Municipal Bonds And Tax Arbitrage: A Cointegration Analysis

This article presents a new, cointegration approach to test a tax arbitrage opportunity in holding municipal bonds. Noticing that the variables of interest are nonstationary, two alternative cointegration tests are used to examine the relationship that may exist (1) between the yield on municipal bonds and the after-tax yield on corporate bonds and (2) between the explicit tax rate on corporate bonds and the implicit tax rate on municipal bonds. Previous studies do not take into account the time-series properties of the variables involved, assuming tacitly that they are stationary. Weekly bond yield data together with New Jersey and federal income tax rates are used, and various unit root and cointegration tests are employed to test for stationarity and for cointegration between the variables. The evidence fails to support the tax arbitrage hypothesis

Large-scale cross-societal examination of real- and minimal-group biases

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains unclear. This registered report focuses on three questions. First, how culturally prevalent is the MGE? Second, how do critical cultural and individual factors moderate its strength? Third, does the MGE meaningfully relate to culturally salient real-world ingroup biases? We compare the MGE to bias in favor of a family member (first cousin) and a national ingroup member. We propose to recruit a sample of > 200 participants in each of > 50 nations to examine these questions and advance our understanding of the psychological foundations and cultural prevalence of ingroup bias

Genomic analysis of sewage from 101 countries reveals global landscape of antimicrobial resistance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major threat to global health. Understanding the emergence, evolution, and transmission of individual antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) is essential to develop sustainable strategies combatting this threat. Here, we use metagenomic sequencing to analyse ARGs in 757 sewage samples from 243 cities in 101 countries, collected from 2016 to 2019. We find regional patterns in resistomes, and these differ between subsets corresponding to drug classes and are partly driven by taxonomic variation. The genetic environments of 49 common ARGs are highly diverse, with most common ARGs carried by multiple distinct genomic contexts globally and sometimes on plasmids. Analysis of flanking sequence revealed ARG-specific patterns of dispersal limitation and global transmission. Our data furthermore suggest certain geographies are more prone to transmission events and should receive additional attention