Integration of financial markets and national price levels: the role of exchange rate volatility

How does international financial integration affect national price levels? To analyze this question, this paper formulates a two-country open economy sticky-price model under either segmented or complete asset markets. It is shown that the effect of financial integration, i.e. moving from segmented to complete asset markets, is regime-dependent. Under managed exchange rates, financial integration raises the national price level. Under floating exchange rates, however, financial integration lowers national price levels. Thus, the paper proposes a novel argument to rationalize systematic deviations from PPP. Panel evidence for 54 countries supports the main findings. A 10% larger ratio of foreign assets and liabilities to GDP, our measure of international financial integration, increases the national price level by 0.27 percentage points under fixed and intermediate exchange rate regimes and lowers the price level by 0.3 percentage points under floating exchange rates. --International financial integration,exchange rate regime,national price level,PPP,foreign asset position

A Simple Data-Adaptive Probabilistic Variant Calling Model

Background: Several sources of noise obfuscate the identification of single nucleotide variation (SNV) in next generation sequencing data. For instance, errors may be introduced during library construction and sequencing steps. In addition, the reference genome and the algorithms used for the alignment of the reads are further critical factors determining the efficacy of variant calling methods. It is crucial to account for these factors in individual sequencing experiments. Results: We introduce a simple data-adaptive model for variant calling. This model automatically adjusts to specific factors such as alignment errors. To achieve this, several characteristics are sampled from sites with low mismatch rates, and these are used to estimate empirical log-likelihoods. These likelihoods are then combined to a score that typically gives rise to a mixture distribution. From these we determine a decision threshold to separate potentially variant sites from the noisy background. Conclusions: In simulations we show that our simple proposed model is competitive with frequently used much more complex SNV calling algorithms in terms of sensitivity and specificity. It performs specifically well in cases with low allele frequencies. The application to next-generation sequencing data reveals stark differences of the score distributions indicating a strong influence of data specific sources of noise. The proposed model is specifically designed to adjust to these differences.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure

Poverty and Employment in Timber-Dependent Counties

One of the most controversial aspects of federal and state policies aimed at protecting old-growth ecosystems has been the potential impact of job losses on local economies. A fundamental question for historically timber-dependent communities is whether these policies will result in local economic stagnation and enduring pockets of poverty. In this paper, we examine the long-run impact of changes in timber-related employment on other types of employment and participation in major federal poverty programs. We use monthly, multi-county time series data to estimate a vector autoregressive model of the experience of northern California counties during the 1980s and 1990s. We find that employment base multiplier effects of timber employment on other types of employment in each county are small, and state economic conditions rather than local employment conditions are the principal driver behind local poverty.

Two-Electron Photon Emission From Metallic Quantum Wells

Unusual emission of visible light is observed in scanning tunneling microscopy of the quantum well system Na on Cu(111). Photons are emitted at energies exceeding the energy of the tunneling electrons. Model calculations of two-electron processes which lead to quantum well transitions reproduce the experimental fluorescence spectra, the quantum yield, and the power-law variation of the intensity with the excitation current.Comment: revised version, as published; 4 pages, 3 figure

The world's great solid waste management libraries

Solid waste knowledge is hard won and too easily lost. A large amount of that knowledge resides in each of our small offices. Many of us use photocopies of photocopies of reports from the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s, which may contain important data on topics like the performance of trommels for processing finished compost, or historic data on leachate quality, or economy-of-scale factors for incinerators. More and more, new professionals in the solid waste field do not know of these key documents and so are prone to wasting time and money pursuing information once known but now hidden