Short selling restrictions and index futures pricing: Evidence from China

© 2019 Elsevier Inc. This study examines the impact of short-selling restrictions on futures mispricing (relative to various benchmarks) in the market for CSI 300 index futures. In mid-2015, Chinese regulators imposed a new short-selling restriction in an attempt to curb excessive stock market volatility. Results show that futures under-pricing occurs more frequently at the transaction cost levels, ranging from 0 to 1.5%, while futures over-pricing occurs less frequently at the transaction cost levels from 0 to 0.75% under the new short sale rule. The results support the hypothesis that short-selling restrictions impose costs to the arbitrage trading strategies by arbitrageurs who do not own the underlying assets in the presence of futures under-pricing (or over-pricing of the underlying assets), resulting in more persistent futures under-pricing

Probiotics for Preventing Cognitive Impairment in Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive and irreversible neurodegenerative disease that results in gradual cognitive impairment and eventually leads to dementia. However, despite AD being one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases in aging societies, no clinically successful therapeutic strategies for its treatment or prevention have been reported to date. Studies have indicated that gut microbial alterations are linked to AD. Probiotics are living microorganisms that are known to confer health benefits to the host when ingested in adequate amounts. Certain strains of probiotics appear to influence the central nervous system (CNS) and behavior via the microbiota-gut-brain axis. Increasing evidence from preclinical and clinical studies has demonstrated that probiotics possess preventive as well as therapeutic potential for AD. It is speculated that probiotics could ameliorate the progression of AD by modulating the inflammatory process, counteracting oxidative stress, and other possible mechanisms, although further studies are needed to understand the details. In this chapter, we will highlight the current understandings of the effects as well as the possible mechanisms of action of probiotics for preventing cognitive impairment in AD

Serum Cystatin C, Markers of Chronic Kidney Disease, and Retinopathy in Persons with Diabetes

Purpose. We examined the association of CKD defined by serum creatinine, serum cystatin C, and albuminuria with moderate diabetic retinopathy (DR). Methods. We examined 1,119 Indian adults with diabetes, aged 40–80 years, who participated in the Singapore Indian Eye Study (2007–2009), a population-based cross-sectional study. The associations of CKD defined by each of the three markers alone and in combination with moderate DR were examined using logistic regression models adjusted for potential confounding factors including duration of diabetes, smoking, body mass index, systolic blood pressure, and HbA1c. Results. The prevalence of moderate DR was significantly higher among those with CKD defined by triple markers (41.1%) compared to CKD defined separately by creatinine (26.6%), cystatin C (20.9%), and albuminuria (23.4%). People with CKD defined by triple markers had a fourteenfold higher odds of moderate DR (OR (95% CI) = 13.63 (6.08–30.54)) compared to those without CKD by any marker. Nearly half (48.7%) of participants with cystatin C ≥ 1.12 mg/L have moderate DR. Conclusions. CKD defined by a triple marker panel was strongly associated with moderate DR in this Asian population with diabetes

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Matching the \u27knowing what to do\u27 and the \u27doing what you know\u27 in ethical decision-making

Corporate events in the past decades have contributed to a continued interest in the ethical decision-making of individuals in accounting. Much of the research in ethics and education have relied on the assumption that the individual’s level of ethical development is related to his/her ethical behavior. Adapting a simplified version of Thorne’s (2000) prescriptive/deliberative reasoning in a cheat-to-gain business scenario, a survey of accounting students suggest that ethical development may not be related to behavior. In addition, consistent with Thorne (2001), results suggest that even if individuals may ‘know what to do’ for the ideal ethical decision, they may not always actually choose that path or ‘doing what they know’

The impact of market microstructure on the operation and regulation of international stock exchange

This dissertation examines several market microstructure issues of potential interest to regulators and operators of stock exchanges internationally. This research provides empirical evidence on how changes to the market microstructure of securities affect market quality, the importance of information disclosures to market participants and the relationship between cross-border exchanges that offer dual-listed derivatives. Each chapter addresses a research question of practical interest to financial regulators and stock exchange officials and provides empirical evidence to assist in the formulation of business strategies and regulatory reforms

Pseudo market-makers, market quality and the minimum tick size

This paper examines how a reduction in the minimum tick size affects the behaviour of pseudo market-makers and market quality. Consistent with prior findings, this study documents that bid-ask spreads and depth decline after a minimum tick size reduction; and the magnitude of tick size reduction influence the extent of the decrease. Empirical evidence from this research indicates that pseudo market-makers prefer lower-price stocks post-reduction, as the yield from quoting these spreads are higher. This is accompanied by a corresponding shift in trading activities, away from higher priced securities. Trading costs, measured using simulated market impact, decrease for large trades in the top price tier but increase otherwise.13 page(s

Matching the 'Knowing what to do' and the 'Doing what you Know' in Ethical Decision-making

Corporate events in the past decades have contributed to a continued interest in the ethicaldecision-making of individuals in accounting. Much of the research in ethics and educationhave relied on the assumption that the individual’s level of ethical development is related tohis/her ethical behavior. Adapting a simplified version of Thorne’s (2000)prescriptive/deliberative reasoning in a cheat-to-gain business scenario, a survey of accountingstudents suggest that ethical development may not be related to behavior. In addition,consistent with Thorne (2001), results suggest that even if individuals may ‘know what to do’for the ideal ethical decision, they may not always actually choose that path or ‘doing whatthey know’

Market behaviour around bankruptcy announcements: evidence from the Australian Stock Exchange

The corporate distress literature to date has largely focused on the predictive power of accounting variables (Altman, 2001). Following previous literature, this study examines the relevance of abnormal stock returns in discriminating between failed and non-failed firms (e.g. Clark and Weinstein, 1983; Shumway, 2001). Our results confirm the findings of previous literature that investors in failed firms typically incur substantial negative stock returns leading up to failure announcements. However, in contrast to prior research we do not find evidence of an announcement effect (i.e. negative stock returns on the event day itself or the day preceding). We also document evidence that the bid-ask spreads of failed firms widen substantially up to 7 months prior to failure, indicating the likelihood of significant information asymmetries across investors in failed firms. Copyright (c) The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2007 AFAANZ.