Firm size and the pre- holiday effect in New Zealand

Using a sample spanning four decades, we document that the pre-holiday effect, one of the most common of the calendar effect anomalies, still exists in the New Zealand market. Contrary to international evidence, the effect appears to have increased over time. Moreover, we find that this effect is inversely related to firm size with the entire effect limited only to small firms, with no pre-holiday price patterns being observed for medium to large firms. The existence of this pre-holiday effect seems to be mainly driven by factors relevant to New Zealand. A search for possible reasons for the persistence of the effect points primarily towards the illiquidity of smaller stocks and the reluctance of small investors to buy prior to major market closures

GDP, share prices and share returns: Australian and New Zealand evidence

With the aim of predicting share market returns, many empirical studies have delved into how financial and macroeconomic variables can be used to forecast return variability. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the ratio of aggregate share price to GDP can capture the variation of future returns on the aggregate share market within Australia and New Zealand. Using quarterly and semi-annual data for the period 1991-2003 for New Zealand and 1982-2006 for Australia, this study finds that the ratio of share price to GDP indeed captures a significant amount of the variation of returns on the New Zealand share market as well as the Australian share market; however results for Australian data do vary, depending on the sample period. Results in this paper generally provide support for the theory behind previous papers, specifically that of Rangvid (2006)

A Computerized System to Solve Difficulties in Finding Medicines under the Medicine Shortages in Sri Lanka

Due to ongoing financial crisis in Sri Lanka, patients are starting to suffer from medicine shortages at an increasing rate. Patients are having to go to multiple pharmacies to find certain medicines which could result in health complications. Although e-pharmacy platforms provide the functionality to order medicines by uploading the prescription sheet, they do not provide alternatives on where to find the medicines that are not available in the pharmacy. This research introduces a new functionality to provide patients suggestion on where exactly to find missing medicines. This is found through checking the stock availability of the medicine in other pharmacies in sorted order with respect to the delivery location of the patient taken via Google map API to make the process much more efficient and practical. This is achieved by implementing a global identifier for each medicine where all pharmacies keep the records of the medicines in reference to the defined global identifier of that medicine. In addition to that, the system allows patients to view all the pharmacies nearest to their delivery location and give the freedom to place orders to whichever pharmacy they prefer. If a medicine is not available in the pharmacy which the order was placed for, the system will give suggestions to the patient on where exactly to buy the medicine

All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients with initial LIGO

We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in two sets of data collected by the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston detectors between November 5, 2005 and September 30, 2007, and July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010, with a total observational time of 283.0 days and 132.9 days, respectively. The search targets gravitational wave transients of duration 10-500 s in a frequency band of 40-1000 Hz, with minimal assumptions about the signal waveform, polarization, source direction, or time of occurrence. All candidate triggers were consistent with the expected background; as a result we set 90% confidence upper limits on the rate of long-duration gravitational wave transients for different types of gravitational wave signals. For signals from black hole accretion disk instabilities, we set upper limits on the source rate density between 3.4×10-5 and 9.4×10-4 Mpc-3 yr-1 at 90% confidence. These are the first results from an all-sky search for unmodeled long-duration transient gravitational waves. © 2016 American Physical Society

All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients with initial LIGO

We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in two sets of data collected by the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston detectors between November 5, 2005 and September 30, 2007, and July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010, with a total observational time of 283.0 days and 132.9 days, respectively. The search targets gravitational wave transients of duration 10-500 s in a frequency band of 40-1000 Hz, with minimal assumptions about the signal waveform, polarization, source direction, or time of occurrence. All candidate triggers were consistent with the expected background; as a result we set 90% confidence upper limits on the rate of long-duration gravitational wave transients for different types of gravitational wave signals. For signals from black hole accretion disk instabilities, we set upper limits on the source rate density between 3.4×10-5 and 9.4×10-4 Mpc-3 yr-1 at 90% confidence. These are the first results from an all-sky search for unmodeled long-duration transient gravitational waves. © 2016 American Physical Society