A scientist’s walk through Hanoi Old Quarter Houses

Hanoi – the capital city of Vietnam and the land of thousand years of civilization – invokes among both locals and tourists the image of the ‘Sword Lake’ with its ancient ‘Turtle Tower’ and the charming Old Quarter with its preserved old houses lying along small commercial alleys. The houses in the Old Quarter were constructed over a century ago which feature tube houses with inclined tile roofs and a blend of French architecture create the infusions of history and memory. Researchers of various fields have attempted to capture and explain the essence of these townhouses in their works, either in the collectibles of many authors, the quintessential drawings of talented painters, or in publications on the history of the Old Quarter. Among these, the recent work by Vuong et al. (2019) adds a unique view of the architectural features of Hanoi’s ancient townhouses as these features are viewed as dependent and independent variables. The study titled ‘Cultural evolution in Vietnam’s early 20th century: A Bayesian network analysis of Hanoi Franco-Chinese house designs’ aims to find traces of cultural evolution in the early 20th century in Vietnam and highlight the most notable elements that affect the Vietnamese people’s perception of cultural evolutions

q-Plurisubharmonicity and q-pseudoconvexity in cn

We generalize classical results for plurisubharmonic functions and hyperconvex domain to $q$-plurisubharmonic functions and $q$-hyperconvex domains. We show, among other things, that $B_q$-regular domains are $q$-hyperconvex. Moreover, some smoothing results for $q$-plurisubharmonic functions are also given

Relationships between Currency Carry Trade and Stock Markets

My paper examines the relationship between currency carry trade and stock market returns. In this exercise, I analyze the effects of Japanese yen-based and US dollar-based carry trade strategies on the stock market performance of both funding and investment currencies. Currency-specific profit measure, calculated as the difference between future (realized) spot exchange rate and today forward rate, is used as a proxy for carry trade return. Using the traditional regression equation with explicitly accounting for GARCH effects in the error term, I find that: (1) there are positively significant associations between carry trade return and stock market performance in the corresponding target currency countries (Australia, New Zealand and China); (2) the relationship between carry trade and stock market returns in the corresponding funding currency countries (Japan and US) is mixed. There is negatively significant association between US dollar-based carry trade and US stock market while the relationship between yen-based carry trade and Japanese stock market is positive. My results raise a possible dispute on the role of Japanese yen as a popular choice of funding currency in carry trade transactions. However, the finding is well supported with robustness check by introducing two explanatory factors (control variables), namely market “fear gauge” VIX and Bloomberg Commodity Price indexes