Distressed Sales and the FHFA House Price Index

Trends in residential house values can be expressed by changes in House Price Indexes (HPIs). Since the recent housing crash, distressed sales have increased in numbers and have led to concerns about how they affect HPIs. This paper has three parts. First, FHFA’s standard HPIs are compared to HPIs constructed without distressed sales. Second, FHFA’s identification of distressed sales is validated against a public data source. Third, the distressed sale discount is shown to vary across time and place. The magnitude of the discount also depends on whether the current or prior recent sales are distressed

Distressed Sales and the FHFA House Price Index

Trends in residential house values can be expressed by changes in House Price Indexes (HPIs). Since the recent housing crash, distressed sales have increased in numbers and have led to concerns about how they affect HPIs. This paper has three parts. First, FHFA’s standard HPIs are compared to HPIs constructed without distressed sales. Second, FHFA’s identification of distressed sales is validated against a public data source. Third, the distressed sale discount is shown to vary across time and place. The magnitude of the discount also depends on whether the current or prior recent sales are distressed

Financial Characteristics of Companies Audited by Large Audit Firms

Purpose “ The purpose of this paper is to examine how financial characteristics associated with the choice of a big audit firm with further investigation on the agency costs of free cash flows.Design/methodology/approach “ The sample used for this work includes industrial listed companies from Germany and France. To test our hypothesis, we used a number of logit models, extending the standard model selection audit firm, to include the variables of interest. Following previous work, our dependent dummy variable is Big4 or non-Big4.Findings “ We observed that most independent variables in the German companies show similar results to previous work, but we did not have the same results for the French industry. Moreover, our findings suggest that the total debt and dividends can be an important reason for determining the choice of a large audit firm, reducing agency costs of free cash flows.Research limitations/implications “ This study has some limitations on the measurements of the cost of the audit fees and also generates opportunities for additional searching.Originality/value “ The paper provides only one aspect to explain the relationship between the problems of agency costs of free cash flow and influence in choosing a large auditing firm, which stems from investors\u27 demand for higher quality audits

Cysteine methyl ester modified glassy carbon spheres for removal of toxic heavy metals from aqueous media

Glassy C spherical powder (10-20 µm diam.) modified with cysteine Me ester is an inexpensive, novel material for the rapid removal of large quantities of toxic heavy metals such as Cd(II), Cu(II) and As(III) from water, with wide ranging potential applications such as 3rd world drinking water filtration or environmental cleanup. [on SciFinder(R)

Soluble Diphenylhexatriene Dimers for Intramolecular Singlet Fission with High Triplet Energy.

Funder: Ramsay Memorial TrustFunder: Winton Programme for the Physics of SustainabilityIntramolecular singlet fission (iSF) facilitates single-molecule exciton multiplication, converting an excited singlet state to a pair of triplet states within a single molecule. A critical parameter in determining the feasibility of SF-enhanced photovoltaic designs is the triplet energy; many existing iSF materials have triplet energies too low for efficient transfer to silicon via a photon multiplier scheme. In this work, a series of six novel dimers based upon the high-triplet-energy, SF-active chromophore, 1,6-diphenyl-1,3,5-hexatriene (DPH) [E(T1) ∼ 1.5 eV], were designed, synthesized, and characterized. Transient absorption spectroscopy and fluorescence lifetime studies reveal that five of the dimers display iSF activity, with time constants for singlet fission varying between 7 ± 2 ps and 2.2 ± 0.2 ns and a high triplet yield of 163 ± 63% in the best-performing dimer. A strong dependence of the rate of fission on the coupling geometry is demonstrated. For optimized iSF behavior, close spatial proximity and minimal through-bond communication are found to be crucial for balancing the rate of SF against the reverse recombination process