Does Seasonality Change over the Business Cycle? An Investigation using Monthly Industrial Production Series

This paper examines the proposition that the business cycle affects seasonality in industrial production, with output being switched to the traditionally low production summer months when recent (annual) growth has been strong. This is investigated through the use of a restricted threshold autoregressive model for the monthly growth rate in a total of 74 industries from 16 OECD countries. Approximately one third of the series exhibit significant nonlinearity, with this nonlinearity predominantly associated with changes in the seasonal pattern. Estimates show that the summer slowdown in many European countries is substantially reduced when recent growth has been high.

Evidencia para la economía española de la hipótesis Ricardiana en un modelo estocástico intertemporal

The empirical study presented is based on an intertemporal optimisation model based in that of Aschauer (1985). The results obtained clearly reject the joint hypothesis Ricardian Equivalence/rational expectations. The lagged values of public consumption and public deficit help to explain significatively the private consumption's variations, even if we leave aside the possible relationships of those lagged values with the public consumption's predictions. The results are robust to different hypotheses concerning the arder of integration and existence of cointegrating relationships among the variables. On the other hand, there is evidence of complementarity rather than sustituibility between public and private consumption.El estudio empírico que hemos realizado se basa en un modelo de optimización intertemporal análogo al de Aschauer (1985). Los resultados obtenidos rechazan claramente la hipótesis ricardiana/expectativas racionales. Los valores retardados de consumo público y déficit ayudan a explicar significativamente las variaciones del consumo privado, al margen de sus posibles relaciones con las predicciones del consumo público. Los resultados son robustos a distintas hipótesis acerca del orden de integrabilidad y existencia de relaciones de cointegración entre las variables implicadas. Por otro lado, hay evidencia de complementariedad más que de sustituibilidad entre consumo público y privado

Outcomes from elective colorectal cancer surgery during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

This study aimed to describe the change in surgical practice and the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on mortality after surgical resection of colorectal cancer during the initial phases of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

Search for gravitational-lensing signatures in the full third observing run of the LIGO-Virgo network

Gravitational lensing by massive objects along the line of sight to the source causes distortions of gravitational wave-signals; such distortions may reveal information about fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics. In this work, we have extended the search for lensing signatures to all binary black hole events from the third observing run of the LIGO--Virgo network. We search for repeated signals from strong lensing by 1) performing targeted searches for subthreshold signals, 2) calculating the degree of overlap amongst the intrinsic parameters and sky location of pairs of signals, 3) comparing the similarities of the spectrograms amongst pairs of signals, and 4) performing dual-signal Bayesian analysis that takes into account selection effects and astrophysical knowledge. We also search for distortions to the gravitational waveform caused by 1) frequency-independent phase shifts in strongly lensed images, and 2) frequency-dependent modulation of the amplitude and phase due to point masses. None of these searches yields significant evidence for lensing. Finally, we use the non-detection of gravitational-wave lensing to constrain the lensing rate based on the latest merger-rate estimates and the fraction of dark matter composed of compact objects