Do More Economists Hold Stocks?

A unique data set enables us to test the hypothesis that more economists than otherwise identical investors hold stocks due to informational advantages. We confirm that economists have a significantly higher probability of participating in the stock market than investors with any other education, even when controlling for several background characteristics. We make use of a large register-based panel data set containing detailed information on the educational attainments and various financial and socioeconomic variables. We model the stock market participation decision by the probit model. The results are shown to be highly robust to various assumptions, including unobserved individual heterogeneityInvestor education; Portfolio choice; Stock market participation

Draft genome sequences of 12 Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli strains isolated from dairy cattle in Portugal

Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) is a foodborne pathogen transmitted from animals to humans through contaminated food. Cattle are the main reservoir of STEC, but their genetic diversity is still poorly characterized, especially regarding strains isolated in Portugal. We therefore present the draft genomic sequences of 12 STEC strains isolated from cattle in the north of Portugal.This study was supported by project PhageSTEC PTDC/CVT-CVT/29628/2017 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029628) fundedby FEDER through COMPETE2020 (Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização) and by National Funds through FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia). This study was also supported by FCT grant POCI-01-0247-FEDER-033679 and strategic funding of unit UIDB/04469/2020 and theBioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000004), funded by the European Re-gional Development Fund under the scope of Norte2020–Programa Operacional Regional do Norte.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

How event-based memories change as a function of forgetting and consolidation

Episodic memories are composed of multiple elements, from the people we encounter, the locations we visit, and the objects we interact with. These ‘episodes’ are thought to be stored in memory as coherent event representations and are associated with holistic recollection at retrieval, such that the retrieval of one element is dependent on the retrieval of all other elements from the same event. Evidence for this ‘dependency’ has been shown to emerge from the association between the event elements themselves. Critically, dependency is seen when participants learn three overlapping pairwise associations in a ‘closed-loop’, but not when participants learn only two out of the three possible associations in an ‘open-loop’, suggesting that all pairwise associations between event-elements need to be explicitly encoded for a coherent event representation to emerge. Here I asked whether the associative structure formed at encoding affects how event-based memories are retained over a period of forgetting and consolidation. Recently formed representations are susceptible to forgetting via interference and/or decay, but also undergo memory consolidation; becoming less susceptible to interference and/or decay. As such, retention for an event-based representation will reflect an interaction between forgetting and consolidation. This thesis presents evidence that closed-loops tend to be forgotten in an all-or-none manner, such that closed-loops are more likely to either be retained or forgotten in their entirety. In contrast, open-loops are associated with a more asymmetrical pattern of forgetting as a function of memory reactivation during sleep. Further, the thesis presents fMRI evidence that closed-loops continue to be retrieved in a coherent manner following a period of forgetting and consolidation. These findings suggest that the associative structure formed at encoding has a lasting impact on the coherence of the underlying memory representation