Pan-European grading scales: lessons from national systems and the ECTS

This article assesses the impact of the Bologna Process on the grading schemes of EU member countries. In light of some problems regarding the implementation of the European Credit Transfer system (ECTS), the author proposes further reforms and offers some elements of a unified grading system for European higher education. The author explores the variation among Europe’s grading systems and the resulting lessons learned are shared here. Lastly, this article also argues that principles of justice and fairness, deemed central to academic freedom, are best upheld by the use of a unified grading system at national and European levels

The Simplicity of Optimal Trading in Order Book Markets

A trader’s execution strategy has a large effect on his profits. Identifying an optimal strategy, however, is often frustrated by the complexity of market microstructures. We analyse an order book based on continuous double auction market under two different models of trader’s behaviour. In the first case actions only depend on a linear combination of the best bid and ask. In the second model, traders adopt the Markov perfect equilibrium strategies of the trading game. Both models are analytically intractable, and so optimal strategies are identified by the use of numerical techniques. Using the Markov model we show that, beyond the best quotes, additional information has little effect on either the behaviour of traders or the dynamics of the market. The remarkable similarity of the results obtained by the linear model indicates that the optimal strategy may be reasonably approximated by a linear function. We conclude that while the order book market and strategy space of traders are potentially very large and complex, optimal strategies may be relatively simple and based on a minimal information set

Dataflow/Actor-Oriented language for the design of complex signal processing systems

Signal processing algorithms become more and more complex and the algorithm architecture adaptation and design processes cannot any longer rely only on the intuition of the designers to build efficient systems. Specific tools and methods are needed to cope with the increasing complexity of both algorithms and platforms. This paper presents a new framework which allows the specification, design, simulation and implementation of a system operating at a higher level of abstraction compared to current approaches. The framework is base on the usage of a new actor/dataflow oriented language called CAL. Such language has been specifically designed for modelling complex signal processing systems. CAL data flow models expose the intrinsic concurrency of the algorithms by employing the notions of actor programming and dataflow. Concurrency and parallelism are very important aspects of embedded system design as we enter in the multicore era. The design framework is composed by a simulation platform and by Cal2C and CAL2HDL code generators. This paper described in details the principles on which such code generators are based and shows how efficient software (C) and hardware (VHDL and Verilog) code can be generated by appropriate CAL models. Results on a real design case, a MPEG-4 Simple Profile decoder, show that systems obtained with the hardware code generator outperform the hand written VHDL version both in terms of performance and resource usage. Concerning the C code generator results, the results show that the synthesized C-software mapped on a SystemC scheduler platform, is much faster than the simulated CAL dataflow program and approaches handwritten C versions

Hedging Labor Income Risk

We use a detailed panel data set of Swedish households to investigate the relation between their labor income risk and financial investment decisions. In particular, we relate changes in wage volatility to changes in the portfolio holdings for households that switched industries between 1999 and 2002. We find that households do adjust their portfolio holdings when switching jobs, which is consistent with the idea that households hedge their human capital risk in the stock market. The results are statistically and economically significant. A household going from an industry with low wage volatility to one with high volatility will ceteris paribus decrease its portfolio share of risky assets by up to 35%, or USD 15,575

Limit Order Flow, Market Impact and Optimal Order Sizes: Evidence from NASDAQ TotalView-ITCH Data

In this paper, we provide new empirical evidence on order submission activity and price impacts of limit orders at NASDAQ. Employing NASDAQ TotalView-ITCH data, we find that market participants dominantly submit limit orders with sizes equal to a round lot. Most limit orders are canceled almost immediately after submission if not getting executed. Moreover, only very few market orders walk through the book, i.e., directly move the best ask or bid quote. Estimates of impulse-response functions on the basis of a cointegrated VAR model for quotes and market depth allow us to quantify the market impact of incoming limit orders. We propose a method to predict the optimal size of a limit order conditional on its position in the book and a given fixed level of expected market impact

Price efficiency and trading behavior in limit order markets with competing insiders

We study price efficiency and trading behavior in laboratory limit order markets with asymmetrically informed traders. Markets differ in the number of insiders present and in the subset of traders who receive information about the number of insiders present. We observe that price efficiency (i) is the higher the higher the number of insiders in the market but (ii) is unaffected by changes in the subset of traders who know about the number of insiders present. (iii) Independent of the number ofinsiders, price efficiency increases gradually over time. (iv) The insiders' information is reflected in prices via limit (market) orders if the asset's value is inside (outside) the bid-ask spread. (v) In situations where limit and market orders yield positive profits, insiders clearly prefer market orders, indicating a strong desire for immediate transactions