Understanding aggregate default rates of high yield bonds

The New York-New Jersey region's hard-earned recovery in employment is being overshadowed by ongoing job losses in certain sectors and the prospect of moderating growth in the United States as a whole. Fortunately, several positive trends are bolstering the region's employment picture. Strength in the services sector, a falloff in restructuring, and gains in income point to continuing--though modest--regional job growth in 1996.Bonds

Market returns and mutual fund flows

With the increased popularity of mutual funds come increased concerns. Namely, could a sharp drop in stock and bond prices set off a cascade of redemptions by mutual fund investors and could the redemptions exert further downward pressure on asset markets? The authors analyze this relationship by using instrumental variables--a measuring technique previously unapplied to market returns and mutual fund flows--to determine the effect of returns on flows. Despite market observers' fears of a downward spiral in asset prices, the authors conclude that the short-term effect of market returns on mutual fund flows typically has been too weak to sustain such a spiral.Mutual funds ; Stock - Prices

Fatum ad Benedictum: Moscow-Petushki, Homo Sovieticus, Postmodernism and the Fatidic post-Soviet Irony of Venedikt Vasilevich Erofeev

The following honors thesis is structured into two parts, four chapters apiece. The first part is a philological study of the Soviet dissident and writer Venedikt Vasilevich Erofeev’s magnum opus, Moscow-Petushki (1969-70). This half of the thesis investigates Petushki in light of its thematic development of fate, or, more particularly, the fate of homo sovieticus—the ironic term devised by Soviet sociologist Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922-2006) to describe a typical conformist citizen of the Soviet Union. I will focus predominantly on Petushki’s connection to the end of the Khrushchev “Thaw” in the early-mid-1960s and the beginning of Brezhnev “Stagnation” in the late-1960s, and will explore the work\u27s engagement with postmodernism. The second part of my honors thesis is an extension of the first. In this section, I reconstruct and analyze the “Kolomna period” of Erofeev’s life and career (ca. 1962-1963), during which he matriculated at the local Kolomensky Pedinstitute and later, following his expulsion, worked as a truck driver and in mass retail. I posit Kolomna as a watershed in Erofeev’s biography. This period saw the end of his university studies and the beginning of the “living large” (what he would name his “ochen’ zhiznennii put’”) that characterized his existence up until his death in 1990 of lung cancer. After Kolomna Erofeev’s life was marked by increasingly destructive bouts of alcoholism and smoking, extensive peregrinations through the former Soviet Union (largely undertaken sans propiska, or mandatory residence permit), and, most of all, the freer form of writing that culminated artistically in Moscow-Petushki. This part of my analysis asserts a link between the fate of Venichka, the notorious erudite drunk of Moscow-Petushki, and that of Venedikt Erofeev, its controversial author. Although not a single journal or piece of writing by Erofeev from this period is extant, I nonetheless maintain that there is a body of evidence that allows us to piece together a provisional reconstruction of Erofeev’s life as he lived it in Kolomna during 1962-1963. The hands-on, on-site research that I conducted for part two took as its starting point the ostensibly “semi-autobiographical” nature of Erofeev’s poem-in-prose. Furthermore, in this second half of the honors thesis I curate and analyze materials from the museum and artcommune “Erofeev and Others” and from the seventh annual Kolomna apple and book fair “Antonov’s Apples.” I also transcribe and analyze interviews taken with knowledgeable sources on Erofeev: a local Kolomna poet, Aleksei Makeev, and the chief executor of Erofeev’s literary legacy and wife of his son, Galina Erofeeva. For the materials from the museum and festival, I include a set of pictures underscored by captioned analyses; for the materials from the interviews, I provide a written transcription interspersed with authorial commentary. I collected these materials during a seven-week stay in the city during the autumn of 2018, and have reprinted or recreated them with the express permission of the city of Kolomna, as well as the specific personages they concern. For additional biographical and literary cultural information, I also rely on published recorded interviews with Erofeev and the journals he kept throughout the 1960s. These can be found on the official Erofeev website, which contains information on his entire œuvre to date

The Sporadic Meteoroid Complex and Spacecraft Risk

The meteoroid population in near-Earth space is typically broken down into two components: shower meteoroids which orbit in collimated streams, and the older sporadic meteoroids which have been dispersed into a much broader uncollimated distribution of orbits. The sporadic meteors dominate the meteoroid flux at Earth in the size range of those particles of the most of the risk to spacecraft (approximately 100 microns to 1 cm). We describe the results of numerical simulations of the sporadic meteoroid complex by full physical modeling of meteoroids from ejection from their parent body through their perturbation by planets and radiation forces though the end of their lives through collision or ejection from the solar system. This model together with comparison with optical and radar measurements of meteoroid fluxes in near Earth space will allow improved assessment of the risk to spacecraft in near-Earth space from the sporadic complex

The Risk-Return Attributes of International Real Estate Equities

This paper examines the risk and return attributes of international real estate equities over the 1980-1988 time period. The empirical results indicate that international real estate equities offer higher returns as well as greater total and systematic risk than U.S.-based REITs. The results also indicate that international real estate equities are weakly positively correlated with the return on REITs. International real estate equities achieve higher values for both the Treynor and Jensen measures than either the S&P 500 Index or the World Equities Index. International real estate equities also outperform domestic real estate companies on a risk-adjusted basis. However, international real estate equities underperform the World Equities Index using the Sharpe Index which suggests that international real estate equities carry significant unsystematic risk.

Antiinflammatory effects of dexamethasone are partly dependent on induction of dual specificity phosphatase 1

Glucocorticoids (GCs), which are used in the treatment of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, inhibit the expression of many inflammatory mediators. They can also induce the expression of dual specificity phosphatase 1 (DUSP1; otherwise known as mitogen-activated protein kinase [MAPK] phosphatase 1), which dephosphorylates and inactivates MAPKs. We investigated the role of DUSP1 in the antiinflammatory action of the GC dexamethasone (Dex). Dex-mediated inhibition of c-Jun N-terminal kinase and p38 MAPK was abrogated in DUSP1−/− mouse macrophages. Dex-mediated suppression of several proinflammatory genes (including tumor necrosis factor, cyclooxygenase 2, and interleukin 1α and 1β) was impaired in DUSP1−/− mouse macrophages, whereas other proinflammatory genes were inhibited by Dex in a DUSP1-independent manner. In vivo antiinflammatory effects of Dex on zymosan-induced inflammation were impaired in DUSP1−/− mice. Therefore, the expression of DUSP1 is required for the inhibition of proinflammatory signaling pathways by Dex in mouse macrophages. Furthermore, DUSP1 contributes to the antiinflammatory effects of Dex in vitro and in vivo

5-Fluorouracil-induced cardiotoxicity mimicking myocardial infarction: a case report

BACKGROUND: Severe cardiotoxicity is a documented, but very unusual side-effect of intravenous 5-fluorouracil therapy. The mechanism producing cardiotoxicity is poorly understood. CASE PRESENTATION: A case of 5-fluorouracil-induced cardiotoxicity, possibly due to coronary artery spasm, and mimicking acute anterolateral myocardial infarction is presented and discussed. Electrocardiographs highlighting the severity of the presentation are included in the report along with coronary angiograms demonstrating the absence of significant coronary atherosclerosis. CONCLUSION: Severe 5-fluorouracil-induced cardiotoxicity is rare, but can be severe and may mimic acute myocardial infarction, leading to diagnostic and therapeutic dilemmas. Readministration of 5-fluorouracil is not advised following an episode of cardiotoxicity

Money for Nothing? A Call for Empirical Evaluation of Biodiversity Conservation Investments

The field of conservation policy must adopt state-of-the-art program evaluation methods to determine what works, and when, if we are to stem the global decline of biodiversity and improve the effectiveness of conservation investments