Pension plan funding and stock market efficiency

The paper argues that the market signifficantly overvalues firms with severely underfunded pension plans. These companies earn lower stock returns than firms with healthier pension plans for at least five years after the first emergence of the underfunding. The low returns are not explained by risk, price momentum, earnings momentum, or accruals. Further, the evidence suggests that investors do not anticipate the impact of the pension liability on future earnings, and they are surprised when the negative implications of underfunding ultimately materialize. Finally, underfunded firms have poor operating performance, and they earn low returns, although they are value companies.Pricing anomalies, DB plans, market efficiency

Portable alphas from pension mispricing

We introduce a new dynamic trading strategy based on the systematic misspricing of U.S. companies sponsoring Defined Benefit pension plans. This portfolio produces an average return of 1.51% monthly between 1989 and 2004, with a Sharpe Ratio of 0.26. The returns of the strategy are not explained by those of primary assets. These returns are not related to those of benchmarks in the alternative investments industry either. Hence, we are in the presence of a "pure alpha" strategy that can be ported into a large variety of portfolios to significantly enhance their performance.Defined Benefit Plans, Portable Alpha, Enhanced Indexing, Pension Contributions, Pricing Anomaly

A new sensorized ceramic plug for the remote monitoring of moisture in historic masonry walls: First results from laboratory and onsite testing

The presence of moisture in historic buildings, especially from rising damp, is extremely widespread and severe, causing materials' deterioration, internal discomfort and bad thermal insulation of external walls. Although this phenomenon is widely studied in the literature, the available solutions are frequently only partially effective, also due to the lack of reliable and compatible techniques to monitor the amount of moisture inside porous building materials, especially in heritage buildings where multiple restrictions exist. In this paper, a new sensorized ceramic plug was developed, to be inserted in historic masonry walls for the remote monitoring of moisture. The plug includes a moisture sensor that is currently used for soil irrigation purpose in agriculture and a ceramic envelope of tailored properties. The plug was developed in laboratory following a step-by-step testing program, which took into account both the specific features of the sensor (requiring a strong research effort to be transferred to building materials) and those of historic walls. After a first set of laboratory tests, the sensorized ceramic plug was validated in small-scale laboratory walls and in a real historic masonry in the monumental Certosa cemetery in Bologna, Italy. The results are extremely encouraging, as they show how the new plug can provide valuable information about the rising damp evolution, and in fact, the data were correlated with the changes in the concurrent environmental parameters in the area of the cemetery. The results also suggest some possible measures to improve the sensorized ceramic plug in the near future

An integrated approach to the monitoring of rising damp in historic brick masonry

Monitoring rising damp in historic masonry buildings requires an integrated approach, including not only the quantification of moisture in materials over time, but also the investigation of the supply of water from the ground, the evaporative capacity of the surrounding air, and the presence of potentially hygroscopic salts. However, this approach is seldom applied, hence our knowledge of the phenomenon of rising damp in real historic masonry structures is often only partial. In this paper, the proposed approach was applied to the church of Santa Croce in Ravenna, Italy, an outstanding example of masonry building affected by rising damp and related materials’ deterioration. Santa Croce is a Byzantine church surrounded by an archaeological site and the whole area is presently located under the water table level, requiring a continuously operating pumping system to prevent the flooding of the entire zone. The testing and monitoring of moisture and salts in the church's materials started in September 2020 and is presently running. The data collected so far are presented and discussed in this paper, providing a contribution to a better understanding of this phenomenon. Moreover, during the monitoring period, a pumping system failure caused the flooding of the area in the period August-November 2021, allowing to investigate the impact of this event on the moisture in the materials. The protocol of testing described in this paper may provide a promising and effective method to investigate rising damp and is a starting point in view of its mitigation

Deep learning for inferring cause of data anomalies

Daily operation of a large-scale experiment is a resource consuming task, particularly from perspectives of routine data quality monitoring. Typically, data comes from different sub-detectors and the global quality of data depends on the combinatorial performance of each of them. In this paper, the problem of identifying channels in which anomalies occurred is considered. We introduce a generic deep learning model and prove that, under reasonable assumptions, the model learns to identify 'channels' which are affected by an anomaly. Such model could be used for data quality manager cross-check and assistance and identifying good channels in anomalous data samples. The main novelty of the method is that the model does not require ground truth labels for each channel, only global flag is used. This effectively distinguishes the model from classical classification methods. Being applied to CMS data collected in the year 2010, this approach proves its ability to decompose anomaly by separate channels.Comment: Presented at ACAT 2017 conference, Seattle, US

SGI como instrumento complementar na avaliação do impacto ambiental da agricultura.

Divulga a metodologia, desenvolvida pelo Núcleo, de caracterização e avaliação do impacto ambiental da agricultura, baseada no uso de SGI. O projeto foi executado sobre conjuntos de pequenas propriedades com diferentes sistemas de produção. Na escala municipal articulou espacialmente, via SGI, o uso das terras e os coeficientes técnicos dos sistemas de produção aferentes. Foram geradas 32 cartas de impacto ambiental da atividade agrícola, por recursos e insumos

Influence of Calcined Clay on Workability of Mortars with Low-carbon Cement

The second-largest industrial global emitter of CO2 (Carbon dioxide) is the cement sector. The technology roadmap of low carbon transition for cement industries includes the introduction of calcined clay (CC) as supplementary cementitious material. A new type of alternative binder, called Limestone Calcined Clay Cement (LC3), was recently proposed. This cement can reduce CO2 emissions of cement production by up to 40% and it is prepared using limestone (LS) and clay which are globally available. Many scientific studies aimed to investigate the hydration of LC3 to understand the contribution of CC to the development of the compressive strength. However, recent studies showed that other cement properties, like workability and water demand, are highly impacted by calcined clay. Despite some papers state that an increase in superplasticizer (SP) dosage compensate this effect, such concrete is usually sticky, and hard to handle and deal with. In this sense, a proper understanding of the mechanisms regulating rheology of LC3 is needed. The objective of this study is to analyze workability of CC-based cement pastes and mortar, specifically investigating the role of free water in particle suspensions. Preliminary results show that CC highly influences workability of mortars and pastes. The flow table test results highlight a need to increase SP dosage to achieve target workability with CC cements. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and 1 H time domain-nuclear magnetic resonance (TD-NMR) results clarify that the capillary unbound water is rapidly consumed by CC, being thus unavailable to fluidify cement pastes. This multi-method approach provides a further step in understanding CC impact on workability of mortars with low-carbon cement and opens new ways to understand paste, mortar, and concrete workability

Biochemical and molecular changes in peach fruit exposed to cold stress conditions

: Storage or transportation temperature is very important for preserving the quality of fruit. However, low temperature in sensitive fruit such as peach can induce loss of quality. Fruit exposed to a specific range of temperatures and for a longer period can show chilling injury (CI) symptoms. The susceptibility to CI at low temperature varies among cultivars and genetic backgrounds. Along with agronomic management, appropriate postharvest management can limit quality losses. The importance of correct temperature management during postharvest handling has been widely demonstrated. Nowadays, due to long-distance markets and complex logistics that require multiple actors, the management of storage/transportation conditions is crucial for the quality of products reaching the consumer.Peach fruit exposed to low temperatures activate a suite of physiological, metabolomic, and molecular changes that attempt to counteract the negative effects of chilling stress. In this review an overview of the factors involved, and plant responses is presented and critically discussed. Physiological disorders associated with CI generally only appear after the storage/transportation, hence early detection methods are needed to monitor quality and detect internal changes which will lead to CI development. CI detection tools are assessed: they need to be easy to use, and preferably non-destructive to avoid loss of products