Pricing innovations in consumption growth: a re-evaluation of the recursive utility model

We re-evaluate the cross-sectional asset pricing implications of the recursive utility function of Epstein and Zin, 1989 and Epstein and Zin, 1991, using innovations in future consumption growth in our tests. Our empirical specification helps explain the size, value and momentum effects. Specifically, we find that (і) the beta associated with news about consumption growth has a systematic pattern: beta decreases along the size dimension and increases along the book-to-market and momentum dimensions, (іі) innovation in consumption growth is significantly priced in asset returns using both the Fama and MacBeth (1973) and the stochastic discount factor approaches, and (ііі) the model performs better than both the CAPM and Fama–French model.

Virtual worlds in Australian and New Zealand higher education: Remembering the past, understanding the present and imagining the future

3D virtual reality, including the current generation of multi-user virtual worlds, has had a long history of use in education and training, and it experienced a surge of renewed interest with the advent of Second Life in 2003. What followed shortly after were several years marked by considerable hype around the use of virtual worlds for teaching, learning and research in higher education. For the moment, uptake of the technology seems to have plateaued, with academics either maintaining the status quo and continuing to use virtual worlds as they have previously done or choosing to opt out altogether. This paper presents a brief review of the use of virtual worlds in the Australian and New Zealand higher education sector in the past and reports on its use in the sector at the present time, based on input from members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. It then adopts a forward-looking perspective amid the current climate of uncertainty, musing on future directions and offering suggestions for potential new applications in light of recent technological developments and innovations in the area.

Reading, writing, crafting – Innovations in first year tertiary writing pedagogy

This paper will outline some of the rationale behind, and strategies contributing to, curriculum revision in first-year creative writing at Deakin University in 2012 – delivered in that year and currently running in 2013. The process aimed to produce two consecutive offerings, with distinct but strategically scaffolded preoccupations. This paper deals with the first of these. The design process for this offering, named ‘Writing Craft’, involved addressing two central concerns: (a) the need to unhook the initial encounter with tertiary creative writing pedagogy from a preoccupation with ‘genres’ or the ‘forms’ of creative writing (such as prose fiction, creative nonfiction, script, poetry, and so on) and instead to reorient efforts towards establishing an engagement with craft per se; (b) to address a perceived impoverishment in the range of texts to which students had been exposed prior to commencing study – in other words, to emphasise the practice of reading to facilitate the practice of writing. The curriculum design also involved reimagining assessment, noting the ‘messages about making’ sent to students via the framing of tasks and rubrics. Aiming instead to deemphasise the role of inspiration and ‘work arriving fully formed’, it sought to offer assessment that provided clear – and bounded – prompts for incidents of making and the practice of craft, as well as to provoke conversation with a broad range of texts as a way of courting intertextual inspiration and aesthetic formation.