On the Perils of Security Pricing by Financial Intermediaries: The Case of Open-End Mutual Funds

There are many instances where financial claims trade at prices set by intermediaries. Pricing by an intermediary introduces the potential for economic distortions from innumerable sources. As one example, we show that nonsynchronous-trading generates predictable, readily exploitable, changes in mutual fund-share prices (NAV). The exploitation of predictable changes in mutual fund NAVs involved a wealth transfer from buy-and-hold fund investors to active fund traders and is costly to all fund investors. A simple modification to the mutual fund pricing algorithm eliminates much of this predictability, but nonsynchronous trading is just one of the issues intermediaries face when setting prices.

Universality and predictability in molecular quantitative genetics

Molecular traits, such as gene expression levels or protein binding affinities, are increasingly accessible to quantitative measurement by modern high-throughput techniques. Such traits measure molecular functions and, from an evolutionary point of view, are important as targets of natural selection. We review recent developments in evolutionary theory and experiments that are expected to become building blocks of a quantitative genetics of molecular traits. We focus on universal evolutionary characteristics: these are largely independent of a trait's genetic basis, which is often at least partially unknown. We show that universal measurements can be used to infer selection on a quantitative trait, which determines its evolutionary mode of conservation or adaptation. Furthermore, universality is closely linked to predictability of trait evolution across lineages. We argue that universal trait statistics extends over a range of cellular scales and opens new avenues of quantitative evolutionary systems biology

Shaping the Global Arena: Preparing the EU Emissions Trading Scheme for the post-2012 Period. CEPS Task Force Reports No. 61, 6 March 2007

Having been underway for more than two years, the review of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is entering a decisive phase with the European Commission’s recent announcement that it will table formal proposals in the second half of 2007. Based on an assessment of the EU ETS, this new CEPS Task Force Report tests the performance of four different design models (a cap-and-trade system based on free allocation, benchmarks, auctioning and a credit-and-baseline system) against 10 criteria under three headings: environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency and the contribution of the ETS to achieving long-term climate change policy objectives. Based on this assessment, the report makes a number of recommendations in the area of allocation, creation of investment incentives and the merits of including new sectors and new gases. The report also addresses the particular challenge of completing the EU ETS review before a global post-2012 agreement can be reached, i.e. the EU ETS will be reviewed against an unknown global context

Compiler analysis for trace-level speculative multithreaded architectures

Trace-level speculative multithreaded processors exploit trace-level speculation by means of two threads working cooperatively. One thread, called the speculative thread, executes instructions ahead of the other by speculating on the result of several traces. The other thread executes speculated traces and verifies the speculation made by the first thread. In this paper, we propose a static program analysis for identifying candidate traces to be speculated. This approach identifies large regions of code whose live-output values may be successfully predicted. We present several heuristics to determine the best opportunities for dynamic speculation, based on compiler analysis and program profiling information. Simulation results show that the proposed trace recognition techniques achieve on average a speed-up close to 38% for a collection of SPEC2000 benchmarks.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version