WEFTA interlaboratory comparison on total lipid determination in fishery products using the Smedes method

Lipid determination by the Smedes method was tested in an interlaboratory trial performed by nine laboratories from seven countries belonging to the West European Fish Technologists Association Analytical Methods Working Group. Five samples of fish and fishery products with different lipid contents, including two blind duplicates, were distributed among the participants. All laboratories applied a slightly modified Smedes method, which included extraction of lipids by cyclohexane and isopropanol, transfer of lipids to the cyclohexane phase by addition of water, phase separation by centrifugation, and gravimetric lipid determination. The results indicate that the RSD for reproducibility (RSDR) was between 4.11 and 6.31% for samples with moderate (7%) and high (14%) lipid content, depending on the sample. Larger SDs among the laboratories were obtained for a cod sample with low lipid content of 0.5%. The method is judged to be suitable as a routine method for lipid determination in fish and fishery products. © 2012 Publishing Technology.Peer Reviewe

Investor Familiarity and Home Bias: Japanese Evidence

We examine how foreign and domestic portfolio investors, both classified into money managers, invest in Japanese firms over the sample period of 1985–1998. We propose the agency-familiarity hypothesis to explain investment behavior of these institutional investors focusing on the two firm-level variables: market capitalization and export ratios. Both types of institutional investors over-invest in familiar firms measured in firm size while each shows opposite preference patterns with respect to the export ratios. The foreign investors become more export-firm oriented in the second-half sample and the domestic orientation of the domestic institutional investors becomes statistically significant during the same second-half. Because of the location difference of their client investors, the compositions of familiar firms are different between these two types with respect to the firm’s export activities. Home bias at the firm level in terms of the sensitivity to the export ratio is evident for both types of investors, especially, in more recent years, although equity home bias at the country level has been gradually mitigated. Based on these macro- and micro-level results, we conclude that the investment behavior of money managers is more consistent with the agency-familiarity explanation than the information-based explanation regardless of their nationalities. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2003foreign investors, home bias, institutional investors, investor familiarity, money managers, the Japanese stock market,