Valuing “Green” How “Going Green” Affects a Company’s Stock Price

Environmentally conscious decision making has become a prominent topic in business that has the potential to affect the public opinion and performance of companies. This project seeks to identify whether or not positive changes in excess return might offer an incentive for companies to adopt green initiatives. It examines the ways in which companies’ green initiatives, as measured by their annual Carbon Disclosure Project S&P 500 Climate Change Report score, impact their stock price. In other words, is there value in “going green”? It is hypothesized that companies exhibiting greater variance in their environmental initiatives from one year to the next (whether positive or negative) will see larger impacts on their stock price surrounding the release date of the rankings. This paper is an event study comparing the magnitude of the change in a company’s annual Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) score to the magnitude of their percentage excess return change in stock price. In the end, the hypothesis was not proven to be true because the results were not statistically significant

Semisimple Quantum Cohomology and Blow-ups

Using results of Gathmann, we prove the following theorem: If a smooth projective variety X has generically semisimple (p,p)-quantum cohomology, then the same is true for the blow-up of X at any number of points. This a successful test for a modified version of Dubrovin's conjecture from the ICM 1998.Comment: 13 page

Kumaraswamy autoregressive moving average models for double bounded environmental data

In this paper we introduce the Kumaraswamy autoregressive moving average models (KARMA), which is a dynamic class of models for time series taking values in the double bounded interval $(a,b)$ following the Kumaraswamy distribution. The Kumaraswamy family of distribution is widely applied in many areas, especially hydrology and related fields. Classical examples are time series representing rates and proportions observed over time. In the proposed KARMA model, the median is modeled by a dynamic structure containing autoregressive and moving average terms, time-varying regressors, unknown parameters and a link function. We introduce the new class of models and discuss conditional maximum likelihood estimation, hypothesis testing inference, diagnostic analysis and forecasting. In particular, we provide closed-form expressions for the conditional score vector and conditional Fisher information matrix. An application to environmental real data is presented and discussed.Comment: 25 pages, 4 tables, 4 figure

Is Including Under God in The Pledge of Allegiance Lawful?: An Impeccably Correct Ruling

On June 26, 2002, in Newdow v. U.S. Congress, a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the 1954 Congressional amendment adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance violated the First Amendment’s proscription that, “Congress shall make not law respecting an establishment of religion.” Because the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause applies to the States via the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Ninth Circuit likewise found unlawful a California school district’s policy encouraging public school students to utter the words “under God” as part of teacher-led daily recitals of the Pledge. Eight months later, the still divided Ninth Circuit panel issued an amended opinion reaffirming its ruling that the school district’s policy coerces students to perform a “religious act” in contravention of the Establishment Clause. However, holding that it had exceeded the legal analysis necessary to review the lawfulness of the policy, the Newdow Court vacated its determination that the words “under God” in the Pledge are per se unconstitutional. This article urges that the original Newdow decision rightly understood that adding the words “under God” to the Pledge violates the Constitution’s anti-establishment principles. Accordingly, government policy encouraging public school students to avow via the Pledge that ours is a nation dependent on or ruled by God, likewise contravenes the First Amendment

Signs in the cd-index of Eulerian partially ordered sets

A graded partially ordered set is Eulerian if every interval has the same number of elements of even rank and of odd rank. Face lattices of convex polytopes are Eulerian. For Eulerian partially ordered sets, the flag vector can be encoded efficiently in the cd-index. The cd-index of a polytope has all positive entries. An important open problem is to give the broadest natural class of Eulerian posets having nonnegative cd-index. This paper completely determines which entries of the cd-index are nonnegative for all Eulerian posets. It also shows that there are no other lower or upper bounds on cd-coefficients (except for the coefficient of c^n)