Economically justified equity investment strategies capable of withstanding growing interest rate environment

Mestrado em Economia Monetária e FinanceiraThis thesis proposes an approach for selection of stocks that could serve as a natural hedge for fixed income portfolios to minimize rising interest rate risk. The developed approach is applied to the case of US equity markets. Based on macroeconomic analysis, vector autoregressive model and Granger causality tests, and financial analysis, it is concluded that US financial sector is the optimal choice among all sectors that have strong correlations with interest rates. The thesis? results could be useful for interest rate risk management of the investment portfolios under the growing interest rate environment, in particular, and for investment industry professionals.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A new geometric approach to problems in birational geometry

A classical set of birational invariants of a variety are its spaces of pluricanonical forms and some of their canonically defined subspaces. Each of these vector spaces admits a typical metric structure which is also birationally invariant. These vector spaces so metrized will be referred to as the pseudonormed spaces of the original varieties. A fundamental question is the following: given two mildly singular projective varieties with some of the first variety's pseudonormed spaces being isometric to the corresponding ones of the second variety's, can one construct a birational map between them which induces these isometries? In this work a positive answer to this question is given for varieties of general type. This can be thought of as a theorem of Torelli type for birational equivalence.Comment: 13 pages, to appear in PNA

Exploring the association between traumatic brain injury and psychotic-like experiences in children

This thesis studies the relationships between exposure to paediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) and psychosis outcomes, and is presented in three parts. Part 1 is a systematic review and meta-analysis of the association between paediatric TBI and subsequent psychotic disorders/symptoms. We identified 10 relevant studies, of which eight were included in the meta-analysis. Based on a pooled sample size of 479,686, the pooled odds ratio (OR) for the association between paediatric TBI and psychosis outcomes was found to be marginally significant. Part 1 reports cautious meta-analytic evidence for a positive association between paediatric TBI and future psychosis. Part 2 utilised the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) large cohort data from children aged 9 to 10 years old at baseline (n = 11,875), with longitudinal and prospective 3-year follow-up to investigate the extent to which TBI at baseline predicted psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) in children, using multi-level logistic regression analyses. It was found that the presence of paediatric TBI at baseline was a significant predictor of the occurrence of PLEs at 36 months, with the relationship remaining robust after controlling for potential confounders. However, no significant association was found between the presence of TBI and the presence of PLEs at baseline. Additionally, no significant relationships were observed between the number of TBIs and the presence of PLEs at both baseline and 36 months, whilst the severity of TBI was only found to be significantly associated with the presence of PLEs at baseline, but not at 36 months. In conclusion, part 2 provides evidence indicating (i) a delayed occurrence of PLEs following TBI among children aged 9 to 10 years old; (ii) weak associations between TBI and PLEs; however, (iii) a persistence of post-TBI PLEs and (iv) a dose–response relationship could not be observed. Part 3 is a critical appraisal which presents considerations in relation to three broad topics, including (i) transparency, accessibility, and reproducibility of the conducted research; (ii) reasons for and likely impact of a lack of expert by experience (EbE) involvement in the research design, conduct, analysis, and interpretation; and (iii) an exploration of the relationships between paediatric TBI and mental health outcomes in children

Helly's selection theorem and the principle of local reflexivity of ordered type

AbstractLet (E,E+,∥ · ∥) be an ordered normed space with a positive cone E+, let 0 ≤ ψ ϵ E″, let N be finite-dimensional subspace of E′ and ε > 0. In terms of the notions of half-full injections and half-decomposable surjections, sufficient conditions for N to ensure the existence of x ϵ E+ with ∥x∥≤∥ψ∥ + ϵ and ψ=KEx on N have been found (Theorems 3.5 and 3.6). As an application of Helly's selection theorem of ordered type, the principle of local reflexivity of ordered type is obtained (Theorem 4.7)

Evaluation of Property Management Agent Performance: A Novel Empirical Model

For many different reasons, property management agents (PMAs) are appointed for managing housing developments in both public and private housing sectors in many different cities. While third-party housing management eases the burdens of property owners and tenants in taking care of their properties, it may lead to agency problems. In fact, cases of mismanagement of multi-owned properties are common in Hong Kong and other Asian cities, leading to accelerated urban decay and augmented confrontations between property owners, users and PMAs. To promote better property management services, the performance of PMAs should be evaluated so market players can benchmark the performance of different PMAs for better-informed decision-making. This study reviews previous and existing measures for evaluating PMA performance and proposes a new evaluation model which is built upon the residual concept proposed by William Sharpe. The ideas underpinning the framework and how a PMA’s performance is evaluated using the framework are detailed. Using this new model, 217 housing developments in Hong Kong are studied and the performance of the respective PMAs is evaluated and benchmarked. The evaluation outcomes are validated with the SERVQUAL scores of these 217 housing developments. Practical implications of the research findings follow

Ricci-Flat Holonomy: a Classification

The reductive holonomy algebras for a torsion-free affine connection are analysed, with the goal of establishing which ones can correspond to a Ricci-flat connection with the same properties. Various families of holonomies are eliminated through different algebraic means, and examples are constructed (in this paper and in `Projective Geometry II: Holonomy Classification', by the same author) in the remaining cases, thus solving this problem completely, for reductive holonomy.Comment: 24 pages, slight corrections and presentation change

FSS-1000: A 1000-Class Dataset for Few-Shot Segmentation

Over the past few years, we have witnessed the success of deep learning in image recognition thanks to the availability of large-scale human-annotated datasets such as PASCAL VOC, ImageNet, and COCO. Although these datasets have covered a wide range of object categories, there are still a significant number of objects that are not included. Can we perform the same task without a lot of human annotations? In this paper, we are interested in few-shot object segmentation where the number of annotated training examples are limited to 5 only. To evaluate and validate the performance of our approach, we have built a few-shot segmentation dataset, FSS-1000, which consists of 1000 object classes with pixelwise annotation of ground-truth segmentation. Unique in FSS-1000, our dataset contains significant number of objects that have never been seen or annotated in previous datasets, such as tiny daily objects, merchandise, cartoon characters, logos, etc. We build our baseline model using standard backbone networks such as VGG-16, ResNet-101, and Inception. To our surprise, we found that training our model from scratch using FSS-1000 achieves comparable and even better results than training with weights pre-trained by ImageNet which is more than 100 times larger than FSS-1000. Both our approach and dataset are simple, effective, and easily extensible to learn segmentation of new object classes given very few annotated training examples. Dataset is available at https://github.com/HKUSTCV/FSS-1000

Perceived Attributes of Music Teaching Effectiveness Among Kindergarten Teachers: Role of Personality

: Musical activity has been found to be beneficial to young children’s all-round development in kindergartens. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between kindergarten teachers’ perceived attributes of music teaching effectiveness and personality. Eighty-eight in-service kindergarten teachers rated themselves using a set of Attributes of Music Teaching Effectiveness (AMTE) and the sensing-intuitive dimension of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. Results showed that 75% (66 of 88) and 25% (22 of 88) of the teachers were sensing types and intuitive types, respectively. The former prefers a directive approach in music teaching to children, whereas the latter prefers a non-directive approach. While teachers’ personalities and work experience significantly predicted music teaching effectiveness, intuitive teachers rated themselves higher than did sensing teachers on the AMTE. Furthermore, the teachers of both personality types varied in their ratings of the importance of most effective attributes. Implications of these findings in relation to job allocation and professional development in effective music teaching for kindergarten teachers are discussed