Only the best? Exploring cross-border investor preferences in US gateway cities

Despite heady growth in cross-border investment into commercial real estate over recent decades, there are few studies that examine differences in investment preferences between domestic and cross-border investors at a micro level. We address the gap by examining the characteristics of assets acquired by cross border investors in six major US metro areas, comparing them with the purchases made by US investors in those same areas. Our study uses data on more than 67 500 transactions recorded by Real Capital Analytics (RCA) over the period from Q1 2003 to Q3 2016. As well as examining cross-border investors in aggregate, we isolate and examine purchases by investors from each of the four principal source nations for cross-border real estate investment in these cities. This is important since treating cross-border investors as a single group may obscure important differences between them. We employ multilevel logit techniques and we find across a number of specifications that cross-border investors prefer larger assets, newer assets and CBD locations regardless of nationality. However, temporal and sectoral patterns of investment, as well as evidence for return chasing behavior, vary with the nationality of investor being studied

Impact Factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?

A review of Garfield's journal impact factor and its specific implementation as the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor reveals several weaknesses in this commonly-used indicator of journal standing. Key limitations include the mismatch between citing and cited documents, the deceptive display of three decimals that belies the real precision, and the absence of confidence intervals. These are minor issues that are easily amended and should be corrected, but more substantive improvements are needed. There are indications that the scientific community seeks and needs better certification of journal procedures to improve the quality of published science. Comprehensive certification of editorial and review procedures could help ensure adequate procedures to detect duplicate and fraudulent submissions.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, 6 table

Science deserves to be judged by its contents, not by its wrapping: Revisiting Seglen's work on journal impact and research evaluation

The scientific foundation for the criticism on the use of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in evaluations of individual researchers and their publications was laid between 1989 and 1997 in a series of articles by Per O. Seglen. His basic work has since influenced initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics, and The Metric Tide review on the role of metrics in research assessment and management. Seglen studied the publications of only 16 senior biomedical scientists. We investigate whether Seglen's main findings still hold when using the same methods for a much larger group of Norwegian biomedical scientists with more than 18,000 publications. Our results support and add new insights to Seglen's basic work

Dynamics and Planet Formation in/Around Binaries

The extent to which planetesimal accretion is affected by the perturbing presence of a companion star is an important issue in the formation of planets in and around binary systems. In this chapter, we review this issue by concentrating on one crucial parameter: the distribution of encounter velocities within the planetesimal swarm. The evolution of this parameter is numerically explored accounting for the secular perturbations of the binary and the friction due to the very likely presence of gas in the disk. Maps of the average encounter velocity \u27e8\u394v\u27e9 between different size planetesimals are presented for a total of 120 stellar dynamical configurations obtained by different combinations of the binary semimajor axis a b and eccentricity e b . According to the different values of \u27e8\u394v\u27e9, 3 different planetesimal accumulation modes are identified: 1) in regions where \u27e8\u394v\u27e9 is comparable to that derived for planetesimal swarms around single-stars, "standard" accretion is likely, eventually via runaway growth, 2) in regions where \u27e8\u394v\u27e9 is larger than v ero , the threshold velocity above which all impacts are eroding, no accretion is possible and planet growth is stopped, 3) in between these two extremes, there is a large fraction of binary configurations where the increase in \u27e8\u394v\u27e9 is still below the erosion threshold. Planetesimal accumulation can still occur but it possibly proceeds at a slower rate than in the single-star case, following the so-called type II runaway growth mode