Is there an accruals or a cash flow anomaly in UK stock returns?

In this paper, we apply a modified version of the Mishkin (1983) test to companies in the UK stock market in order to investigate the presence of accruals and cash flow effects on UK firms’ annual returns. First, we find that accruals decile rankings have U-shaped, or inverted U-shaped, or no relationships with most of the risk variables. Accruals decile rankings have, however, a negative relationship with the ratio of research and development to market value which is known to have a positive relationship with returns. Second, regarding the relationship between risk controls and returns, we find evidence associated with an RD effect and some evidence in favour of earnings-price and past return effects. We find little evidence of firm size, book to-market, and firm leverage effects, once the other variables are controlled for. Third, for the period 1990-2007, we report little evidence of general accruals mispricing in the UK in which accruals have a negative relationship with future returns, once risk has been accounted for. Additionally, after treatment of extreme observations, evidence of cash flow mispricing is found for the UK stock market. An alternative interpretation of our results is that there is no separate accruals effect, at least in the way predicted by the conventional mispricing stories, once other effects are taken into account, but there is a separate cash flow effect.Accruals anomaly, accrual based accounting, cash flows, financial statement analysis

A helmet mounted display to adapt the telerobotic environment to human vision

A Helmet Mounted Display system has been developed. It provides the capability to display stereo images with the viewpoint tied to subjects' head orientation. The type of display might be useful in a telerobotic environment provided the correct operating parameters are known. The effects of update frequency were tested using a 3D tracking task. The effects of blur were tested using both tracking and pick-and-place tasks. For both, researchers found that operator performance can be degraded if the correct parameters are not used. Researchers are also using the display to explore the use of head movements as part of gaze as subjects search their visual field for target objects

The Stellar Mass Density at z~6 from Spitzer Imaging of i-drop Galaxies

We measure the ages, stellar masses, and star formation histories of z~6 galaxies, observed within 1Gyr of the Big Bang. We use imaging from HST and Spitzer from the public "Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey", coupled with ground-based near-infrared imaging, to measure the spectral energy distributions from 0.8-5microns, spanning the rest-frame UV and optical. From our sample of ~50 i-drop Lyman-break star-forming galaxies in GOODS-South with z'(AB)<27mag, we focus on ~30 with reliable photometric or spectroscopic redshifts. Half of these are confused with foreground sources at Spitzer resolution, but from the 16 with clean photometry we find that a surprisingly large fraction (40%) have evidence for substantial Balmer-breaks. This indicates the presence of old underlying stellar populations that dominate the stellar masses. For these objects, we find ages of 200-700Myr, implying formation redshifts of 7<z<14, and large stellar masses in the range 1-3x10^10M_sun. Analysis of 7 i-drops that are undetected at 3.6microns indicates that these are younger, considerably less massive systems. We calculate that line contamination should not severely affect our photometry or derived results. Using data out to 8microns, we find little evidence for substantial intrinsic dust reddening. Correcting for incompleteness in our sample, we find a lower limit on the comoving stellar mass density at z~6 to be 2.5x10^6M_sun/Mpc^3. We are able to explore the star formation histories of our selected galaxies, and we infer that the past global star formation rate may have been much higher than that observed at z~6. The associated UV flux we infer at z>7 could have played a major role in reionizing the universe.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Minor changes in response to referee repor

Discovery of a possibly old galaxy at z=6.027z=6.027, multiply imaged by the massive cluster Abell 383

We report the discovery of a unique $z=6.027$ galaxy, multiply imaged by the cluster Abell 383 and detected in new Hubble Space Telescope ACS and WFC3 imaging, as well as in Warm Spitzer observations. This galaxy was selected as a pair of i-dropouts; its suspected high redshift was confirmed by the measurement of a strong Lyman-alpha line in both images using Keck/DEIMOS. Combining Hubble and Spitzer photometry after correcting for contamination by line emission (estimated to be a small effect), we identify a strong Balmer break of 1.5 magnitudes. Taking into account the magnification factor of 11.4+/-1.9 (2.65+/-0.17 mag) for the brightest image, the unlensed AB magnitude for the source is 27.2+/-0.05 in the H band, corresponding to a 0.4 L* galaxy, and 25.7+/-0.08 at 3.6 um. The UV slope is consistent with beta~2.0, and from the rest-frame UV continuum we measure a current star formation rate of 2.4+/-1.1 Msol/yr. The unlensed half-light radius is measured to be 300 pc, from which we deduce a star-forming surface density of ~10 Msol/yr/kpc2. The Lyman-alpha emission is found to be extended over ~3" along the slit, corresponding to ~5 kpc in the source plane. This can be explained by the presence of a much larger envelope of neutral hydrogen around the star-forming region. Finally, fitting the spectral energy distribution using 7 photometric data points with simple SED models, we derive the following properties: very little reddening, an inferred stellar mass of M*=6e9 Msol, and an inferred age of ~800 Myrs (corresponding to a redshift of formation of ~18). The star-formation rate of this object was likely much stronger in the past than at the time of observation, suggesting that we may be missing a fraction of galaxies at z~6 which have already faded in rest-frame UV wavelengths.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, MNRAS in press, replaced with accepted version including minor comment

Session D, 2016 Second Place: Plankton: I don\u27t know, I didn\u27t think we\u27d get this far

At the Cranberry Lake Biological Station, motorboats are used daily in order to allow students to observe the natural environment around them by conducting research, making observations and exploring. Zooplankton are an essential part of the Cranberry lake food chain, and high amounts of boat traffic may negatively affect their abundance in the water. Due to the varying degrees of gas levels in the lake, it is hypothesized that zooplankton from the marina will have lower percent mortality than the zooplankton from the swimming dock in the presence of gasoline (µL-1). Zooplankton samples were collected from the swimming dock and the marina. Water samples were then collected from Sucker Brook, the swimming dock, and the marina and used to compare the percent mortality between the zooplankton from the marina versus the dock. The experimental groups were exposed to 100 µL-1 gasoline, and both control and experimental groups were allowed to sit for 20 minutes. At the end of the twenty minute treatments, the number of alive and dead zooplankton were counted; twelve replications of this were completed. Statistical analysis will include ANOVA and paired t-tests. It is predicted that mortality rates of the marina plankton will be significantly less than dock plankton in all treatments

Got Bounded Rationality and Political Gridlock? There\u27s a Loan Disclosure Hack for That

For decades, Congress has primarily relied upon the use of mandatory disclosure forms to protect consumers from entering into ill-advised loans by disclosing the terms of an offered loan before the borrower enters into it. This policy is not likely to change any time soon due to congressional gridlock. Frustratingly, despite improvements, consumers still have difficulties using these forms to obtain the key information and data they need to make wise decisions. These disclosures contain a great deal of information, and assume that consumers are capable of reading, understanding, and using all of it. Contrary to this assumption, research on the cognitive science of decision-making has repeatedly demonstrated that the amount of information that consumers can absorb and use is very limited (a phenomenon called “bounded rationality”). To overcome the limitations of bounded rationality, disclosures should engage consumers, focus their attentions on the most important information, and be tailored to their individual situations. In this Article, we propose online, individualized, and interactive disclosures that are data-based to address these and other limitations of current disclosures. These interactive, data-based disclosures can be implemented by government agencies without congressional action, thereby sidestepping the current congressional gridlock. Consumers would interact with these disclosures by entering information that is needed to individualize the information presented in the disclosure to their personal situations. For example, such interactive features should allow consumers to see how their APRs—the prices of their loans—change based on how long they hold loans. Such interactive features might also allow consumers to see how the APRs of their loan offers compare with average APRs for others with their credit score, thereby enabling borrowers to gain a sense of whether loan offers are the lowest-priced and most suitable loans that they can qualify for. We report the results of an experiment that we ran on both experienced home-loan borrowers and less experienced consumers designed to test a specific example of how these disclosures can be made interactive, individualized, and able to respect consumers’ bounded rationality. We describe how making disclosures online, individualized, interactive, and data-based can be incorporated into other important aspects of home-loan decision-making, as well as student loan decision-making to better enable student-loan consumers to make rational, wealth maximizing decisions on student-loan offers