28,865 research outputs found
An experimental study of attitudes to changing water charges in Scotland. ESRI Working Paper No.654 March 2020
If an aim of a regulatory body is to act on behalf of the views of its citizenry, then it is
important to understand what those views are. This paper, in collaboration with the OECD and the
Scottish water industry, presents the results of an online (n= 500) and face-to-face laboratory (n= 100)
study that utilised experimental behavioural science to explore how the provision and presentation of
future price change information influences Scottish citizensâ acceptance of water price changes.
Participants were asked to rate different patterns of price rises for their water charges. The pattern,
presentation, magnitude of price rises and the provision of additional cost information (designed to
simplify the calculations of future costs) was manipulated across tasks and participants. Results from
this study suggest that Scottish citizens are generally accepting of price rises in the short and medium
terms. However, the patterns of price rises, and the way in which information is presented, can influence
these attitudes, suggesting that consumers do not always accurately integrate sequential price rises over
time. Findings from this study are designed to inform the regulatory process of the Scottish water
industry and highlight the potential role of behavioural science in regulation more generally
A Survival Analysis of Australian Equity Mutual Funds
Determining which types of mutual (or managed) investment funds are good financial investments is complicated by potential surbivorship biases. This project adds to a small recent international literature on the patterns and determinants of mutual fund survivorship. We use statistical techniques for survival data that are rarely applied in finance. Of specific interest is the hazard rate of fund closure, which gives the variation over time in the conditional probability of fund closure given fund survival to date. For a sample of 251 retail investment funds in Australia from 1980 to 1999 we identify a hump-shaped hazard function that reaches its maximum after about five or six years, a pattern similar to the UK findings of Lunde, Timmermann and Blake (1999). We also consider the impact of monthly and annual fund performance (gross and relative to a market benchmark). Returns relative to the benckmark are much more important than gross returns, with hgiher relative returns associated with lower hazard of fund closure. There appears to be an asymmetric response to performance, with positive shocks having a larger impact on the hazard rate than negative shocks.mutual funds; survivorship bias; duration analysis; cox regression
Solar spin down and neutrino fluxes
Effects of core spin-down process on neutrino flux in solar evolution theor
Eliciting trade-offs between water charges and service benefits in Scotland. ESRI Working Paper No. 655 March 2020
If it is the responsibility of a regulatory body to decide where to prioritise future investment, then it is important to
understand the priorities of the citizenry it represents. This paper, in collaboration with the OECD and the Scottish water
industry, presents the results of an online (n= 500) and face-to-face laboratory (n= 99) study that utilised experimental
behavioural science to explore how Scottish citizens trade-off costs and potential improvements to their water service.
Participantsâ priorities for investment were elicited using a novel âslider taskâ methodology that forced them to explicitly
consider the trade-offs required to allocate limited resources across multiple possible water service improvements. The provision
of additional cost and timing information was systematically varied. Results suggest that citizens are increasingly accepting of
price rises when provided this information. Results also suggest that citizensâ priorities for specific improvements are not
sensitive to the costs of different improvements but are sensitive to the lengths of time improvements take to be made. Findings
from this study are designed to inform the regulatory process of the Scottish water industry and highlight the potential role of
behavioural science in regulation more generally
On the Snow Line in Dusty Protoplanetary Disks
The snow line, in Hayashi's (1981) model, is where the temperature of a black
body that absorbed direct sunlight and re-radiated as much as it absorbed,
would be 170~K. It is usually assumed that the cores of the giant planets,
e.g., Jupiter, form beyond the snow line. Since Hayashi, there have been a
series of more detailed models of the absorption by dust of the stellar
radiation, and of accretional heating, which alter the location of the snow
line. We have attempted a "self-consistent" model of a T Tauri disk in the
sense that we used dust properties and calculated surface temperatures that
matched observed disks. We then calculated the midplane temperature for those
disks, with no accretional heating or with small (<10^-8) accretion rates. Our
models bring the snow line in to the neighbourhood of 1 AU; not far enough to
explain the close planetary companions to other stars, but much closer than in
recent starting lines for orbit migration scenarios.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, to appear in ApJ,528,200
U.S. East Coast Trough Indices at 500 hPa and New England Winter Climate Variability
Using monthly gridded 500-hPa data, two synoptic indices are defined to better understand the principle mechanisms controlling intraseasonal to multiannual winter climate variability in NewEngland (NE). The âtrough axis indexâ (TAI) is created to quantify the mean longitudinal position of the common East Coast pressure trough, and the âtrough intensity indexâ (TII) is calculated to estimate the relative amplitude of this trough at 42.5°N. The TAI and TII are then compared with records for NE regional winter precipitation, temperature, and snowfall with the goal of understanding physical mechanisms linking NE winter climate with regional sea surface temperatures (SST), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and the PacificâNorth American (PNA) teleconnection pattern. The TAI correlates most significantly with winter precipitation at inland sites, such that a western (eastern)trough axis position is associated with greater (lower) average monthly precipitation. Also, significant correlations between the TAI and both NE regional SSTs and the NAO suggest that longitudinal shifting of the trough is one possible mechanism linking the North Atlantic with NE regional winterclimate variability. The NE winter temperature is significantly correlated with the TII, regional SSTs, and the NAO. While the PNA also correlates with the TII, NE winter climate variables are apparently unrelated to the PNA index
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