Systematic review of antiepileptic drugs’ safety and effectiveness in feline epilepsy

Understanding the efficacy and safety profile of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) in feline epilepsy is a crucial consideration for managing this important brain disease. However, there is a lack of information about the treatment of feline epilepsy and therefore a systematic review was constructed to assess current evidence for the AEDs’ efficacy and tolerability in cats. The methods and materials of our former systematic reviews in canine epilepsy were mostly mirrored for the current systematic review in cats. Databases of PubMed, CAB Direct and Google scholar were searched to detect peer-reviewed studies reporting efficacy and/or adverse effects of AEDs in cats. The studies were assessed with regards to their quality of evidence, i.e. study design, study population, diagnostic criteria and overall risk of bias and the outcome measures reported, i.e. prevalence and 95% confidence interval of the successful and affected population in each study and in total

An ordinal game theory approach to the analysis and selection of partners in public:Private partnership projects

Nowadays, public–private partnership projects have become a standard for delivering public services in both developed and developing countries. In this paper, we are concerned with the analysis of private sector proposals and the selection of the private sector partner to whom to award the contract. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been addressed within a game theory framework. To fill this gap, we model this decision problem as a static non-cooperative game of complete information and propose a new ordinal game theory algorithm for finding an optimal generalized Nash equilibrium. The proposed algorithm determines a single ranking of proposals or bidders that takes account of multiple performance criteria and reflects both the public sector and the private sector perspectives, and can handle any number of private sector players and any number of contractual terms. An illustrative scenario is provided to guide the reader through the workings of the proposed ordinal game theory algorithm. The proposed ordinal game theory-based analysis framework can be used by the private sector to analyse any set of potential proposals most likely to be submitted by bidders and to assist with the choice of bidding strategies, and by the public sector player to analyse any set of potential proposals most likely to be submitted under any set of contractual terms and to assist with the choice of a realistic set of contractual terms and their performance measures

Information trading by corporate insiders based on accounting accruals: forecasting economic performance

In this paper, we test whether directors' (corporate insiders) trading in Australia, based on accounting accruals, provides incremental information in forecasting a firm's economic performance. We determine that directors' trading on negative accruals in larger firms has greater forecasting content and is associated with 1-year-ahead bull market phases. Moreover, arbitrage portfolios set up to mimic insider trading can earn 1-year-ahead excess size-adjusted arbitrage returns of up to 12.2 per cent. Results are consistent with directors hiding their trades in liquid well-traded firms and in providing incremental information above that supplied by a continuous information regime. Copyright (c) The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2006 AFAANZ.

Synaptic connectivity and computation

A new study finds two classes of synapses between layer 2/3 neurons in auditory cortex, and suggests they nay be involved in processing transient versus sustained acoustic stimuli

The Credit Crunch and Insider Training

This paper examines the behaviour and information content of insiders’ trades before and after the credit crunch and, in particular, examines the extent to which some insiders anticipated the market crash and took action to protect their positions. In part, the market crash was brought about by the excessive borrowing of financial institutions. Our results point to the view that a number of insiders, primarily directors, were aware that the excessive use of leverage by financial institutions would ultimately have a detrimental impact on the economy. These insiders acted by selling their shares prior to the market collapse and subsequently buying them back at a lower price. Supportive evidence for the above view is provided through both graphical evidence and regression analysis. In particular, we demonstrate a link between insider behaviour and the rapid decline in share values. Further evidence is also provided of a link between insider behaviour and future risk as measured by the CDS premium. In short, we argue that this selling was not motivated by liquidity or other contrarian strategies but was a result of understanding how higher levels of leverage and excessive trading in new risky derivatives could lead to higher levels of risk, an insight possessed only by a subset of insiders

To Trade or Not to Trade: The Strategic Trading of Insiders around News Announcements

We argue that insiders' decisions to trade in short windows before news announcements are likely to result from a trade-off between the incentives to capitalize on the foreknowledge of the disclosure and the risk of regulatory scrutiny and reputation loss. We provide evidence that the decision of insiders to buy is driven by this trade-off. We show that insiders strategically choose the amount of shares bought ahead of good news announcements, as they increase their purchases when the price impact of the news goes up, but the amount of shares purchased levels off as the news becomes extreme. In contrast, their sell trades are primarily influenced by the deterring effect of the regulatory and reputation risks, as the probability of their sell trades decreases significantly with the price impact of the forthcoming bad news. To further support our arguments on the importance of incentives and disincentives to trade, we show that the strategic trading is mainly observed in the most price-sensitive groups of news announcements, and is clearly pronounced for best informed executives (CEOs), and that the trading patterns change with changes in regulations, and insiders with higher reputational risk limit their trading ahead of bad news. Copyright (c) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Insiders' Market Timing and Real Activity: Evidence from an Emerging Market

Earlier research on insider trading has documented unequivocally that officers, directors and controlling shareholders are in possession of valuable private information and exploit it profitably in security trading.1 It is widely believed that the apparent informational asymmetry arises from the foreknowledge of public disclosures. Consequently, a number of studies have investigated the intensity of insider trading prior to corporate events, such as takeover bids (Seyhun, 1990), dividend and earnings announcements (John and Lang, 1991; Ke, Huddart and Petroni, 2003), stock repurchases (Lee, Mikkelson and Partch, 1992), or bankruptcies (Seyhun and Bradley, 1997)