Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The World Of Sports Sexual Harassment, Arsalan Sadiq Sheikh

MSJ Capstone Projects

Sexual harassment has been a major issue in all fields of life, similarly, the national and international level athletes also faced it on their way to the glory. The capstone project focused on exploring the state of sexual harassment in the field of sports in Pakistan, at the school, university, national and international level. During the investigative report, it was revealed that sexual harassment was much more common in sports than anyone had imagined. Moreover, the harassment was not always by male coaches or counterparts against female athletes. Instead, the females were being harassed by the same gender, while men …

Crazy Rich Karachi — Where The Streets Are Paved With Gold, Murtaza Irfan Ali

MSJ Capstone Projects

Karachi happens to be Pakistan’s economic powerhouse but the irony is it never received its fair share of development. Which is why, to this day, I have no clue where to park, when I visit the southern district of the city. The random and sporadic parking has costed me with a hundred scratches and 2 pairs of side-view mirrors during the course of a year. So to find exactly where I could safely and “legally” park, I set out to find some answers.

Early Child Development Amid The Pandemic, Zain Saeed Siddiqui

MSJ Capstone Projects

I would like to bring to notice the importance of early child development because the early years are crucial for the development especially the skills that are going to help children succeed in life. Basically, I would like to focus on the natural development of the human being from birth to maturity, enabling children to become the transforming elements of society, leading to a harmonious and peaceful world.

Emotional well-being and social competence provide a strong foundation for emerging cognitive abilities, and together they are the bricks and mortar that comprise the foundation of human development.

Generally, development happens in …

Pakistan's Beauty Dilemma, Fatima Azhar

MSJ Capstone Projects

“Kia aap bhee chahtay hain bright, glowing skin?” “Aaj hum dark circles aur pigmentation khatam karnay k tareeqay sikhaengay” “Kia school aur college ja ja kar apka complexion kharab hogaya hai?” “Uneven skin tone ka asal hal kia hai?” “Chalain jee! Pyara pyara gora gora rang karnay ki tarqeebain aap say share karengay aaj”

A number of problems: pigmentation, uneven skin tone, tan complexion; one meaning: dark skin. A number of claims: brightening, glowing, evening out; one result: skin whitening. It is said, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” and so, embedded in any society are expectations from …

Iba Newsletter [December 2019], Communications Department, Iba

IBA News

No abstract provided.

Coronavirus And Journalism In Pakistan, Syed Osama Ali

MSJ Capstone Projects

The lockdown caused by the Coronavirus pandemic in 2019 made the reporting process extremely challenging for journalists. In this dire situation, Pakistani journalists like other journalists around the world, ensured the implementation of Coronavirus SOPs while fulfilling their duty as journalists and reporting problems they faced in the process, this is my subject of writing.

Iba Newsletter [November 2019], Communications Department, Iba

IBA News

No abstract provided.

Animal Cruelty - Who To Blame?, Fakhra Afzal

MSJ Capstone Projects

This piece on animals is a journalistic work where on field situation and visits are recorded coupled with interviews from the sources. It must be noted that the animal lives in a deplorable state in Pakistan, so much so, that there are no fresh legislation since the country gained independence from Britishers in 1947.The same goes true for the state of animal hospitals. Richmond Crawford is the only government run hospital in the metropolis Karachi and the private hospitals are suitable for pet owners only, in a position to go an extra mile to spend money on their imported pets. …

Iba Newsletter [October 2019], Communications Department, Iba

IBA News

No abstract provided.

New Perspectives On Pakistan's Political Economy: State, Class And Social Change, Matthew Mccartney, S. Akbar Zaidi

Faculty Research - Books

This volume makes a major intervention in the debates around the nature of the political economy of Pakistan, focusing on its contemporary social dynamics. This is the first comprehensive academic analysis of Pakistan's political economy after thirty-five years, and addresses issues of state, class and society, examining gender, the middle classes, the media, the bazaar economy, urban spaces and the new elite. The book goes beyond the contemporary obsession with terrorism and extremism, political Islam, and simple 'civilian-military relations', and looks at modern-day Pakistan through the lens of varied academic disciplines. It not only brings together new work by some …

The Plight Of Retail Investors In The Pakistani Stock Market, Ahmed Jamil

MSJ Capstone Projects

PSX has a reputation for being biased towards big investors; Experts blame lack of information, brokers’ disinterest in smaller returns, and govt.’s indifference towards spreading investment awareness.

Iba Newsletter [August 2019], Communications Department, Iba

IBA News

No abstract provided.

Iba Newsletter [July 2019], Communications Department, Iba

IBA News

No abstract provided.

Estimating Proportion Of Noise Traders And Asset Prices, Mirza Faizan Ahmed

Business Review

This paper provides empirical evidence of the presence, proportion and trading behavior of noise traders in the U.S. equity market (S&P500 index). A simple methodology is used to estimate the heterogeneous agent asset pricing model involving noise traders’ risk, through GMM. Departing from previous estimations of heterogeneous agent models, it estimates fundamental price using the consumption-based asset pricing model and noise traders’ misperception as deviation from this price. It concludes that noise traders exist in the S&P500, they exaggerate price expectations as compared to fundamental traders, and traders (or investors) are rational, on average.

Examining The Impact Of Personalization On Online Advertising Engagement: Moderating Role Of Privacy Concerns Of Online Users, Uzma Noor, Tahira Awan, Muhammad Zahid

Business Review

This study examines online advertising engagement as a potential consequence of perceived personalization in online behavioral advertising (OBA) context. Internet users’ privacy concerns were analyzed as a moderator on perceived personalization and online advertising engagement relationship. Scenario based activity design was used and 409 usable questionnaires were incorporated in the statistical analysis. The collected data was analyzed using (SPSS) 21 and AMOS 23. Hayes method was used to perform moderation analysis. The moderation analysis showed a significant result but in the opposite direction as hypothesized i.e., high level of privacy concerns made the relationship between perceived personalization and online advertising …

Board Structure And Dividend Smoothing: A Case Of Pakistani Listed Firms, Zahid Ali, Assad Ullah, Arshad Ali

Business Review

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the effects of ownership and board structure on dividend smoothing for listed non-financial firms for the period 2005-2015 on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) in the light of agency and information asymmetry theory. Two measures, speed of adjustment and relative volatility are used to estimate dividend smoothing. Tobit regression is used for analyzing the effects of board structure on dividend smoothing measured via speed of adjustment while OLS is used for relative volatility. Additionally, the study applies the technique of principal component analysis (PCA) for board index. The results reveal that …

Rebuilding Karachi-Bulldozing One Livelihood At A Time, Haddiqua Siddiqui

MSJ Capstone Projects

The story revolves around Pakistan’s powerful mafias who illegally occupy state and private property, mostly in urban areas and unclaimed land. They are backed by the police, bureaucracy and politicians. This is a norm in countries where these encroachers occupy a piece of land for as long as they want without any legal right or documents. These encroachers occupy the property for weeks, months or even years before voluntarily leaving it for a better spot or being forcefully evicted by city authorities. Saddar, the city’s center; is considered a safe haven for these land grabbers. For decades the heart of …

Thousands Forced To Migrate As Sea Swallows Coastal Belt, Jahanzeb Tahir

MSJ Capstone Projects

Pakistan is one those tropical countries that faces a major climate change challenge. People are generally less concerned about the issue but a great effort is required to face this growing threat. Extreme weather events can already be seen. In 2015 more than 2000 people died because of heat wave which heat in Karachi, the capital of Sindh province.

Karachi, the Arabian coastal region has area of approximately 3,640 km2. The impact of global warming can be measured in the coastal region as sea levels have risen by approximately 10 centimetres in the last century. The sea levels are expected …

The Water Tanker Mafia, Yousuf Sajjad

MSJ Capstone Projects

This is a thesis about the Water Tanker Mafia in Karachi. The citizens of Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi suffer from an acute lack of water for drinking and domestic use. To cover for this lack of water, there is a network of tankers, run illegally but also with a large degree of connivance with parts of the state in Karachi, that provides water to the citizens of this city. This paper seeks to explain this network, its history, organization and the infrastructure in Karachi that it supports or in many cases, supersedes. This paper places the Karachi water tanker mafia …

A Squandered Mandate: How Ppp Failed Larkana, Mashal Usman

MSJ Capstone Projects

In this story, I have attempted to capture the history of the Bhutto family’s association with Larkana; how their influence in the district as well as their hold over it grew over time, how that shaped the districts identity and continues to do so, and lastly, how their party, the PPP, squandered the mandate in Larkana.

Is Pakistani State At War With Free Press?, Umer Bin Ajmal

MSJ Capstone Projects

Pakistan’s media scene today depicts a similar picture where many journalists say they have been “conditioned” to self-censor news. But unlike Pavlov using a sound as a stimulus, certain “powers that be” use threat and violence to intimidate journalists and force them to behave in a certain way. Psychologists around the world say there is a lesson in this experiment: it demonstrates that human behavior, too, can be manipulated or maneuvered through conditioning.

Cyberspace Is Becoming Unsafe For Women In Pakistan, Sara Tanveer

MSJ Capstone Projects

This study explores the challenges faced by students in Pakistan who become victim of cyber harassment. Due to the lack of awareness, people do not know about cyber-crime and do not know that it is the violation of human rights. The Human Rights Ministry has no sense of urgency to work on the issue. According to the Human Rights report 2018, since 2004, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has recorded more than 6,000 cases of sexual violence and 2,200 cases of domestic violence against the women. The violence is mostly connected with the online harassment in the form of …

Arkanabad- Where Drowning Is As Common As Dying A Natural Death, Mariam Ahmed

MSJ Capstone Projects

Today, the world faces the highest number of displacements ever recorded (United Nations [UN], n.d.), with refugees and asylum seekers amounting to 28.5 million, according to data released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (UNHCR, n.d.). Rohingya Muslims, belonging to the Rakhine district in Myanmar (Ahmed, 2009), form a large section of these displaced individuals (UNHCR, n.d.), who are forced to flee their homeland in the face of atrocities afflicted by the Government of Myanmar (Warr, & Wong, 1997).

According to UNHCR, Rohingya are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world (Baloch, 2017), subjected to …

Gilgit-Baltistan At The Cross Road Of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (Cpec), Zulfiqar Ali Khan

MSJ Capstone Projects

This capstone project focused on the in-depth analysis of the role and impact of this multi-billion-dollar project on the politically deprived region of Gilgit-Baltistan. This region is the gateway to CPEC as it is the only region of Pakistan that shares border with China. The geographical ties, tributary and trade relationship and even family relationships between Gilgit-Baltistan and the Xinjiang region of China dates back centuries before the creation of Pakistan and the post revolution China.

The project has been designed and implemented in a way that GB’s role is to provide the services of road and some other services …

The #Metoo Movement And Its’ Impact In Pakistan, Noor Usman Rafi

MSJ Capstone Projects

The MeToo movement, albeit a social media tool, has practically worked in favor of women empowerment. All the women speaking out against Harvey Weinstein and big Hollywood producers stepping down had a tremendous moral impact on the movement. This gave it so much force and impetus that it translated into a similar trend in India and Pakistan.

Women empowerment and sexual harassment are being discussed regularly in news media in Pakistan. Because of the ripple effect of the hashtag MeToo, victims and sufferers who spoke up have been vital enough to spark this debate. The taboo and silence of ‘being …

Outcasts – In Search Of Identity, Syed Hasan Haider

MSJ Capstone Projects

The idea for this documentary came from a story published in the express tribune which talked about the people who are unable to vote in 2018 elections due to having Computerized National Identity Cards (CNICs) in the Ibrahim Hyderi locality in Karachi.

Not having a CNIC in Pakistan means that you are not able to participate in civic life and also not subscribe to basic facilitates like housing, water, gas and employment.

This documentary film looks at different cases and through the experience of some journalists what it is like to live as an undocumented citizen. The film also explores …

Agony Of Delayed Justice, Ahmed Saeed

MSJ Capstone Projects

Martin Luther King Jr in his famous letter from a Birmingham jail wrote that justice too long delayed is justice denied. King said so to highlight that justice for African-Americans had been delayed for far too long. (King, 1963) According to ancient Latin maxim, ‘to delay justice is injustice’ but in the land of pure, delayed justice is a new normal. Courts in Pakistan have a backlog of 1.9 million pending cases to be adjudicated. Some of these cases have been pending for three or four decades.

Testing Asset Pricing Models On The Pakistan Stock Exchange, Kiran Lohano, Muhammad Kashif

Business Review

This study investigates the performance of CAPM, three-factor and five-factor asset pricing models on the Pakistan Stock Exchange using monthly data of 896 companies from November 2000 to December 2016. The results from the time-series approach show that the three-factor model performs relatively better than the CAPM and the five-factor model, whereas the cross-sectional approach establishes the superiority of the five-factor model. It can thus be concluded that it is important to incorporate factors, such as size, value, profitability and investment when predicting returns on securities in the Pakistan Stock Exchange.

Inflation Targeting And Exchange Rate Pass Through In Pakistan: Markov Switching Approach, Safia Minhaj, Muhammad Nishat

Business Review

This study uses Markov switching model to empirically track the existence of exchange rate pass through and inflation trends in Pakistan from 1982 to 2016. The results reveal a direct relationship between pass through and inflation. Furthermore, interest rate and trade variables have a significant impact on inflation. According to the smoothed probabilities, switches between regimes were sudden and sporadic till 1990, after which long spells were observed during high and low inflation regimes.

Socioeconomic Determinants Of Child Mortality: Evidence From Pakistan Demographic And Health Survey, Rana Ejaz Ali Khan, Khadija Malik Bari, Muhammad Ali Raza

Business Review

This paper attempts to highlight socioeconomic determinants of child mortality in Pakistan. Binary logistic regression is applied to 7297 observations from the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2012-13. The results reveal that probability of child mortality decreases with greater birth-interval, child’s large size at birth, more family members, mother’s education, mother’s ownership of assets and mother’s decision-making at the household level. Policy makers can work to improve mothers’ characteristics such as fertility behavior, education, empowerment and decision-making at the household level, to reduce child mortality.