between high risk debt markets and equity markets, there is evidence that equity market risk is priced in the loan market.

Unlike US and Continental European jurisdictions, Australian monetary policy announcements are not followed promptly by projections materials or comprehensive summaries that explain the decision process. This information is disclosed 2 weeks later when the explanatory minutes of the Reserve Bank board meeting are released. This paper is the first study to exploit the features of the Australian monetary policy environment in order to examine the differential impact of monetary policy announcements and explanatory statements on the Australian interest rate futures market. We find that both monetary policy announcements and explanatory minutes releases have a significant impact on the implied yield and volatility of Australian interest rate futures contracts. When the differential impact of these announcements is examined using the full sample, no statistically significant difference is found. However, when the sample is partitioned based on stable periods and the Global Financial Crisis, a differential impact is evident. Further, contrary to the findings of Kim and Nguyen (2008), Lu et al. (2009), and Smales (2012a), the response along the yield curve, is found to be indifferent between the short and medium terms.

Unlike acquiring company shareholders in Australian takeovers, but like shareholders in government initial public offerings, shareholders of companies purchasing Australian government assets earn economically and statistically significant positive abnormal returns. However, unlike privatisations via initial public offerings where all citizens are entitled to subscribe for shares, in privatisations via asset sales only acquiring company shareholders benefit from any under-pricing. This suggests the need for greater scrutiny to ensure fair pricing in privatisation via asset sales.

By examining the correlation between the size, value and momentum empirical regularities and macroeconomic variables we investigate whether these regularities may be explained as risk factors within Merton's (1973) ICAPM. We examine the commodity-based Australian economy where financial asset claims are highly sensitive to macroeconomic volatility. The size and momentum premia covary pro-cyclically, while the value premium is countercyclical and negative at the business cycle peak. All three regularities become insignificant after controlling for the Chen et al. (1986) factors and a macroeconomic model successfully forecasts returns for both the size and momentum premia. Our results suggest that these regularities may be explained as macroeconomic-risk factors. We argue that covariance between macroeconomic risk and empirical regularities may explain inconsistencies in prior Australian market literature.