On the demand for lotteries in Greece

Demand for lotteries has been estimated in several countries, an important issue being whether operators set lottery payouts optimally. The question is tackled by means of a traditional demand equation in effective price and recently by a demand equation variant in jackpots, both specifications indicating that in many countries operators set their payout ratio more or less correctly and slightly on the generous side. The objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the lottery demand parameters in Greece and to assess the optimality of the current payout-allocating rulesdemand elasticity; payout policy

Venture Capital and Innovation in Europe

This paper examines the direction of causality between Venture Capital (VC) and innovation (proxied by patents) in Europe. We test whether causality runs from patents to VC by estimating a linear dynamic panel model and causality from VC to patents by estimating a panel count model. Evidence from a European sample indicates that causality runs from patents to VC suggesting that, in Europe, innovation seems to create a demand for VC and not VC a supply of innovation. In this sense, innovative ideas seem to lack more than funds in EuropeVenture Capital; Dynamic Panel Data; Innovation; Patents

Pension Funds under Investments Constraints: An Assessment of the Opportunity Cost to the Greek Social Security System

In this paper we study the opportunity loss of the Greek social security system in terms of risk and return, caused by the inflexible investment constraints under which Greek pension funds operated in the period 1958-2000. Using data on pension fund reserves as well as on money and capital market yields, we evaluate retrospectively the risks and returns of a more pro-investment fund reserve management by analyzing an indicative number of investment scenarios in local and international money and capital markets. In order to estimate local currency yields for international investment, we generate for the entire period – covering both a fixed and a partially floating exchange rates regime – a corresponding series of exchange rate variations based on the official rate fluctuations and inflation differentials. Our results suggest that in the 43-year period, there has been a significant opportunity loss in the system both in risk and returns: first, by excluding Greek bank deposits and Greek capital market securities that would have propped returns up at acceptable levels of risk and, second, by not allowing for some degree of international diversification that would have kept overall downside risk down. This opportunity loss could have alleviated, to some extent, the current imbalance of the system, had some of the restrictive investment rules been relaxed.pension funds; financial investment

Venture Capital and Innovation in Europe

This paper examines the direction of causality between Venture Capital (VC) and innovation (proxied by patents) in Europe. We test whether causality runs from patents to VC by estimating a linear dynamic panel model and causality from VC to patents by estimating a panel count model. Evidence from a European sample indicates that causality runs from patents to VC suggesting that, in Europe, innovation seems to create a demand for VC and not VC a supply of innovation. In this sense, innovative ideas seem to lack more than funds in Europ

On the demand for lotteries in Greece

Demand for lotteries has been estimated in several countries, an important issue being whether operators set lottery payouts optimally. The question is tackled by means of a traditional demand equation in effective price and recently by a demand equation variant in jackpots, both specifications indicating that in many countries operators set their payout ratio more or less correctly and slightly on the generous side. The objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the lottery demand parameters in Greece and to assess the optimality of the current payout-allocating rule

On the demand for lotteries in Greece

Demand for lotteries has been estimated in several countries, an important issue being whether operators set lottery payouts optimally. The question is tackled by means of a traditional demand equation in effective price and recently by a demand equation variant in jackpots, both specifications indicating that in many countries operators set their payout ratio more or less correctly and slightly on the generous side. The objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the lottery demand parameters in Greece and to assess the optimality of the current payout-allocating rule

VITALAS at TRECVID-2008

In this paper, we present our experiments in TRECVID 2008 about High-Level feature extraction task. This is the first year for our participation in TRECVID, our system adopts some popular approaches that other workgroups proposed before. We proposed 2 advanced low-level features NEW Gabor texture descriptor and the Compact-SIFT Codeword histogram. Our system applied well-known LIBSVM to train the SVM classifier for the basic classifier. In fusion step, some methods were employed such as the Voting, SVM-base, HCRF and Bootstrap Average AdaBoost(BAAB)

Towards a clinical staging for bipolar disorder: defining patient subtypes based on functional outcome.

BACKGROUND: The functional outcome of Bipolar Disorder (BD) is highly variable. This variability has been attributed to multiple demographic, clinical and cognitive factors. The critical next step is to identify combinations of predictors that can be used to specify prognostic subtypes, thus providing a basis for a staging classification in BD. METHODS: Latent Class Analysis was applied to multiple predictors of functional outcome in a sample of 106 remitted adults with BD. RESULTS: We identified two subtypes of patients presenting "good" (n=50; 47.6%) and "poor" (n=56; 52.4%) outcome. Episode density, level of residual depressive symptoms, estimated verbal intelligence and inhibitory control emerged as the most significant predictors of subtype membership at the p<0.05 level. Their odds ratio (OR) and confidence interval (CI) with reference to the "good" outcome group were: episode density (OR=4.622, CI 1.592-13.418), level of residual depressive symptoms (OR=1.543, CI 1.210-1.969), estimated verbal intelligence (OR=0.969; CI 0.945-0.995), and inhibitory control (OR=0.771, CI 0.656-0.907). Age, age of onset and duration of illness were comparable between prognostic groups. LIMITATIONS: The longitudinal stability or evolution of the subtypes was not tested. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide the first empirically derived staging classification of BD based on two underlying dimensions, one for illness severity and another for cognitive function. This approach can be further developed by expanding the dimensions included and testing the reproducibility and prospective prognostic value of the emerging classes. Developing a disease staging system for BD will allow individualised treatment planning for patients and selection of more homogeneous patient groups for research purposes

Pension Funds under Investments Constraints: An Assessment of the Opportunity Cost to the Greek Social Security System

In this paper we study the opportunity loss of the Greek social security system in terms of risk and return, caused by the inflexible investment constraints under which Greek pension funds operated in the period 1958-2000. Using data on pension fund reserves as well as on money and capital market yields, we evaluate retrospectively the risks and returns of a more pro-investment fund reserve management by analyzing an indicative number of investment scenarios in local and international money and capital markets. In order to estimate local currency yields for international investment, we generate for the entire period – covering both a fixed and a partially floating exchange rates regime – a corresponding series of exchange rate variations based on the official rate fluctuations and inflation differentials. Our results suggest that in the 43-year period, there has been a significant opportunity loss in the system both in risk and returns: first, by excluding Greek bank deposits and Greek capital market securities that would have propped returns up at acceptable levels of risk and, second, by not allowing for some degree of international diversification that would have kept overall downside risk down. This opportunity loss could have alleviated, to some extent, the current imbalance of the system, had some of the restrictive investment rules been relaxed

The effect of cell disruption on the extraction of oil and protein from concentrated microalgae slurries

Novel cell-disruption combinations (autolytic incubation and hypotonic osmotic shock combined with HPH or pH12) were used to investigate the fundamental mass transfer of lipids and proteins from Nannochloropsis slurries (140 mg biomass/g slurry). Since neutral lipids exist as cytosolic globules, their mass transfer was directly dependent on disintegration of cell walls. Complete recovery was obtained with complete physical disruption. HPH combinations exerted more physical disruption and led to higher yields than pH12. In contrast, proteins exist as both cytosolic water-soluble fractions and cell-wall/membrane structural fractions and have a complex extraction behaviour. Mass transfer of cytosolic proteins was dependent on cell-wall disintegration, while that of structural proteins was governed by cell-wall disintegration and severance of protein linkage from the wall/membrane. HPH combinations exerted only physical disruption and were limited to releasing soluble proteins. pH12 combinations hydrolysed chemical linkages in addition to exerting physical disruption, releasing both soluble and structural proteins