Spillover effects from London and Frankfurt to Central and Eastern European stock markets

This paper investigates comovement in stock markets between the emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the developed markets of Western Europe. Three approaches are employed to examine this issue. The first two approaches, time-varying realised correlation ratios and cointegration statistics, use a two-step technique to derive timevarying estimates of the comovement between returns on CEE and EU stock exchanges. The first step uses common factor analysis to define the factors driving CEE stock exchanges, while the second step evaluates the relationship between the leading principal factor for CEE countries and the DAX and FTSE using time-varying realised correlation and rolling cointegration statistics. The third approach employs multivariate GARCH techniques to obtain estimates of mean and variance spillover effects

Stock market co-movement in the Caribbean

This paper investigates co-movement in five Caribbean stock markets (Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, The Bahamas and Guyana) using common factor analysis. The common factors are obtained using principal component analysis and therefore account for the maximum portion of the variance present in the stock exchanges investigated. We break our analysis down and test for co-movement in different periods so as to ascertain any changes that have taken place from one period to the next. In particular we examine 10-year, 5-year and 3-year periods. We also specify a vector autoregression model and test for co-movement between the five markets during the sample period through impulse response functions. Both of our tests fail to find any evidence of co-movement between the exchanges over the entire sample period. However, we find evidence of periodic co-movement, particularly between exchanges in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago

Nonlinearities in Stock Returns for Some Recent Entrants to the EU

In this paper we use nonlinear tests to investigate the mean reverting properties of stock returns in a group of CEE markets. We also test whether returns in our target group of countries demonstrate characteristics of persistence and cross sectional dependence. Our results indicate that all series’ are stationary, but we find some ambiguity in the results of our tests for cross sectional dependence.nonlinearities, stock markets, Central and Eastern European Countries

Early learning programs that promote children’s developmental and educational outcomes

This resource sheet reviews international and Australian research evidence for the characteristics of early learning programs that are effective in promoting developmental and learning outcomes. The early years of life are the best opportunity to lay the foundations for a child’s future. By getting it right in early childhood, we plant the seeds for tomorrow’s engaged and active student, productive and skilled worker, and confident and loving parent. Investments of time and money in the early years have been shown to be far more cost-effective than investments made at any other time. The skills children develop as infants, toddlers and preschoolers are cumulative and form the basis for later skill development. Early learning contributes to a chain of effects that either reinforces initial achievements or exacerbates initial difficulties. As a result, children enter school with marked differences in the cognitive, emotional, attention-related, self-regulatory, learning and social skills needed for success in the school environment, and these differences are predictive of later academic success. Progress during the school years depends partly on early levels of functioning and partly on family socioeconomic status. Throughout the early years, socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with poorer outcomes in language and literacy, communication, socioemotional functioning and early learning skills. Attending an early learning program in the years before school has been shown to have significant benefits for children’s development, particularly for children growing up in situations of socioeconomic disadvantage or special need. However, many of these children miss out due to problems of access and uptake or cost and quality. This resource sheet reviews international and Australian research evidence for the characteristics of early learning programs that are effective in promoting developmental and learning outcomes. The bulk of this research is not Indigenous-specific. The review focuses on centre-based or school-based education and care settings; universal and targeted approaches to program delivery; and Australian studies that address the needs of Indigenous children. &nbsp

Beyond Black and White: Visualizing Cultural Identity Amidst Racial Anxiety and Nativism in American Modernist Novels

Walter Benn Michaels’ Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism highlights that the search for identity is a mutual project of both nativism and Modernism and reveals how relevant racial identity is in American Modernism. While this is an important relationship in American Modernism, I argue that many recent studies following Michaels’ legacy of scholarship on race and nativism in modern American literature reduce individual authors’ projects, too often interpreting them all to have similar anxieties and desires for American racial identity and citing the presence of racial tropes as evidence of the authors’ own social and political arguments. Michaels set a precedent of overlooking the aesthetic in critical examinations of racial identity in American modernist texts, but I argue that aesthetic spaces are often the spaces where authors work through issues of race and identity and that aesthetics are crucial to understanding identity formation in many American modernist novels. Modernism is a movement that explores the idea that identity is not one-dimensional or whole, and I wish to illustrate a more kaleidoscopic view of racial aesthetics in American Modernism, exploring the complexity and variations of race presented by a variety of authors. Various American authors come to both Modernism and race in different ways and have unique projects and perspectives about racial identity. I wish to broaden the scope of conversation surrounding American Modernism and race, and I hope to illuminate the significance of examining the various and unique aesthetic elements at play in individual works of modern American fiction. I will examine works by Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nella Larsen to argue that race and Modernism have a more complicated relationship than much scholarship acknowledges and that the nativist and racial language and themes presented by many American modernist writers can be read more richly according to the various narrative perspectives and projects of the writers using them

SUB-LETHAL EFFECTS OF ROUNDUP ON TADPOLE DEVELOPMENT AND PREDATOR AVOIDANCE

Roundup is a commonly used pesticide applied to agriculture and forest habitats. In Canada and parts of the North Eastern United States, these areas are generally optimal for amphibians due to the presence of small, ephemeral water bodies. While Roundup has been shown to have no adverse effects on a number of species, amphibians are one of the few groups who show high sensitivity to Roundup. My research aims to determine how an acute sub-lethal dose of Roundup affects several different facets of larvae development in wood frogs (Lithobates sylvaticus). In Chapter 2 I examined the effect of Roundup on amphibian development. Groups of tadpoles were treated with Roundup (0.5 mg a.e./L) for four days at three different times in their development (Gosner stage 26, 31-32 and 37-38), while a control group was maintained in similar conditions without Roundup. Pictures were taken every four days until tadpoles reached metamorphosis. Changes in development, body area or length were assessed, along with metamorphic endpoints, such as timing of metamorphosis and weight. Although there was no differential effect of Roundup on tadpole growth or weight, there was a slight, non-ecologically relevant, delay in development in tadpoles treated with Roundup at stage 26. The delay was not detectable in the second half of the experiment, indicating that compensatory mechanisms allowed those individuals to recover. Neither time to metamorphosis or weight at metamorphosis were affected by an environmentally relevant exposure to Roundup. In Chapter 3 I focused on the effect of Roundup on crucial behaviours related to the ability of larval amphibians to detect and avoid predation threats. I demonstrated that being exposed to Roundup for one hour eliminated the response of larval wood frogs to cues from injured conspecifics (i.e. cues known to elicit dramatic anti-predator responses in a wide variety of aquatic species). Tadpoles that were maintained in clean water and exposed to a combination of injured conspecific cues and Roundup, did not exhibit a decrease in movement, when compared to control tadpoles. This result indicates that Roundup deactivates the alarm function of the injured conspecific cues. However, it is possible that both the cues and the animal would be affected by Roundup. In Chapter 3 I also demonstrated that tadpoles that were exposed to Roundup as embryos had reduced basal movement rates. The results of this thesis illustrate that an environmentally relevant concentration of Roundup (0.5 mg a.e./L), does not negatively affect the development of tadpoles. The studies outlined in this thesis suggest that at this exposure concentration, behaviour acts as a more sensitive endpoint, than more traditional morphologic endpoints

Heisenberg exchange in magnetic monoxides

The superexchange intertacion in transition-metal oxides, proposed initially by Anderson in 1950, is treated using contemporary tight-binding theory and existing parameters. We find also a direct exchange for nearest-neighbor metal ions, larger by a factor of order five than the superexchange. This direct exchange arises from Vddm coupling, rather than overlap of atomic charge densities, a small overlap exchange contribution which we also estimate. For FeO and CoO there is also an important negative contribution, related to Stoner ferromagnetism, from the partially filled minority-spin band which broadens when ionic spins are aligned. The corresponding J1 and J2 parameters are calculated for MnO, FeO, CoO, and NiO. They give good accounts of the Neel and the Curie-Weiss temperatures, show appropriate trends, and give a reasonable account of their volume dependences. For MnO the predicted value for the magnetic susceptibility at the Neel temperature and the crystal distortion arising from the antiferromagnetic transition were reasonably well given. Application to CuO2 planes in the cuprates gives J=1220oK, compared to an experimental 1500oK, and for LiCrO2 gives J1=4 50oK compared to an experimental 230oK.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Phys. Rev. B 1/19/07. Realized J=4V^2/U applies generally, as opposed to J=2V^2/U from one-electron theory (1/28 revision

Confinement-induced Berry phase and helicity-dependent photocurrents

The photocurrent in an optically active metal is known to contain a component that switches sign with the helicity of the incident radiation. At low frequencies, this current depends on the orbital Berry phase of the Bloch electrons via the "anomalous velocity" of Karplus and Luttinger. We consider quantum wells in which the parent material, such as GaAs, is not optically active and the relevant Berry phase only arises as a result of quantum confinement. Using an envelope approximation that is supported by numerical tight-binding results, it is shown that the Berry phase contribution is determined for realistic wells by a cubic Berry phase intrinsic to the bulk material, the well width, and the well direction. These results for the magnitude of the Berry-phase effect suggest that it may already have been observed in quantum well experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Barium in stony meteorites

Concentrations of barium have been determined spectrographically in 95 stony meteorites. The distribution of the concentration of barium in the chondritic falls appears to be log-normal in shape with a median of 4.5 ppm. The concentrations in the chondritic finds indicate a tetramodal distribution that may have resulted from terrestrial contamination, but that also may have been present initially. The fact that the finds represent a strongly selected sample of generally hard and resistant meteorites leaves the second alternative open as a distinct possibility