Welcome, everybody, to lecture two. In this lecture, we're going to be talking about the methods that social psychologists use to conduct their research. And methodology is not necessarily the most favorite topic for students. To be completely honest, it's also not my favorite topic to talk about, but it is an essential topic because only if we really understand what you need to do to conduct good research, you can also understand the outcomes of that research. And that is where the fun happens. That's where it gets exciting. So today, we're going to be talking about the methods that social psychologists use to do their work. And especially for social psychology, you could say, this is really important. It's important to talk about good methodology. And why is this the case? Well, because it's not really easy to be a social psychologist, not in general, but also not, especially not, over the last decade. Let me talk to you about why this is problematic to be a social psychologist and the problems that we tend to run into. The first problem has to do with the image of social psychology. The second one about bad research practices and finally, unethical research that has been conducted in the past. So let me start off with the first one, the image of social psychologists. Okay, so let's start by talking about the image that social psychologists have. The image is typically that social psychology is just common sense. It's sort of an open door. The research that we do is not really new. It's something that all humans can sort of predict the outcomes. It's not very important, therefore. And let me tell you a little bit about my own research and sort of the problems that I had when talking about my work. So I told you before that I study relationships and when I did my PhD, I studied why some people are better able to maintain and protect their relationships than others. And one topic that I studied was cheating. So unfaithfulness in relationships. And I studied why some people are more likely to cheat on their partner than others. And there's, of course, a variety of topics and it's a very complex question. But one factor that I zoomed into was impulse control. So in my work, I studied participants' ability to control their impulses and I tested whether this ability for impulse control predicted cheating. So whether people that are very impulsive are actually more likely to cheat on their partner. And I thought that this was very cool research and I think I did some very cool studies. And it was in the media and then I got a lot of remarks from people saying, yes, of course, but this makes so much sense. Why would anyone study this? If you're impulsive, you're likely to cheat. Yeah, what's the big deal? Everybody knows this. And this is a typical example of what we refer to as hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is basically the idea that once you know the results of a certain study, you think it would have been very easy to predict it. So retrospectively, you think once you know how something works, you think I could have easily predicted this. So this is called hindsight bias and social psychologists have a lot of troubles with this because a lot of times if they talk about their work, people say, yeah, I knew this all along. That's basically the idea of hindsight bias. This is not newer information. This is just research being conducted on something that everybody already knows. And sometimes I get it, this feedback, this criticism, but oftentimes this is not how it works because if I ask you to predict outcomes of a certain study, this is much more complicated than you sometimes think. So for example, I will now showcase some questions, something that you could study. For example, you hear a song on the radio for the very first time, you really like the song. Over the next few weeks, you hear it many, many, many times on the radio. So you know this first time you hear a song, then it's got to repeat it over and over and over and over and over again. After a couple of weeks, do you think you will like the song less, the same or more? So you think about it yourself. Another example, Taro, who happens to be my older son, and this is actually something that happened to me, Taro is playing in his room. His room is a bit messy and he decides out of his own initiative, which is shocking, as a mom, I can say that, he decides to clean his room. And actually to his own surprise, he also enjoys doing so. When his mother later enters the room, she decides to reward him with five euros. And after this payment, do you think Taro will like the act of cleaning his room even more, the same or less? So once he was rewarded for the behavior, do you think this increased his liking for cleaning the room or do you think it didn't affect it or do you think he liked it less? So you might have some ideas about this and I can tell you that probably your first responses to these questions are wrong. I'm not gonna tell you the answers to these questions right now, you will learn them if you follow this course. So stay tuned for the answers to these questions, but they are less straightforward than you think. So this is sort of the first problem that we as social psychologists deal with, the problem that we have this image that is our research is an open door, it's not important, everybody can predict it, which is oftentimes not the case because of hindsight bias. Okay, on to the second problem that we social psychologists face. This is actually a suffer cookie, I would say. And this is something that has become very open and relevant over the last 10 years and it had to do a lot with something that happened at Tilburg. Actually, to be more specific, at the department of social psychology of Tilburg University, it had to do with this guy that you see over here. I don't know if you know him, maybe some people recognize him, his name is Dieter Ekstapel. And Dieter Ekstapel was very well known in the field of social psychology, really a very influential scholar, someone who published a lot of papers, also got published in very big journals like Science, like then you really made it if you published in Science and in Nature. So he was well known, very famous, and he also was the dean of the faculty at a certain moment. And just to give you an impression of his fame, while I was doing my PhD research, I started in 2006 and I ended in 2010, what you do as a PhD student, once you're finished and you wrote your dissertation, you send it out to influential people in the field. And I also remember that I sent a copy of my dissertation to Dieter Ekstapel and he sent me an email and it was just one sentence, something like, I don't remember word by word, but it was something like, thanks for your dissertation, very interesting work. And that really made my day because he was so famous, he was so well known, and I thought, wow, he actually got my dissertation and sent me an email about it. So that's sort of the level of fame that he had in our own field and also more broadly speaking in society because he was also in the news quite a lot with his work, really sort of groundbreaking work also, also very influential, impactful. The media really liked his work, for example, he did a study together with Rose Fonk of Rappert University, Nijmegen, in which they compared people who eat meat versus vegetarians and that people who eat meat would be basically more of an asshole once you eat meat.  So this was also something that was in the news a lot sort of very appealing. So everything was going very well for Professor Staples until in 2011, there were some students in his group who had their concerns about the way he worked. And they were very brave and they stepped up and they raised their concerns to people in power. And as it turns out, he was actually conducting fraud at a very, very big level. So he actually now is known as one of the biggest scientist frauds in history. So he sort of used all the bad research practices that you can think of. And most importantly, he sort of made up his own data. So he would say that he conducted a certain study. For example, he said he conducted studies with primary school children. And what he actually did was he himself in the back of his car filled out questionnaires as it is was filled out by the children and conducted his research based on the questionnaires that he himself filled out. Can you imagine how scandalous that is? It's really bizarre. So there was a huge investigation and it turned out that a lot of his papers also the famous meat eating versus vegetarian paper was completely false. It was not based on fraudulous, faked data. And a lot of his work, actually almost all of his work was retracted also from these big articles like Science. They retracted the paper. And it was really a serious investigation also because he got a lot of money to conduct his work. So he got millions and millions of euros to conduct his work and he spent it on hiring people and making money himself. And he also ruined so many careers for PhD students of his. Yeah, it was really, really, really bad. So also, of course, not good for Tilburg, not good for the reputation of social psychology, especially not social psychology in Tilburg, complete disaster. But this turns out to be only the tip of the iceberg because in the years to come, we sort of, as a feels, reconsidered the methods that we use to do our work. And we found out that there's actually a lot of bad research practices and fraud is very apparent, one of them, there are more problems with doing science. For example, using very small sample sizes, so not enough participants basically to come up with your conclusions and sort of removing participants from your data set and then conducting your analysis. So if you wanna know more about that, I'll post a link so you can read on the seven deadly sins of methodology and social psychology. It's not relevant for you to know all of this, but if you're interested, you can find out more. For now, it's just enough for you to know that there were bad research practices and this sort of spurred an entire field of replication, replication studies. And what replication means is that researchers sort of redo work that has been done in the past. So especially very famous studies that have been very well known. These studies were replicated, repeated basically, by other researchers using oftentimes a bigger group of participants, a different sample size and to see whether the same results could be obtained. And what the researchers found out was that oftentimes results could not be replicated. So when the study was repeated, other results were obtained, which is a problem because if you obtain other results than the results that was in the initial work, then the conclusions that people come up with from the previous work cannot actually be concluded. So you have to change the theory. So this is called a replication science, a replication crisis, sorry. And this has also been discussed a lot. So there's a lot of examples of replication crisis in the field of social psychology, but it turns out to be a much broader problem. It was also general in other fields of psychology, but also in, for example, medicine and other fields of science, there was a replication crisis. So we needed to sort of step up our game, change our methods to make sure that the conclusions that we derive from our work can actually, you know, are real, are based on actual factual information. So we are now, after a decade or so after this crisis, we are moving further, we're moving forward, and we are improving our methods. So I think social psychologists did very well in taking this crisis very serious and changing stuff for the better. So what we did now is we run replication studies, as I mentioned, so we sort of repeat studies that have been done in the past, but then with better methods. We also run meta-analyses, and with the meta-analyses, you sort of combine several researches, several studies that had the same goal to see whether the results are still true. So basically, you combine studies to test whether certain hypotheses can actually be confirmed yes or no. And finally, we now conduct open science practices, and this is really supported. And with open science, I mean that we, for example, once we come up with a research question and we have a certain expectation, we pre-register this, and this means that we, before we actually do the research, we type and we make public our expectation of that work. So this is called pre-registration. The materials that we use are open, and the data sets are open, so everybody can just look into what we did, so the chances of actually conducting fraudulent work that's really slim, because now everything is so open, so it's very hard for a future leader example to do what he did. So I think we did a very good job in this. So this is solved, right? Of course, this is still working and making, but this is going the right direction. Now let's move on to the final problem that we as social psychologists have to deal with, and this has to do with unethical research. And what you see here are pictures of studies that were actually conducted by social psychologists. You see a very famous study, the Milgram experiment, and the Zimbardo experiment. These were both conducted around the 60s and the 70s. I'm not gonna talk about the content of this research. I'm gonna do so later in the course, so I'm gonna tell you all about what these researchers actually did, but for now I just wanna mention that the research was conducted as very renowned institutions like Stanford University, still one of the most renowned worldwide, well-known institutions for science, also by very well-known professors in psychology, Zimbardo and Milgram were well-respected, and they conducted studies that were completely unethical, and they should have never been conducted because the participants were really harmed in this work, and what they exactly did, again, I will tell you, but we are still dealing with the backlash of this research because these studies are still very famous, maybe you already know them, and they also damaged the image that we have as social psychologists, and they also damaged the perspective that we are sort of messing with people a little bit. So this is also something that we need to change, and we are also moving forward in this regard, so when it comes to ethics of research, we have very good restrictions I think now, so for example, we use informed consent, so that means that once participants enter our research, the very first thing they do is they read an information letter in which we explain to them what this research is about and what they can expect, and they give consent, so they say, okay, I understand it, and I agree to participate in this work. Sounds very straightforward, right? But this is new, relatively new in the field of science, so to actually tell people what they can expect and not just bombard them with some sort of research procedure that they didn't see coming, so they now know what they are getting themselves into, informed consent, a really vital aspect of ethics. We try to avoid deception, sounds very logical, right? But for a long time, a lot of research that has been conducted in psychology used deception, so we basically lied to participants. For example, what researchers did in the past was we gave participants a task to do. This was really a task that didn't make any sense, they had to count something or divide something, and then we gave them fake feedback. And the fake feedback group, for example, looked like this. On the basis of the results of your task, I can see that in the end of your life, you will have no friends.  Well, that's quite harsh feedback, right? And that was all nonsense, it was not true, but it was used to sort of shock participants and see what the effect is of receiving this feedback and studying emotions. Well, that's maybe the researchers had good intentions, but using deception can actually harm participants because this is something that can stick with you, especially if participants are later on not informed that this was actually fake, something that I'll come back to later. So we try to avoid deception, we also try to protect our participants, protect them from experiencing harm, pain, being too cold, being too hot, making sure that they are not harmed. Sometimes we do harm them a little bit just to see the results, but then it will be within a very doable range. I'll give you some examples of that later on in the course, but we try to protect the participants as good as we can. Also, of course, confidentiality is now a much of a more big deal. So we protect the privacy of our participants, especially relevant today because once something is out there, you cannot imagine sort of the personal questions we sometimes ask our participants and we really wanna make sure that these data are treated confidential so we are using more restrictions on that regard. And finally, we also use debriefing and debriefing is at the very end of an experiment. We tell participants what the research was about and also if we still used deception, for example, so we gave them fake feedback, we really make sure that they know that this was false and this is not based on real actual data. And to make sure that we do all this correctly, there's now an IRB, this is an institutional review board at basically every university that sort of checks whether the research that is conducted also lives up to these expectations. So we have several institutions in place to make sure that researchers do their job well, both when it comes to conducting right methodology as well as when it comes to treating people in a humane way. Thanks.


A few weeks ago in Winnipeg, my city, a church had a celebration ceremony affirming the choice of a woman to un-alive herself. But I guess when a church abandons God's word as their ultimate authority, they're left to be swept away into whatever cultural movement or moment they're in. Cause right now the world is celebrating assisted un-aliving, dying with dignity, they call it. Legislation all around, especially in Canada is making it that much more easy for people to access this stuff. But this isn't dignified, this is selfish. Think about it, it's God who gave us the gift of life. We didn't deserve that in the first place and yet we spit in His face when we throw it back at Him prematurely. So what do we do about this? Well we keep sharing the gospel, we keep sharing hope, we introduce people to the author of life and through Jesus that we can have new life in Him that regardless of our pain and our suffering there is purpose in it and that we will live with Christ in eternity where there will be no more pain and no more suffering but all in God's timing. Not our own.


Yeah, we're sticking with the biggest party in sport the Republic Bank Caribbean Premier League the CPL the St. Lucia Kings book their pace place in the playoffs following a seven-week victory of a host Ghana Amazon Warriors on Thursday night electing to bat at the Providence Stadium the Warriors posted a competitive 167 for five from their 20 overs as I'm Khan and Shea Hope were the most impressive batsman with scores of 40 and 38 respectively but the Kings made light work of the total easing to 173 to win with 15 deliveries to spare the victory was set up by a 132 run second we could stand between Sri Lankan, Banuka, Raja Paksa who made 86 and New Zealand the Colin Monroe who contributed 55 Thursday nights result the first defeat for the Amazon Warriors leaves the table looking like this, Ghana Amazon Warriors, Trinbega Knight Riders, St Lucia Kings already booked for their playoff spots top of the table the Warriors and the Knight Riders both on 13 points and the Kings three points off them on ten Barbados Royals on seven points Jamaica Tallow is five, Senkitsa Nevis Patriots bottom of the table on four points and of course the top four after the ten games in the group stage will qualify for the playoffs so we know Ricardo and Mara three of the four playoff teams at the moment and there's only one spot left the Barbados Royals and the Jamaica Tallow is eyeing for that position yeah I was looking at the table I noticed the Jamaica Tallowers they have two games left I think those will be must win games if they are to qualify Barbados Royals as well they have a really good chance but Lance the thing about it is it comes down now to how these teams execute and matches and we can't say there has been an outright dominant team other than the Ghana Amazon Warriors and their winning streak was ended last night so these teams will of course have to put on a really really good showing I think it's extremely close and that's what makes this CPL so exciting it's so close so it's any teams want to take Ricardo how do you how seriously do you take the Amazon Warriors defeat last night because they are already qualified and they didn't play a bad game I saw Imran Tahir the captain of the team speaking post game and he suggested that the team played well and he didn't look overly bothered obviously he didn't want to lose but he didn't look overly bothered by the result and I wouldn't be overly bothered by the result if I were the Ghana Amazon Warriors in fact maybe I'm a little bit superstitious Lance and Mariah but in tournaments like that I actually don't mind when my team loses a match at a stage that is not crucial for the competition the Amazon Warriors already through to the next round they will finish in the top two already through to the playoffs they will finish in the top two so they will have two bites at the cherry to try and get into the championship match and sometimes you don't want to go into the playoffs and beat them because they've done it before Ghana Amazon Warriors more than any team else they've done that before and the only match they lost was the final Ricardo and I just want to say something because I was in the CPL around the players in Trinidad and Tobago I had the opportunity to talk to some of them about it I will not call names because it was off the record so I will not put any player of course on the sports market zone where everybody could hear but I was speaking to a player from the Jamaica Talos a senior player who was a great repetition and he is really good friends with Imran Tahir from the Ghana Amazon Warriors and I remember him saying the moment that the Ghana Amazon Warriors had an unbeaten streak he called it and he said you need to lose one you know you need to lose one well of course Imran continued and the team continued winning and he got the last laugh yes so that's how I see it as well because I think when you go through a competition like this and as you continue to win and win and you remain unbeaten the pressure builds especially when you get into those knockout situations all the pressure is on you because you are trying to maintain this unbeaten tag and now when you get into the playoffs you pretty much have to maintain that unbeaten tag if you are going to go on and win the title and sometimes I feel as if that pressure can end up being too much so maybe not a bad thing that the Ghana Amazon Warriors lost last night but there are some big matches coming up on the weekend Lance and Mariah especially for the Jamaica Talos well not especially for the Jamaica Talos and the Barbados Royals the Barbados Royals they have one match to play they finish off against the Ghana Amazon Warriors on Sunday night I suspect that Providence will once again be packed for that encounter and the Talos have two morning games they go up against the Kings and they will play at the St. Kitt's and Nevitz Patriots as well they have to win those two games to try and get to nine points which is also what the Barbados Royals can get to so potentially we could have a situation where what head-to-head or net run rate determines which team gets into the playoffs as the fourth and final qualifier in my opinion this is a thrilling end to the preliminary stage of this season's CPL yeah and Pete Russell touched on it earlier on when we were speaking to him that on their best day each team can beat the other that's how good all the teams are I know the Patriots would be disappointed with their poor run in the tournament so far but you know the top flight teams it's hard to differentiate between them with regard to their quality because it's just a matter of how they turn up on the day or in many cases on the night because they are all quality teams I love that, I love that Lance because for some time you could always look at a team on paper and say this is the team that's going to win because they are so dominant and from the onset you could walk away and pick a favorite now it's a bit difficult to pick an outright favorite and I like that about the tournament because you get these different players and I spoke about it at the top of the show players that are young they're new to the competition they're coming out and shining like superstars and I think dreams are made here in the CPL because this is where other players get the opportunity to showcase their talent and who knows what opportunity opens up for them you know what and Pete Russell mentioned the Rakeem Cornwall 100 on the night at Kensington Oval in Barbados twice when we spoke to him and I think that the impact of that moment tells the story and quite frankly I cannot remember any moment in CPL cricket since its inception that is as indelibly printed in my mind as that moment in fact beyond the CPL that is one of the most memorable and moment defining events I've ever seen in sport and you've done a lot it was tremendous Lance vertical I'm serious I'm serious and you're going to tell me about Karsten Warholman so on the Tokyo Olympics no no no no no I was going to say I never took you as the person who would be overcome by recency bias no but it's not a recency bias it is not a recency bias let me see if I got what you said correctly did you say you can't recall another moment in the CPL CPL for sure equivalent to what happened with Rakeem Cornwall with Rakeem Cornwall century I can't another moment that I cherish I could think of a few is a no look six that the Spice Man hit was it Sheldon Cottrell a beautiful suit I remember it it was a mid weekend and he didn't look at the ball he just did this it was another class moment give me a moment so don't get me wrong Lance and Mariah the Rakeem Cornwall moment was clearly special I want to see what he talks this way for so many reasons but I have an issue with you saying I find equivalent moments but let me try and see if I can come up with a few Chris Gale yes being bowled at Sabina Park by O'Shaen Thomas oh that was tremendous yeah that I will never forget that's one that's a big moment yeah I don't know why his name is slipping me Wicked Keeper batsman opener Jamaican he's played for the Ghana Amazon Shadwick Walton who always writes ballers into his book being sent back to the Pavilion and written up into a book can I ask you before you even continue can I ask you those are good moments for real and I accept that but would you put those moments over the Rakeem Cornwall moment above because that's what we are discussing I would not put it above but the way you said it Lance it was almost to suggest that there is nothing that can match it I think you could have a debate about several moments that could match it and maybe you would find as well that there are many individuals who would have moments that supersede the Rakeem Cornwall there was a cat that took on the boundary I think it matches in Florida I think it was in Florida it was stunning one of the best catches I have seen in all of cricket but the Rakeem Cornwall moment was not just about the hundred it was about what he has been through and the dropping of the bat I have never seen a cricket that do that I have seen Bolas knock over Chris Gale's Thomas before so I know that Ocean Thomas moment was big because it was Sabina Park and Chris Gale was playing for the nature we have seen many catches too so the story there was special as well because Chris Gale had just left the Jamaica Tally was he had come back to Kingston to play Ocean Thomas was the new kid on the block and here is Chris Gale the master the T20 Superstar the legend of T20 Cricket facing up to this quick upstart everyone wants to see this battle and bam leave alone I think it was LBW was it bold or was it LBW I think he was bold it may have caught up his path or somewhere he was bold his thumb sort of shattered but I have seen Chris Gale's thumb shattered before the story behind it the story behind his legs and dropped the bat in the way that Rakeem Cornwall I've never seen that and because of his personality too what we've seen from him I think it was out of character let me be clear I don't know that it was out of character I think that is very much Rakeem Cornwall's character I think that's the type of individual he is what indicator did you have before then that it was I've listened to his interviews over time Lance because you don't survive the type of criticism and critique that Rakeem Cornwall has still performed at a high level if you don't have that little special thing about you as an individual so it wasn't a major surprise for me that he did that because I get the feeling he is that type of an individual well I would say this Ricardo I respect your rebuttal I respect the moments that you have given to contradict or to match Rakeem Cornwall's moment but I'm still sticking to my position he hasn't changed his mind so I'm not trying to change your mind right I actually have no issue if you say that Rakeem Cornwall's moment is the most compelling moment that you have witnessed in the CPL the issue I was having when you said it initially which is why I took you up on it is because it was almost you were suggesting that nothing else nothing else can come close to this that was the issue I was having so the reason why it sounded that way of yours is because I was sure of what I was saying not to say that there were other moments that were brilliant as well but I was sure in my mind that for me but you did say it with Rakeem Cornwall's flair I thought he was about to drop yourself too the suggestion was that there is no other moment that could come close and I am suggesting that there are many other moments that could come close even if you still end up picking the Rakeem Cornwall moment I'm just going to put it I'm just sure that it would be number one if those moments that you have mentioned are a close second I'm fine with that but Rakeem Cornwall's moment is number one number one for last week to go as we would say when we were kids number one no bow to doubting alright the sportsman zone is giving away tickets for the games in Guyana answer the following question let's do that again 1-8-7-6-5-6-4-7-6-6-1 the person with the first correct answer wins the question name the years that Jamaica tell us won the CPL very very easy question Mariah and Lance know the answer so do I but we can't tell you we have to go to a break


Good morning. My name is Elizabeth Moran. I'm Director of Education and Research here at EFIC. Thank you for joining the webinar today on Managed Income Portfolio Services. I have with me Emma Jenkins, who is Director of Managed Accounts, who is going to be giving that presentation. But before I hand over to Emma a couple of things, first of all, you should have a panel on the side of your screen. If you can't see that panel, there's an orange arrow. If you just click on that, it will expand the panel and you'll see down the list there is an area that says questions. So if you have any questions as we're going through the webinar today, please type them in and we'll try and answer them for you. Now a little bit about Emma. Emma's worked at FIG for four years and has been my colleague over that time. We've worked on a number of projects and she's got an excellent analytical and technical mind, so she's perfect to give this presentation today. A bit about her, she spent the last 14 years in various roles in financial markets, including a stint at UBS in Asia. Now as we go through the presentation today, just before we do start, I just want to make you all aware that the MIPS or the Managed Income Portfolio Service is for wholesale investors only and we can only provide general advice. So we make the assumption that you have done an introduction to fixed income, so there may be some terms you're not familiar with in this presentation, but if you haven't done that introduction to fixed income, just email me in or let us know, we'll send you a link to a webinar so you can catch up at some time later on. But without further ado, I'm very delighted to introduce you to Emma Jenkins. Thanks for coming and presenting, Emma. Great. Thanks Liz. I'm very excited to be here today to talk about our new Managed Income Portfolio Service, which we call MIPS for short. Our new service is a first in the Australian market and offers investors a direct portfolio of bonds that's professionally managed. The Managed Income Portfolio Service offers a higher regular income stream from your own portfolio of bonds. So all the income is paid on individual investments and that can go straight into your funding account. MIPS provides direct ownership of the bonds held in your name via a managed account. This is similar to how many people hold their equities. The critical point is that the bonds are held in the investor's name, so they are segregated from all the other investor's decisions. Okay, so Emma, that's a really good point. So they're held in your own name and you can get all the income through to you just as if you were an individual or direct investor, so there's no restriction on that income. That's exactly right. You can endeavor to take the best of the direct bond service and just overlay professional management. It's also important to know, this differs to managed funds where investments are pulled. These investments are segregated and held in your own name. Your MIPS portfolio is looked after by the portfolio management team, so you put your money into MIPS and then the team take over. So they select the bonds and then they manage your investments. So the teams are monitoring the market the whole time to risk manage your portfolio, but importantly also to optimize your return. They're looking for opportunities to improve your portfolio return and hence your income. Unlike equity markets where there's open access, the fixed income markets are predominantly OTC or over the counter, so by using MIPS, that portfolio management team is investing for you alongside those institutional investors. So we have over 130 people nationally with a wealth of experience across the portfolio management team, sales, research and education, so by selecting MIPS, you're tapping into all of our knowledge and experience to help look after your money. I think that sounds great. It's certainly a lot of work in my role just reading, keeping up to date with what's going on just in our market, so to have access to all those people is a real advantage I think. Yeah, look, I think a lot of investors are looking for the option to have fixed income market professionals looking after their money. They're complex fixed income markets and there's the macro environment, local economic conditions and then there's the credit work itself to be done on the bonds and that's something we do all day every day. Great. So taking a look at the main features of MIPS, the first is that discretionary portfolio management, which I've touched upon, the team's headed up by Owen Hung, who brings a wealth of experience from offshore, he's been in New York, London, Hong Kong and looking particularly at credit work, which is assessing the viability of the companies and so that team has the discretion to look after your portfolio. As I touched on, they look at the macro environment, so that's broad, it's interest rates, it's inflation, it's economic growth, it's fiscal policy, it's credit spreads and they look at all of those factors to form a view in the asset allocation for your portfolio. They then look at the credit of the individual bonds that they're going to put in your portfolio and the undertake analysis of the individual issuers situation, their business prospects, their outlook to determine whether you'll, to ensure you'll get paid your coupons and your money at maturity and of course they continuously monitor those companies as well, so they're always assessing the risk, risk return of your holdings. I've got a couple of questions for you, Emery, it's a good time now to have a bit of a break. So, Ian has asked, under MIPS, can retail investors get access to bonds that are traditionally only available to wholesale investors? No, unfortunately they can't. This is a wholesale only product at this stage, but we are working on a retail investment program, but it is probably 12 to 18 months away. There's greater levels of complexity from our side involved in creating it, so it's for wholesale investors only. That's fantastic, because that actually hopefully answers your question to Alan, so we'll let you continue, Emma. Great. I wanted to touch on transacting services and why this is so important in bond markets. So, unlike in equities where anyone can trade online and buy and sell stocks, that's not the case in bond markets. As I mentioned, it's over the counter, so the portfolio management team are able to do two things. They're able to aggregate the MIPS investments and use those sort of block trades, if you like, to go and purchase bonds in the market and get better prices. But they're also talking to the market all the time, so they spend about half their day talking to the various parts of the bond market to source bonds to make up the MIPS portfolios. Another key point is wherever they purchase bonds, that's the price that goes into your portfolio, so effectively they're bought at cost. Great. Onto the custody admin and reporting. So, your MIPS portfolios are held in big custody. We look after all the portfolio administration for you, so what we're aiming to do here is make it really simple for you, so you can get on with your life and enjoy your retirement. But we do know transparency is very important, so there's continuous reporting on your portfolio. You can access that online at any stage and see your exact holdings and when your coupons are going to be paid. Oversight and governance is important, so you've got complete confidence in your investments. As we've taken on the discretionary part of MIPS, that means we can manage your portfolio. So we've put in place three levels of checks and balances. These are the portfolio management committee, they look at the risk protocols and the risk governance, the supervisory committee, this is a majority independent committee and they're responsible for looking at governance as well, but also returns, pricing and portfolio turnover. Finally, we're audited by a big accounting firm as both the custodian and MIPS, so this is all intended to provide you peace of mind, you know, that your investment is being properly looked after. That's great, Emma, I think that's really important. Everyone needs to be comfortable with where they're investing their funds and that they're going through proper process, so highlighting those is fantastic. Thank you. I have another question too from Ronald and Ronald asks, is the bond portfolio common to all MIPS investors or does it vary from client to client? That's a great question. The answer is that it can vary from client to client. In order to be able to make a bond managed account, what we've done is we've created investment programs, which I'll get to a moment, and every investor's investment will comply with that investment program, but effectively they'll have an individually managed account, so they will potentially have, well, they will have a unique portfolio. However, having said that, if you invest in the core income, for example, your portfolio will look broadly similar to most of the other people who own a core income portfolio. Excellent, and another question from Michael. Michael asks, can an existing portfolio be transferred into a MIPS, and is there a review process before the transfer? Yes, and yes, so yes, bonds can be in-species transferred across to MIPS, but the portfolio management team will check those bonds to make sure they're appropriate to move across, and they may sell down some of those bonds, but they will look at those bonds first and provide a tick-off as to which ones can be transferred into MIPS. Right, I've got another couple of questions, but I think we'll just let you keep going for a couple of slides, because I think some of those questions will be answered in the presentation. Great, thanks Liz. So I've just run through quite a lot of detail there about MIPS, and I think the important point is that's all what we do for you. So we've set up MIPS to take those four key components and look after those for you so that you can invest in fixed income, direct fixed income, but in a simple and convenient way. So now taking a look at the investment programs that I touched on briefly before. There are four investment programs for wholesale investors to select. These have been created by a portfolio management team, and they spend a lot of time setting these up and thinking about the appropriate program limits in order to provide access to bond market to meet investors' risk return appetites. So looking at the three defined programs where investment starts from $250,000, we have the core income program. So this provides regular income with low risk. It's a senior debt-only portfolio, so that's the very top of the capital structure with a high allocation to investment-gated securities. The current target return on this portfolio, net of fees, is 4.25%. Now this is the baseline return or the yield to maturity and active management is expected to add to that return. The second investment program is the income class. So this offers higher income with moderate risk. This can include bonds from the whole capital structure and the whole credit rating spectrum. So that means both rated and unrated bonds. This portfolio invests in higher risk companies that are carefully selected by the team. So it's really important the credit work that's done by Owen and his team to get very comfortable that the companies will pay their coupons and their money maturity. So the higher risk though is of course compensated with higher returns and the target return on this portfolio is 5.4% net of fees. These are all the current levels of returns. And of course, like the core income, that's the basic expected target and with trading, Owen will be looking for opportunities all the time and I imagine trading the bonds to try and achieve higher returns for investors. That's right. We'll be looking for opportunities in the market and then assessing the credit of those opportunities and whether they add value to the portfolio, both in terms of diversification and of course, return. Fantastic. The third portfolio is an inflation linked program. It's an inflation hedge portfolio. So most of investments across the market, the payments are not linked to inflation. This is intended to be a pure inflation hedge that's linked to the headline inflation number. The issue is a mainly government and semi governments and some corporate bonds. So this is a very conservative portfolio. The current target return on the portfolio is 3.3% net of fees. Now, the fourth option is to cut customized. So we can customize. That means we can create a program to meet whatever requirements, whether they're ethical, social and governance, credit restrictions or liquidity requirements for investors from 5 million. This has particular appeal in the not-for-profit sector and for investors with specific needs. Great. Before we move on, there are a couple of questions. So Ron's asked, what is the minimum dollar investment? And of course, you've just said 250,000, but he also asks, and is there a daily price visible on his screen? Can he see the pricing? Yes, Ron, you can. On my fig, you can log in. You can see your bonds every day and you'll be able to see the price that will be the previous day's close. Fantastic. And both Ron and Michael ask, how do they exit? How do they get money out of mips if they need it? So you need to keep a minimum of 250,000 invested in mips, but assuming you had a larger balance than that, you can draw down and we've got a best endeavours of 10 business days to return those funds. And that's just to ensure we get best execution on exit. Or alternatively, a complete sell-down, so I guess a termination of your investment is 30 business days. And there is actually a third option, which is transferring your bonds out of the specie into a direct bond account and holding them there. Okay. So if you had, say I invested 250,000 dollars and I needed 50,000 dollars for a wedding or a trip, I would need to sell down my portfolio or transfer it to a direct portfolio. And then I could just sell bonds to take the 50,000. And then if I had further money, I had received further money in a year or so, I could then transfer it back in. Is that right Emma? That's correct. Okay. There's a few other questions here, but I think I'll keep going and we'll keep going because again, she may answer some of them, but we will attempt to answer more as we go through. Great. Thanks Liz. So now taking a look at a case study of the types of investments in MIPS and how they choose different programs. So here we have conservative investors, Ryan and Amanda, and they've been using TDs for income. But as the rate offered by the banks has declined below 3%, this is not providing them enough income anymore. So we see many investors like Ryan and Amanda who are looking to invest in bonds to create a higher income stream. However, Ryan and Amanda don't know much about the bond market and they don't want to become the fixed income experts. They'd like to be able to travel without worrying about their investments. They've also, they've never invested in bonds and they don't know much about the fixed income market. However, they do have a managed account for their equities and they see the benefit of having a professional management team making decisions and watching the markets on their behalf. So they've selected the core income program as they want low capital volatility. And this provides them with an expected return of at least 4.2% and that's 1.2% over the best TD that they can find. So this is really gonna help them meet their living expenses. So looking at that core income program in a bit more detail that Ryan and Amanda selected. So this is a conservative portfolio with the majority of bonds being investment grade. So at least 85% of this portfolio must be held in investment grade bonds. So looking at the July portfolio created by the portfolio management team, you can see all the bonds are rated in the triple B spectrum except for SET logistics which is unrated and represents just under 15% of the portfolio which is the maximum amount for unrated bonds. So this allocation to investment grade bonds will likely result in lower price volatility. So for these conservative investments they want a strong income stream but they want low capital volatility. The target return as I've mentioned is 4.25% net of fees and this is the baseline. So the active management that we've discussed will add to this. So this provides Ryan and Amanda with the income they need to meet their expenses. You'll also note here the chart up in the top corner you can see that the portfolio's got a mixture of fixed rate, floating rate and inflation linked bonds. So currently the portfolio management team have a higher emphasis on fixed rate bonds as they value the certainty of fixed income in the current interest rate environment where they view rates and figures a house views rates as being lower for longer. Okay, I've got a couple of questions. Is it a good time now to ask Emma? Okay. A couple of things, where do I start here? Peter has asked, can you state the running yield targets? Now I'm not sure there are running yield targets or income targets on the portfolio. Peter, looking at the one that Emma's provided though and most of the bonds are fixed rate, I'm assuming that the running yield would be actually higher than that target of 4.25%. I don't know for sure, but Apatsemi, you might wanna answer that. That's right Liz, it is. It's currently at about 4.9% is the running yield on the portfolio. We tend to focus on the yield to maturity because that reflects your overall return but the portfolios are deriving strong income yields as well. Okay, and I've got a couple of questions here. Graham asks, can you give me a couple of disadvantages of MIPS plans? Yes, I can. I think one of the key ones is around control. So with MIPS, you're handing over to the professional management team, the portfolio management team. So they're empowered to make the decisions on your behalf. So you don't get to say I don't like that bond and the portfolio management team won't ask you before they sell a bond and buy another bond. So that may have tax implications for you that you don't control as well. So they're the two big disadvantages. It's really around control and potential if you're tax planning and you didn't want to sell a bond for certain reasons. Okay, that's right. That sort of ties in with a question from Michael and he's got a concern. He said, with managed funds, there's a risk of churning by managers. How is it proposed to minimize this in a MIPS? We've thought about that one a lot because this is intended to be a portfolio that derives strong income. The portfolio management team adds value by changing the bonds in the portfolio but it's not an actively traded hedge fund type portfolio. So we've got a soft target limit of 35% on the turnover. It's a soft target because there will be market conditions where that potentially needs to be a larger amount. So there may be a circumstance where you want to move all to cash or where there's a really good opportunity that improves all the portfolios and so you want to breach that 35%. For the portfolio management team to do that, they need to go to the supervisory committee, explain their reasons and get sign off to increase the turnover over 35%. Great, that's fantastic. So there is that limit. I'm pleased to hear that. Okay, so Ron asks, this is a very good question. I really like this question, Ron. Thank you. Does the team analyze individual accounts such that if my capital appreciation on one particular bond is, say, 10% and the profit ought to be taken, do they do so or does the responsibility to arrange that fall to me? Good question. So what the portfolio management team does is they look at both the overview of all the bonds that are held across all of MIPS and make sure they're very comfortable with all the names and the value. They then also analyze the individual portfolios. And where that would happen, Ron, is where there was another opportunity to buy a new bond and they would look at what the creative value to the individual portfolios was of switching that bond and in that case, that 10% bond would be an obvious one to switch out of. Okay, excellent. Jenny's got a very good question too. She wants to know what your year end statement looks like. For example, the tax purposes, what items are detailed in the statement? So in the year end statement, it covers both the historical performance such as either three months, one year, et cetera, over time, historical performance in terms of total return and total reliance return. And then it shows you the current portfolio metrics so you can see what your current portfolio is expected to be in terms of fuel to maturity duration. It also contains all the coupons that have been paid in that year and any realized capital as well. So that's all you'll need for your tax reporting. And it clearly states the fees as well. Excellent, so it's all rolled in there. It's all in the one statement. Fantastic. Now, then I'll pass back to you. So we have Robert ask, can you roll some of your current bonds over into MIPS? Yes, you can. And as we sort of touched on before, the portfolio management team will assess that portfolio and then most bonds, I'm sure, they'll be able to move across. But an example would be foreign currency bonds can't move across. You would have, those would be sold separately if you wanted to transfer the funds in. And it's not going to be unusual really is it for people to have some funds in MIPS and some funds direct. So I think that might be quite a standard going forward. Yeah, we've already seen many investors that are choosing to, they like looking at one part of the market. They might like doing the foreign currency bonds. They do that themselves. And then they hand over the core income or income plus to the MIPS team. Other investors are concerned about inflation. So they put some money in there. And then they may be doing their own figure regionation bonds themselves. So people are using all sorts of combinations that suit them. And I guess the amount of interaction they want to have in terms of the day to day in the bond markets. And then of course we have other investors that say, I don't want to look at this at all. I would like each takeover and put in their money all into MIPS across various different programs. They're splitting their money. That sounds fantastic.  And Michael asks, what fees are coming out of these net income figures? Good question. So based on $250,000 investment, the total fees for the core income and the inflation linked are 0.85%. And the total fees for the income plus are 1.05%. Now that reflects the additional credit work that's done for the income plus. Excellent. I'll let you keep going with the presentation. There's a couple of other questions but we'll get to those in a minute. So now having a look at the portfolio manager's favorite bond. So as I touched on, Owen Hung, who heads up the team, has a wealth of international experience and in particular he's got a really strong background in the analyzing of the credit worthiness of companies. And he brings that expertise to assessing the bonds that his team selects for inclusion in your portfolios. So Owen's favorite bond is SET Logistics. They issued a fixed rate bond that contained 7.65% maturing on the 24th of June, 2021. This bond is in both the core income and the income plus target portfolios. So what makes Owen like this bond? Basically to summarize, he likes the industry, the business and the outlook for SET. So SET is a national model transport and logistics company. It's a well-established business with stable family management and a strong market share. It's a concentrated industry and this means that there are high barriers to entry and results in oligopoly style environment. They also have consistent and predictable revenue streams and the nature of the business leads to long-dated contracts and they have very good long-term relationships. So this is all really good for bondholders because it impacts positively on SET's ability to pay its interest when it falls due. Owen also looks to the strength of the balance sheet which indicates the ability to pay the debt at maturity and he likes the balance sheet ratios. So having established that the strength of the business balance sheet and liquidity are all good, which are the keys to the credit of the companies. We talk about credit a lot and that's what that means. And his team would spend two to three weeks looking at an individual company and doing this analysis, modeling up the balance sheet, looking at the cash flows, looking at the contracts, who their key relationships are, the length of those relationships, all that work that goes into that is what the MIPS team does on your behalf. So once they've done all of that and they like the company, they like the credit, then Owen will compare SET to other bonds in the market, other comparable bonds. And in doing so, he's identified that SET offers really good value. So the yield to maturity on SET is 7.25% and comparable bonds as to the portfolio management team for your credit are around that 5.5% to 6%. So there's a significant additional amount there for the SET bond. Great, I love to get that personal insight into the portfolio manager and how they're thinking and bonds that they like. So I'm really pleased to hear. I think SET is a very good bond. Okay, let's move on. So just to recap on the key benefits. So this goes to why we created MIPS and what it achieves for investors. It's really about convenience and simplicity. So you're handing over the management to the MIPS team, but your fixed income still driving that regular income stream for you. It's leveraging their in-depth credit and market insights. So it's that team's wealth experience that you get to tap into and you know that they're looking at your positions at all times. And of course it's active management. So it's that really important part of bond markets because they're OTC, a bond, there may be a new bond in the market. And this could be at any one of the investment banks or big four domestic banks, they may bring a new issue to market. And the team will know about that. They'll be working on it, working out whether it fits into your portfolio, assessing the relative value, and they can move very fast on your behalf. Those books off from close in 24 hours, they can make those quick decisions if the bond's appropriate for the various investment programs. So the next steps, look, it's very simple. You download and review the IEM from our website. This contains all the terms and conditions. You choose your investment program that meets your risk return requirements. So that's the core income, the income plus or the inflation limit. You can also choose a combination of programs as I mentioned. You fill out the application form and our client services team can assist with this if you've got any questions at all about the detail. Then FIC will set up a funding account and a custody account for MIPS. And you can transfer in the money or you can inspecie transfer in bonds as we've discussed. Then the PMT team, being the portfolio management team, takes over. So they'll create your portfolio and manage that for you. Finally, and this is also, is very important, you've got complete transparency. So you can see your holdings, portfolio performance. You can see all the transactions as well. We won't be sending out transaction statements because the MIPS team will be managing that, but you can see all your transaction statements online on your MIPS FIC. You can also see the valuations as well. And we're obviously, we're now using an independent pricing source to value the bonds in your MIPS portfolio and your funding account balances. So all that is contained on your MIPS FIC. And of course the income, as it's paid on the individual bonds, goes straight through to your account. So it's not like all when or the portfolio management team make a decision to pay you an income or not as they would in a managed fund. The income is yours and it is paid to you unless, is there an option to reinvest? There is an option to reinvest. So if you don't need the money at the moment, you can opt to, you tick a box on the application form and the money will be reinvested by the team and you can change that option at any time. Okay, fantastic. So just looking at this last slide here, where you can get further information. We've got a MIPS website, which has got a whole lot of information there. I think many of you have already been to this website in order to both download the PAC and register for the seminar, I'm sorry, the webinar. But if you'd like to talk to us further, please call in and speak to your dealer about MIPS. But now we might go to some more questions, I think. I've got a few, sorry. I'll run down the list, Emma. Karen asks, if you have ethical concerns about some companies, can you stipulate that these not be included in your portfolio? You can do that, but you can only do that from five million. Right. We have three investment programs predefined currently that start at $250 and I expect over time we'll expand that out. We would like in future to have foreign currency programs and I can also see over time we may have enough demand to determine that we need an ESG managed portfolio as well. But at this stage, the only way you could do that is through the customized option. Great. Michael asks, does the management fee include custodial costs? The fees I quoted were all in fees, so that was a combination of the management fee and the custodial cost. And is that for all three accounts? Is it the same fee basis for all of the three accounts? So just to recap on those, it's a combination of the management fee and the custody fee. So the core income and income plus, sorry, core income and inflation linked, it's 0.85%. And for the income plus, it's 1.05%. Okay, so it's slightly higher. Great. Joe asks, this is a great question, Joe. How does FIGS staff manage all the investment portfolios to get value for their clients? There may be many. We're hoping, Joe, that there'll be many. But that's a good question. So perhaps, Emmy, you want to address that one? Yeah, definitely. So there's a couple of ways. So we have a very good portfolio management system which allows us, or allows the portfolio management team to manage on both the macro level. So by that, I mean the aggregated bonds across everyone's portfolios. And that's really key for risk management and to make sure that the view on bonds is consistent across smaller portfolios. Then down at the individual portfolio level, they can review all those portfolios and run very complicated queries to pull out different portfolios there as well. However, I would say, yes, they're individually managed accounts. But the way they're practically managed is the team runs model portfolios and investors actually go into those model portfolios. And one or two bonds may be different. But over time, I expect that the portfolios will look similar as bonds get changed in and out of portfolios. So it's a very efficient way to manage individually managed accounts and to provide people with a direct bond portfolio that is direct. So I guess in time, for example, bonds might do very well, SET might do very well, the price might rise, and then our one may make the decision, well, it's time to switch out of SET, take the profit and invest somewhere else. So he would do that across the entire everyone's portfolio. They'd all be switched out at the same time. Would that be how it would work? Yes. But the caveat there, I would say, is that depending on what the replacement bond is, he would also be looking across the various different programs. Because it's in both the core income and the in-class. So the replacement bond may be several bonds. Yes, great. Fantastic. Okay, we have a question from Michael again. If a new bond becomes available and the manager is reluctant to dispose of any existing holdings, will the investor be contacted with additional funds? So I'm assuming there, Michael, that we have a portfolio for you with $250,000. It's invested in five, six, seven, eight bonds. And a new bond comes out which we like, but doesn't want to sell out of any existing bonds. Would we say to you, do you want to put in an extra $50,000 and have this bond to add this bond to your portfolio? I don't know that we would do that. That sounds a little bit complicated to me. No, I don't think we could do that. But I guess that would really come down to a relative value question. So what the portfolio management team would be doing is looking at the existing portfolio, the credit, and then looking at the new bonds, credit, and then looking at the relative value. So assuming the credits were the same and there was a real benefit to changing the bond, so there was additional value in terms of return, then they would switch the bonds. But if that wasn't the case, then that's how I would see the scenario where they wouldn't be switching the bond. No, okay. Ron asked, is it intended that the investor hold the portfolio for years or can the investor treat the funds like a six-month term deposit? The intention is that these are three to five year investments. So, but things come up in people's lives and we recognize that. So there is the ability, obviously, to sell down and we can do that in a very efficient manner. If it's six months, someone needed the funds again. I think one of the advantages of the new service is the fact that you can change into and out of it from a direct service. So if you have direct bonds, you can put some of your direct bonds in. If you need funds and you don't want to sell the whole of your portfolio, you can transfer it out, sell down, I think that is a real advantage that perhaps other companies can't offer at this point. A couple of other questions here, though. Heather asks, will there be change in the level of service for non-mixed clients? Well, Heather, I'm gonna answer that one and I'm going to say definitively no because the portfolio management team is quite separate to the rest of FIG and to the sales staff. So they're quite, it's quite an individual unit and so we would imagine no difference in service to you. For example, all the education and the research that we make available now, that won't change. It's just that Orwin and his team will be looking at a higher level because theoretically they'll be managing a larger sums of money. Emma, do you want to make any comment on that? Yeah, this is not meant to take away from the direct bond services at all. This is another option for those investors who would like to have someone taking over the active management of their money for a whole host of reasons. Your dealer or client representative still remains for those existing clients, still remains your point of contact for both MIPS and VDRAC bonds. So that doesn't change at all. Okay, I've got just maybe a final two questions here, Emma. Jon asks, what percentage of wholesale investors does FIG expect to move to MIPS? Jon, I can't answer that at this stage. Although, one way I think I can answer it is, I think having been to several lunches in our soft marketing mode, I think roughly a quarter of our investors were really interested in MIPS. I think for existing investors, it goes around how active they want to be. So some see it as maybe not at this point in time, they're very happy doing all the credit work themselves, the active management, talking to dealers, transacting in bonds, but they can see a future time where they no longer want to do that, and they'd like to hand over and they say MIPS is a great way to do that. Then for new investors, there may be some who, we haven't had this option previously, but who say, I don't want to become the credit expert, I like doing my equities, I don't want to do my fixed income, I'm happy to have you to do it for me. Excellent, I think that's a fantastic answer. And two last questions, one from Robert. Robert asks, if you roll your existing bonds over to MIPS, does the manager sell them or switch them over to the new bonds at current prices, or do they sell them down over a period of time to maximize your return? So I think what Robert's getting at there is, do we sell the bonds or is it a straight transfer? It can be a combination. So the first thing that happens with the need-specy transfer is the portfolio management team assesses those bonds, assuming that all the bonds move over, or actually assume four out of five move over, and the fifth bond is sold down immediately because say it's a foreign currency bond and that can't go into MIPS, so that then the proceeds would come across. The other four bonds go into MIPS, then they would assess them, and several of those bonds may form part of the portfolio and they'd be kept. The other bonds that remain would then be sold down in a managed way over time in order to then be replaced by the bonds selected by the portfolio management team. Fantastic, and just this last question from Ian. Now listen, before I ask you, Emma, if we haven't answered your questions today, someone from FIG or the managed income portfolio team will get back to you and answer you, but this last one from Ian, he's wanting to know what is the benefit of MIPS compared to a managed bond fund? Why choose MIPS over the managed bond fund? So there's several reasons, and they're really around transparency and control. So a managed bond fund can provide you access to a very large universe of bonds, but what it can't do is you don't know what you own. And for a lot of investors, they're looking for that level of transparency. You're also, you're pulled, it's a pulled investment in a managed fund, whereas this is not MIPS, it's a segregated investment, so it's in your name, so you have control over that. It also provides you with that access to income, and that's the interest payments or the coupon streams, and you can see those on your online portal and you can plan around the income that's going to be coming in on MIPS, whereas in a managed account, you don't have that either transparency or control over your investment. Fantastic, I just want to thank you very much for presenting today, Emma. I found it really informative. I hope everyone listening did as well. I'd encourage you all to go onto the MIPS space onto that website, fig.com.au, backslash MIPS private and have a look around. We're very happy to call you or arrange a meeting if you're interested in finding out more about MIPS. We'll certainly be happy to have that meeting, but this really concludes the presentation today. Thank you all very much for joining, and we look forward to you hopefully joining us again in the near future. This now concludes the presentation. Good morning, have a good rest of your day. Great, thank you.


All right y'all, so let's talk about some fitness. So we already talked about drinking your ketones, sandwiching between your celebratory meals, your fun, your parties, have one before, one after, next three days you're going to increase by one serving. All right. We also talked about nutrition. On the days that you're not having celebration, crunch those carbs down more, go less carbs on those days, give yourself like a bank that you can kind of, you can bank it more on those other days that you're going to have some fun. Also reboot with us in December. Make sure you reboot with us. It's going to be really, really important that you can even reboot an extra time in December if you want to give an extra banking of some extra carbs that you can allow yourself to have on those days of freedom and flexibility. Remember, we're talking about maximizing fat loss through this journey. But I want to talk about exercise. So this is my secret around this, is that it's the winter season, it's the holiday season and you don't have to be a fitness freak or fitness fanatic or fitness guru. You don't have to be, you can, moms, dads, it can be anybody. What I want you to do is I want you to add five or add 10. That's it. Just add five or add 10. If you're currently at zero, add five or add 10. Exercise a little bit more. It's kind of like, it's like I said, you're giving yourself, you're increasing your bank account to draw out, meaning that you're giving yourself more flexibility from your celebratory days to keep the carb levels down so you're going to deplete your system out. What I mean by that is, is that if you go to the gym for an hour, add five minutes. If you go ride your bike for 20 minutes, add five minutes. You're going for a walk, add five minutes. You can even add 10. So just add five, add 10. Don't go overboard. Don't go crazy. If you're right now, you're at zero, go add five. Go five minutes of walking, five minutes of stairs, or 10 minutes of walking, 10 minutes of stairs every single day. But make it mindful, meaning that you're purposely going out to move your body. Not just I walk further from the shopping cart or from the grocery store to the car. That's great. Do that, but be mindful that actually add five or add 10. So this is the time to become more active and it's going to create a, not only a pattern for you to be able to prepare for next year. So you're moving into the year way more ahead of the game, moving your body. But it's also going to allow you to keep your carbs down, depleted out so that when the celebratory days happen, you're going to keep the carbs, the carbs are going to come off your system really fast. So if you have a day that you have 200 grams of carbs, you have a buffer between your ketones, one before, one after, you're eating low carb other times. Well guess what?  And so it's a simple trick, simple, simple, simple, and that's a secret. So y'all happy holidays, if you can't see my shirt, happy holidays, truly, truly honored to serve you all and happy 2020 holidays and it's going to be an epic 2021, y'all. So let's start right now. Cheers.


So today I'm going to talk about a little bit about the effect of international remittances on informal labor conditions, so working conditions for informal, for individuals with informal jobs. So this is going to be the main topic in this presentation. Now, a little bit to understand the context that I'm going to be talking about. We know that informal type of jobs have been one of the main types of jobs in developing countries. So there is enough evidence showing all these, but mostly most of these, of these particular countries, we see the number of people who report being informal as a share of total employment, what we find is that this proportion has remained in constant or has increased. So we know exactly this, but then when we start analyzing this type of jobs, what we are going to find is that actually these particular types of employment, they report to having worse working conditions. So they report having lower earnings, they report long working hours, lack of social protections. So when we refer usually to social protections, what we are going to be talking here is about individuals who report do not do in pension contribution or having a lack of health insurance. So in order to like create a little bit of the context here in particular in this conference that we are here in Africa, so I'm going to show a little bit about how is the sub-Saharan region relative to Latin America. So I'm going to be working with data from Colombia, so it's going to be like, this is going to help us a little bit to understand the context. So what we find actually is that if we look for the sub-Saharan Africa, what we find is that by 2014, the share of on account and paid workers is around 76 percent, and we find something that has come in to become one of the challenges for this particular type of employment, which is young workers. So we find that eight in ten young workers were in today's category of self-employment. We find that self-employment accounted for 53 percent of non-agriculture unemployment. So usually when we start analyzing these particular categories of informal jobs, we are going to find that most of these people usually report being self-employed. Now if we jump a little bit to the case of Colombia, we will find that despite Colombia being a middle-income high country, there is not too many differences in terms of informal jobs. So what happened with Colombia in particular is after the 90s when the economy opens, there was an increase in this type of jobs. So the share of informal workers in Colombia is about 60 percent, and something that we are going to define here because actually we go to international labor organizations, we are not going to find a particular definition of informal jobs. So we are going to account as informal workers those who are in fears with five or fewer employees, who have some paid jobs, who are domestic workers, who report being self-employed, or who are business owners of fears with five employees or less. And as a robustness check, what I did here, I'm not going to show those results, but actually I get the same results, is the definition of informal labor if there is a lack of social protection or health insurance. Now the worry, again, we come back to the job and the use of new workers and the reason this paper focuses on them, is that six of every 10 new jobs available to you are actually informal, and this has going to be important consequences in future periods. Now one of the main concerns about international policy is that informal workers report working around 47 hours during the week for the case of Columbia, and 60% of them report having near health insurance or no pension contributions. So what we are going to be interested about is to see if international remittances have the capacity to improve working conditions for these particular workers. So when we analyze a little bit about Columbia, basically we have experienced, or the country has experienced three big wave of migrations, in particular when these processes started started going to in the regional, in the region. So a lot of people went to Venezuela during the 80s and 90s, and in particular during the oil boom, but then the preference of migrants went to outside the region. And in particular, people started going to the United States and in Spain at the end of the 90s. So what we find is that actually these three countries, the United States, Spain and Venezuela, come for more than 70% of the migrants' destinations. During the end of the 90s, we find that international remittances come for 1.6 billion, and in 2008 it has an exponential growth of 4.4 billion. So there was this rapid growth of remittances, and in particular these international income flows, they come from the United States and Spain. So we have seen here that international remittances and even internal remittances had the capacity to relax the budget constraint of the household, so we are going to explore if actually they can also change labor effort, the likelihood of having health insurance. So we are going to use one of the largest surveys in Colombia, which is the Great Household Survey, and we are going to focus in the periods of 2008 and 2010. It is important to take into account that this is a repeated cross-section data, so it is not a panel. The key parameters that we are going to use is that I'm going to focus in other labor participation, in particular at the intensive market. So we are going to be analyzing the impact of an hours' work, and the reason to do this is that there has been previous research focusing on labor participation, and we can find that actually employment outcomes doesn't change, but the amount of labor effort actually does. So this is going to be one of the reasons I'm going to be focusing in this particular margin. And we are going to analyze health insurance coverage, and in particular using the question I have the individual report having health insurance or not. So it is true that it may be possible that some individuals report not having health insurance, but they are covered because another member of the family have health insurance, but in this case we know, I mean, we can check both questions and see if they really have or they don't. And finally, well, the way, of course, we know that remittances have this big problem of indigeneity, in particular we have two sources of indigeneity, which is the omitted variables and the reverse causality, and in order to deal with this, we are going to use the historical migration rates, which has been used by the literate to be formed, but we are also going to use the macroeconomic shocks of the host countries where these migrants go. The reason to do this is actually if we only use the historical migration rates, then we are going to ignore all the unobserved regional characteristics, and if we try to use regional fix effects, well, we will kill the instrument, so we need to find a way to be able to control for these unobserved characteristics. Once we interact with the unemployment shocks, we will be able to use the region fix effects, but still we need to control for regional confounders of these regional trends that actually can be driving our results, so we are going to use also regional variables, so it is a common practice that people use historical migration rates and only use regional variables, but actually you are still having unobserved effects, so it is important to have the region fix effects. Now, to understand the instrument, as I say, most of these remittances come from Spain and the United States. We are going to use the grade recession unemployment shocks, basically, which happened during the 2007 and the 2009 period, so we had the grade recession by the United States, we contracted by 5 percent response, and we had the greatest Spanish depression also in 2008 until, well, even now, so something that we need to figure out here, or basically, that we find is that was the Spanish economy after a long period contracted by 3.7 percent response. What we are going to use as I was talking is this unemployment rate, and when we analyzed the United States and in Spain, when the United States reported an increase in unemployment rate by 86 percent, and in the case of Spain, at 125 percent, which is something interesting that you see additional surveys, what you find that most of these people actually report sending less money during these periods of time than what they did before the crisis. In order to be careful with the instrument and with this unemployment rate, what we are going to use is deviations from the average unemployment rate before the crisis. So this is going to give us some more energy in terms of unemployment rate. Now, it will say a little bit about how it has been the behavior of remittances in Colombia. So we have this exponential increase after the 1990s after these extensive migrations. Even after 2008, when the financial crisis happened, there was a slowdown of remittances. So there have been several literate to also explain, like, market conditions actually explain these particular slowdown on remittances, and we are going to exploit this and the regional heterogeneity in migration preference to construct or build our instrument. So in order to also make sure that we are capturing what we want to capture and we don't have, like, other unobserved effects there or a confunded effects. So what I did here was to divide the migration intensity by regions in four quartiles and just try to see what happened with the remittances and recipients in each period taking into account the unemployment rates in the host country. So taking into account the unemployment rate in Venezuela, the United States, expect. So what we find, actually, is that, yeah, these regions who experienced historical higher migration before actually are the ones who report receiving more remittances and are going to be the ones who are most exposed to this variation, these fluctuations generated by the unemployment shocks. So in the paper, you can sit in line, there is more tables, I'm trying to show that this is an effect really coming from these macroeconomic shocks, but here I just post because of the time just this graph. So let me talk a little bit about the empirical study. So what I did basically in order to build the first stage was to use these deviations from the unemployment rates, but I also weigh these macroeconomic shocks by the share of migrants of each of the regions. So we have here the different shares from region R to destination J, and we multiply these by the destination unemployment shock, which is the deviation I was explaining before. So when we run this first stage, we can run like a two-stay list square for the case of the hours worker and a linear probability model for the case of the likelihood of having hail insurance. So we control for some other observables who have been using the literatures, so we include individual characteristics as gender, age, year of education, relationship with the household head, which was one of the main control that people use since 2007, and then we start including other different controls, the percentage of members in the household younger than 60 are old and older than 65, which actually are part of the members of the household who are outside the labor markets and they are like a burden. So we control for the regional controls actually that we include to be careful with these regional trends and confund the factors of the regions what the genicoefficient and the regional domestic product grow. And in order to make this a little bit more conservative, we also use time on fixed effects, in particular because we are pulling all these repeated cross-sections from these particular years. So why exactly the period of 2008 and 2010, so this came from the literate remittances in particular for the Dean Jump paper, actually this strategy is very close to this particular strategy which basically used exchange rates as an instrument, we are using historical migration rates, but the idea is basically the same and what we want to try to avoid here is to not capture the endogenous adjustment that people can make during this period of the crisis. So in order to do this, this strategy will make sense if actually it happens close to the period when the crisis occurs. So according to what we have, the period of unemployment rate before they start to stabilize, it was 2008, 2010. So we are going to have basically 284, 361 observation of informal workers, so this is a large labor survey, so we are going to exploit this. Now let's talk a little bit about the main resource here, something that we are going to do, or at least that I do, sorry, is that I exploit the effect of international remittances for those individuals who report having an informal job. So if they have less than five employees, if they were in pay, if they were self-employed, but I also did self-employment by separate. So if we see self-employment, what we find is that some individuals will be self-employed because they volunteer of this type of job, they will sacrifice the benefits of a formal employment to get more flexibility. But there is other people who is forced to this kind of employment. So in order to try to see, I mean we can not exactly disaggregate this in self-employment, but we know that these particular individuals have certain characteristics that are different to their other types of job. So the good news that we find here is that international remittances have the capacity of giving individuals the ability to buy time away from the informal labor effort. So we find that there is a reduction in hours, we find that 25% increase on the mean of remittances actually reducing six hours and 10 hours per individual with informal jobs and for those who are self-employed. Now if you see the F-study study actually is kind of weak. So in order to make sure that our estimates are not biased by weak instruments, we report Anderson and Rubin tests and we find that actually, as you can see the series is not going to be here. So they are not biased by this problem. And this in turn has been shown or has been proved that actually robots do have a certain condition with instruments. And we also explore, well the other good news is that remittances also have the capacity to increase the likelihood that these individuals have health insurance. So again actually we find a very robust results doing it with informal jobs, self-employment sorry and the other definition of informal jobs. So it's a very robust result, we find that 25% increase of the mean of remittances actually increasing 25% response the likelihood of having health insurance. Again we do the Anderson and Rubin test to check that our results are not biased by weak instruments. Now here we have some interesting results, I will show you first the results and then I will explain a little bit of the discussion of why this is happening. So we find that actually international remittances have the capacity of reduce or at least woman use this money to buy time away from the labor market. But if you see actually the impact of men is positive. And if you see like previous literature on remittances actually what you will find is that it's the other effect. So this is something that is interesting that we need to understand what is the context behind and the patterns of migration in Colombia. Now in terms of health I also find that if we took into account all the informal jobs we find that the impact is more pronounced by men and actually we only took self-employment we see that there is not any effect of remittances in the case of women. And actually it's marginally small in this particular case in the case where we take into account all types of informal jobs. Now why is this happening right? So different to what is common in other previous countries or in countries like in Africa or in Asia like Albania which people go to Greece or in Egypt migration patterns in Colombia have been dominated by women. So when we take this into account and the fact that there is strong barriers to the formal sector actually these men who are left behind if there is a lot of effect of remittances which is having a migrant member if this is a lot of effect of said the income effect then what we will see is that actually men have to go to the labor market and if they find these kind of barriers then what is going to happen is that they are going to go to informal labor. Now another part of this still can be that actually since men are the ones who are left behind now they need to figure it out how to balance employment and their employment and balancing caring of the children who are also left behind. So if they prefer to go to informal labor or to sacrifice the benefits of formal employment in order to get this flexibility to take care about their members left behind then we will find also an increase in the case of then we will find an explanation of why this is happening in this positive side which is actually discussed by this seminar paper on remittances. Now the further men benefit the most from hell insurance actually from international remittances in terms of hell insurance is a good news. We know that actually informal labor have really bad consequence in hell status and actually it is not only in the head of the people who is the informal worker but it also the family members of that particular member and we find that actually healthcare access decrease the probability of depression which is one of the main illness that people with informal jobs suffer. So the use of preventive services actually can help to improve the working conditions of these populations. Now in order to start concluding this as I say one of the most vulnerable populations in terms of informal types of jobs is individuals that are less than 25 years old. So in the case of Colombia we find that six of everything so in Latin America six of everything new jobs available to the you are informal and we find that the problem here is knowing if they can go to work or stay at home and doing drugs or doing other things whatever it is the case here is that the people these these individuals who are starting with this type of jobs actually suffer a lack of other types of benefit that they could that they could use to improve their well-being like for example most of these people have lack of access to formal credit and most of these people actually are more likely to remain informal so this is this is something that actually government and policy in Latin America has been focused on trying to decrease the amount of new jobs available who are informal. Now what we find is that these international remittances have the capacity to reduce labor effort for these new workers but it doesn't have the capacity to improve like the likelihood of having head insurance and this may sense in terms that if you think about it they will be able they will be more likely to sacrifice some of these social benefits to gain some experience right so in the other case if we analyze people who is older where they go to the self-employment for example because they want some flexibility so they actually will they will be more likely to sacrifice this and use the remittances to get to get head insurance. So in order that my time my time is over so let me conclude about this basically what we find is that remittances have the capacity to relax liquidity constraints and using these remittances people or individuals with type of informal jobs actually can increase their well-being how they can access to health insurance and they can also reduce the amount of time in labor effort. So the other important results here is that actually international remittances have the capacity to compliment these efforts that the governments are doing to reduce formal labor employment for the youth. Thank you so much.