Multiple interspecies recombination events within RNA2 of Grapevine fanleaf virus and Arabis mosaic virus

Sequence alignments and SISCAN analyses inferred multiple interspecies recombination events within RNA2 of strains GHu of Grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV) and Ta of Arabis mosaic virus (ArMV), two closely related subgroup A nepoviruses in the family Comoviridae. Interspecies recombination events were identified in the 5′ untranslated region, the putative homing protein and movement protein genes but not in the coat protein gene and 3′ untranslated region. These findings suggest a dynamic relationship between GFLV and ArMV, and a differential selection pressure on RNA2-encoded proteins with constraints in terms of function and co-adaptation that limit interspecies recombination to certain gene segment

Gold and Inflation(s) - A Time-Varying Relationship

What is the relationship between the price of gold and inflation? How stable is it - over time and across measures of inflation? We examine this for three countries (the USA, the UK and Japan) over forty years and failure of rejecting the null-unit root hypothesis at with a variety of medicate statistical significance aasures of inflation and monetary liquidity. We apply a formal test for time variation and proceed to extract time varying cointegration relationships. Both formal and graphical evidence points to a break in the relationship(s) of gold and official inflation in the mid 1990s in the USA but to less clear results for the UK and Japan. However, gold seems to have offered a protection against an increase in money supply throughout nearly the entire past 40 year period in the US and the UK but failed to do so in Japan. Supporting previous findings we find evidence for a time-varying relationship in cointegration between gold and both predicted and realized inflation in nearly all cases. Contrasting multiple inflation indicators, we find evidence for the importance of money supply in the gold/inflation relationship

DETERMINANTS OF THE MAIZE BOARD-MILLER MARKETING MARGIN IN SOUTH AFRICA : 1977-1993

Determinants of the Maize Board - Miller (MBM) marketing margin for the period 1977-1993 (period defined by data limitations) are identified for a mark-up model using Three-Stage Least Squares Regression (3SLS) and Principal Component Analysis. The MBM margin was positively related to the real miller white maize meal selling price, real variable processing costs, and a change in Maize Board pricing policy after 1987

Bitcoin futures - what use are they?

Early analysis of Bitcoin concluded that it did not meet the economic conditions to be classified as a currency. Since this conclusion, interest in Bitcoin has increased substantially. We investigate whether the introduction of futures trading in Bitcoin is able to resolve the issues that stopped Bitcoin from being considered a currency. Our analysis shows that spot volatility has increased following the appearance of futures contracts, that futures contracts are not an effective hedging instrument, and that price discovery is driven by uninformed investors in the spot market. We therefore argue that the conclusion that Bitcoin is a speculative asset rather than a currency is not altered by the introduction of futures trading

A comparative and conceptual intellectual study of environmental topic in economic and finance

We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the past, present, and future development of environmental related topics in Economics and Finance. In this regard, Environmental Finance (EF)- and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)-related literature is collected and analysed. The paper draws chronical pictures of the topic development in these two recently developed fields by applying bibliometric methods. Then, we provide a novel systemic comparison on their main differences. Reviewing the top journal publications, we identify literature gaps for a future research agenda. In particular, on the one hand, for EF, we suggest exploring various financial innovations to generate environmental benefits research, and thus building up efficient regulatory framework for addressing major regional and/or global environmental issues. On the other hand, for ESG, we respectively provide potential research directions to conduct the cost-benefit study on the real impact of ESG disclosure and to evaluate how ESG investment strategy efficiently deliver sustainable development

A new attention proxy and order imbalance: Evidence from China

In this paper, we propose a new direct proxy for investors' attention in the Chinese stock market: daily abnormal reading quantity of each stock's posts on the Eastmoney guba website. Using A-shares samples of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, we find that our proposed proxy (i) is significantly correlated to existing attention proxies; (ii) leads to contemporarily high returns and long-time reversal; (iii) is related to heterogeneous trading behaviour of different investors. In summary, we add value to the field of investor attention approximation with a new and efficient measure that can be useful for guiding and modelling investor's tradin

An analysis of liquidity skewness for European sovereign bond markets

We examine liquidity skewness by providing an analysis of bid-ask spreads for a comprehensive high-frequency dataset comprising Eurozone countries’ sovereign bonds. European sovereign bond markets exhibited increasing positive skewness over the sample period which was most extreme for Greece, Ireland and Portugal. We argue that positive skewness reflects decreased liquidity during volatile periods. We also report negative skewness in 2007. This can be explained by a feature of the limit-order book rubric of the MTS market where market-makers can submit limit-orders that are more competitive than the current best-price to reduce unwanted inventory without having to execute a market-order

Did long-memory of liquidity signal the European sovereign debt crisis?

This paper analyses high frequency MTS data to comprehensively evaluate the liquidity of the European sovereign bond markets before and during the European sovereign debt crisis for eleven countries. The Hill index, Generalized Hurst exponent and Dynamic Conditional Score are employed to evaluate the properties of the bid-ask spread. Sovereign bonds exhibit the stylized facts reported for a range of financial markets. The 1-min interval analysis indicates the level of bid-ask spread exhibits long-memory and the change in bid-ask spread experiences volatility clustering. In a dynamic setting, the volatility of bid-ask spread also exhibits long-memory in most European sovereign bond markets across all three maturities. Long-memory effects diminish (disappear) for 5-min (15-min) interval, and for short-term maturity (peripheral countries) is stronger than long-term maturity (core countries). Analysis of sub-periods indicates that long-memory process reached its peak during European sovereign debt crisis from May 2010 to December 2011. This analysis suggests that estimating long-memory parameters for high-frequency data could be a useful tool to monitor market stability

Statistically robust representation and comparison of mortality profiles in archaeozoology

Archaeozoological mortality profiles have been used to infer site-specific subsistence strategies. There is however no common agreement on the best way to present these profiles and confidence intervals around age class proportions. In order to deal with these issues, we propose the use of the Dirichlet distribution and present a new approach to perform age-at-death multivariate graphical comparisons. We demonstrate the efficiency of this approach using domestic sheep/goat dental remains from 10 Cardial sites (Early Neolithic) located in South France and the Iberian Peninsula. We show that the Dirichlet distribution in age-at-death analysis can be used: (i) to generate Bayesian credible intervals around each age class of a mortality profile, even when not all age classes are observed; and (ii) to create 95% kernel density contours around each age-at-death frequency distribution when multiple sites are compared using correspondence analysis. The statistical procedure we present is applicable to the analysis of any categorical count data and particularly well-suited to archaeological data (e.g. potsherds, arrow heads) where sample sizes are typically small