1,151 research outputs found
Landscape Evolution and Human Settlement Patterns on Ofu Island, Manu’a Group, American Samoa
This study summarizes the impacts of geomorphological processes on human settlement strategies on the island of Ofu in the Samoan Archipelago from island colonization to permanent settlement in the interior uplands (c. 2700–900 b.p.). Previous archaeological research on Ofu has documented a dynamic coastal landscape at one location, To’aga, on the southern coast. Using a new geoarchaeological data set, our study extends this assessment to a site on the western coast of the island. We conclude that although the sequence of coastal evolution is broadly consistent between the two areas there are also differences indicating that island-wide coastal evolution did not progress everywhere at the same rate. Using this data set, we record changes in human settlement patterns temporally correlated with coastal progradation—perhaps related to continued drawdown from the mid-Holocene sea-level highstand—and sediment aggradation. We suggest that coastal landscape change on Ofu may have been one factor in the expansion of the terrestrial component of the human subsistence base and the more intensive use of the interior uplands of the island. The timing of this settlement change was slightly earlier than elsewhere in the region, demonstrating the variability of human response to regional-scale environmental changes
Impact of Investor's Varying Risk Aversion on the Dynamics of Asset Price Fluctuations
While the investors' responses to price changes and their price forecasts are
well accepted major factors contributing to large price fluctuations in
financial markets, our study shows that investors' heterogeneous and dynamic
risk aversion (DRA) preferences may play a more critical role in the dynamics
of asset price fluctuations. We propose and study a model of an artificial
stock market consisting of heterogeneous agents with DRA, and we find that DRA
is the main driving force for excess price fluctuations and the associated
volatility clustering. We employ a popular power utility function,
with agent specific and
time-dependent risk aversion index, , and we derive an approximate
formula for the demand function and aggregate price setting equation. The
dynamics of each agent's risk aversion index, (i=1,2,...,N), is
modeled by a bounded random walk with a constant variance . We show
numerically that our model reproduces most of the ``stylized'' facts observed
in the real data, suggesting that dynamic risk aversion is a key mechanism for
the emergence of these stylized facts.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure
The US stock market leads the Federal funds rate and Treasury bond yields
Using a recently introduced method to quantify the time varying lead-lag
dependencies between pairs of economic time series (the thermal optimal path
method), we test two fundamental tenets of the theory of fixed income: (i) the
stock market variations and the yield changes should be anti-correlated; (ii)
the change in central bank rates, as a proxy of the monetary policy of the
central bank, should be a predictor of the future stock market direction. Using
both monthly and weekly data, we found very similar lead-lag dependence between
the S&P500 stock market index and the yields of bonds inside two groups: bond
yields of short-term maturities (Federal funds rate (FFR), 3M, 6M, 1Y, 2Y, and
3Y) and bond yields of long-term maturities (5Y, 7Y, 10Y, and 20Y). In all
cases, we observe the opposite of (i) and (ii). First, the stock market and
yields move in the same direction. Second, the stock market leads the yields,
including and especially the FFR. Moreover, we find that the short-term yields
in the first group lead the long-term yields in the second group before the
financial crisis that started mid-2007 and the inverse relationship holds
afterwards. These results suggest that the Federal Reserve is increasingly
mindful of the stock market behavior, seen at key to the recovery and health of
the economy. Long-term investors seem also to have been more reactive and
mindful of the signals provided by the financial stock markets than the Federal
Reserve itself after the start of the financial crisis. The lead of the S&P500
stock market index over the bond yields of all maturities is confirmed by the
traditional lagged cross-correlation analysis.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl
Scaling of the distribution of fluctuations of financial market indices
We study the distribution of fluctuations over a time scale (i.e.,
the returns) of the S&P 500 index by analyzing three distinct databases.
Database (i) contains approximately 1 million records sampled at 1 min
intervals for the 13-year period 1984-1996, database (ii) contains 8686 daily
records for the 35-year period 1962-1996, and database (iii) contains 852
monthly records for the 71-year period 1926-1996. We compute the probability
distributions of returns over a time scale , where varies
approximately over a factor of 10^4 - from 1 min up to more than 1 month. We
find that the distributions for 4 days (1560 mins) are
consistent with a power-law asymptotic behavior, characterized by an exponent
, well outside the stable L\'evy regime . To
test the robustness of the S&P result, we perform a parallel analysis on two
other financial market indices. Database (iv) contains 3560 daily records of
the NIKKEI index for the 14-year period 1984-97, and database (v) contains 4649
daily records of the Hang-Seng index for the 18-year period 1980-97. We find
estimates of consistent with those describing the distribution of S&P
500 daily-returns. One possible reason for the scaling of these distributions
is the long persistence of the autocorrelation function of the volatility. For
time scales longer than days, our results are
consistent with slow convergence to Gaussian behavior.Comment: 12 pages in multicol LaTeX format with 27 postscript figures
(Submitted to PRE May 20, 1999). See
http://polymer.bu.edu/~amaral/Professional.html for more of our work on this
are
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