LGBT and the Changing Moral System in Contemporary Chinese Society: Formality Marriage and the Strife between Family-centered Values and Self-centered Individual Needs

This study focuses on the phenomenon of formality marriage xinghun in contemporary post-socialist China. This practice is becoming more and more common among LGBT individuals, namely gay men and lesbian women. The research aims to unveil and inquiry the mechanism working behind such practice, focusing on the factors influencing the choice to undergo xinghun, the search for xinghun partner and the arrangements taken before the marriage. As theoretical framework, Yan Yunxiang's dissertations about the changing moral landscape of contemporary Chinese society will be taken in consideration in behalf of the nature of social relationships between individuals. Such analysis will be posed within the context of the ongoing process of individualization triggered by the market liberalization. Hence, the research will focus in particular on the pivotal moment of any Chinese individual, that is, marriage and its social significance. It will be shown how xinghun is a result of this changing social relations, especially those between the old generation and the one called post-80s generation

A note on the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation with discontinuity

In this work we consider differential equations of the type $$pm, u^{(k)}=f(u),$$ and study the extinction profile of their solutions. Emphasis is placed on the special case $-u^{(4)}=sign(u)$, which is related to the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. In this case we describe in more detail the extinction phenomenon and prove a conjecture by Galaktionov and Svirshchevskii

Modeling and evaluating conditional quantile dynamics in VaR forecasts

We focus on the time-varying modeling of VaR at a given coverage $\tau$, assessing whether the quantiles of the distribution of the returns standardized by their conditional means and standard deviations exhibit predictable dynamics. Models are evaluated via simulation, determining the merits of the asymmetric Mean Absolute Deviation as a loss function to rank forecast performances. The empirical application on the Fama-French 25 value-weighted portfolios with a moving forecast window shows substantial improvements in forecasting conditional quantiles by keeping the predicted quantile unchanged unless the empirical frequency of violations falls outside a data-driven interval around $\tau$.Comment: 37 pages, 5 figures, 8 table