Descriptive analysis of Finnish equity, bond and money market returns

This paper gathers the longest available historical monthly return series for the Finnish equity, bond and money markets as well as inflation. The series are analysed to calculate the statistical characteristics of the returns investors would have received in these markets. We also survey existing literature concerning the history of these markets and review the main developments to facilitate future research on the long-term development of the Finnish markets. Using a new total return stock market index for Finland in an approach similar to Mehra and Prescott (2003), we find the equity premium for Finland to be 10.14 per cent from 1913 to 2009.equity market; bond market; money market; risk premium; Finland; Helsinki Stock Exchange; performance

A new value-weighted total return index for the Finnish stock market

This paper presents a new monthly value-weighted, all-share total return index for the Finnish stock market. The index covers the period from the establishment of the Helsinki Stock Exchange in October 1912 to the beginning of 1970, after which the WI index by Berglund et al (1983) and later in December 1990, the Exchange’s own HEX index are available. When combined, these can be used to study the development of the Finnish equity market without a break from the beginning of the stock market until the present day. We also provide a detailed description of the construction methodology and a comparison between our index and those available earlier. The new index replaces the Unitas price index, which has been the only index available for long-term studies from 1928 onwards. The new index also provides an alternative to the book equity weighted Poutvaara (1996) price index for the period 1912–1929.stock market index; Finland; Helsinki Stock Exchange; Nasdaq OMX; OMXH; Unitas

Visualization of Fuzzy Clustering Result in Metric Space

AbstractThis paper presents a visualization of a result of fuzzy clustering. The feature of fuzzy clustering is to obtain the degree of belongingness of objects to fuzzy clusters so the result will be more commensurate with reality. In addition, the number of clusters requires less and the solution of the result will be more robust when compared with conventional hard clustering. In contrast, the fuzzy clustering result interpretation tends to be more complicated. Therefore, measuring the similarity (or dissimilarity) between a pair of fuzzy classification status of objects is important. In order to measure the similarity (or dissimilarity) mathematically, it is necessary to introduce a scale to the fuzzy clustering result. That is, the obtained solutions as a fuzzy clustering result must be in a metric space. In order to implement this, we have proposed multidimensional joint scale and cluster analysis. In this analysis, we exploit a scale obtained by multidimensional scaling. This paper clarifies that the multidimensional joint scale and cluster analysis introduces scale to the fuzzy clustering result and then the visualization of the fuzzy clustering result in the metric vector space has a theoretical mathematical meaning through the Euclidean distance structure. In this paper, this is shown by using several numerical comparisons with ordinary visualizations of the fuzzy clustering result

Composite biasing in Monte Carlo radiative transfer

Biasing or importance sampling is a powerful technique in Monte Carlo radiative transfer, and can be applied in different forms to increase the accuracy and efficiency of simulations. One of the drawbacks of the use of biasing is the potential introduction of large weight factors. We discuss a general strategy, composite biasing, to suppress the appearance of large weight factors. We use this composite biasing approach for two different problems faced by current state-of-the-art Monte Carlo radiative transfer codes: the generation of photon packages from multiple components, and the penetration of radiation through high optical depth barriers. In both cases, the implementation of the relevant algorithms is trivial and does not interfere with any other optimisation techniques. Through simple test models, we demonstrate the general applicability, accuracy and efficiency of the composite biasing approach. In particular, for the penetration of high optical depths, the gain in efficiency is spectacular for the specific problems that we consider: in simulations with composite path length stretching, high accuracy results are obtained even for simulations with modest numbers of photon packages, while simulations without biasing cannot reach convergence, even with a huge number of photon packages.Comment: 12 pages, accepted for publication in A&

Mining for Social Serendipity

A common social problem at an event in which people do not personally know all of the other participants is the natural tendency for cliques to form and for discussions to mainly happen between people who already know each other. This limits the possibility for people to make interesting new acquaintances and acts as a retarding force in the creation of new links in the social web. Encouraging users to socialize with people they don't know by revealing to them hidden surprising links could help to improve the diversity of interactions at an event. The goal of this paper is to propose a method for detecting "surprising" relationships between people attending an event. By "surprising" relationship we mean those relationships that are not known a priori, and that imply shared information not directly related with the local context of the event (location, interests, contacts) at which the meeting takes place. To demonstrate and test our concept we used the Flickr community. We focused on a community of users associated with a social event (a computer science conference) and represented in Flickr by means of a photo pool devoted to the event. We use Flickr metadata (tags) to mine for user similarity not related to the context of the event, as represented in the corresponding Flickr group. For example, we look for two group members who have been in the same highly specific place (identified by means of geo-tagged photos), but are not friends of each other and share no other common interests or, social neighborhood

The role of marketing in new ventures: How marketing activities should be organized in firms’ infancy

Although marketing activities are vital for new ventures (NVs) to ensure growth and survival, previous research is silent on how to organize them in firms’ infancy. The entrepreneurship literature focuses on which marketing activities to perform in NVs but not on how to organize these activities, whereas the marketing literature concentrates on how to organize marketing activities in established firms but not in NVs, which face specific opportunities and challenges in their early stage of development. This article aims to tackle this research gap by examining marketing’s role within NVs’ organization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with managers, we identify two key organizational dimensions: marketing’s dispersion (related to the proliferation and, thus, wide anchoring of marketing responsibilities) and marketing’s structuration (related to the manifestation and, thus, deep anchoring of marketing responsibilities). Through a field survey and archival data, we show that marketing’s dispersion enhances NV profitability, while marketing’s structuration decreases it, and that with increasing marketing influence (i.e., power of marketing actors) in NVs and NV maturity (i.e., age and size), this diametrical pattern of effects becomes less pronounced. Overall, the findings provide novel theoretical and practical insights into the organizational design of marketing in firms’ infancy.© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The nucleoporin Nup205/NPP-3 is lost near centrosomes at mitotic onset and can modulate the timing of this process in Caenorhabditis elegans embryos

This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). Two months after publication it is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License.Regulation of mitosis in time and space is critical for proper cell division. We conducted an RNA interference–based modifier screen to identify novel regulators of mitosis in Caenorhabditis elegans embryos. Of particular interest, this screen revealed that the Nup205 nucleoporin NPP-3 can negatively modulate the timing of mitotic onset. Furthermore, we discovered that NPP-3 and nucleoporins that are associated with it are lost from the nuclear envelope (NE) in the vicinity of centrosomes at the onset of mitosis. We demonstrate that centrosomes are both necessary and sufficient for NPP-3 local loss, which also requires the activity of the Aurora-A kinase AIR-1. Our findings taken together support a model in which centrosomes and AIR-1 promote timely onset of mitosis by locally removing NPP-3 and associated nucleoporins from the NE.V.H. was supported by a Roche postdoctoral fellowship (Mkl/stm 120-2007) and by an MHV postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (PMPD33-118694). Additional support was provided by the Swiss Cancer League (grant KLS 2160-02-2008 to P.G.). Work in the laboratory of P.A. was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (BFU2010-15478).Peer reviewe

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Equity premium in Finland and long-term performance of the Finnish equity and money markets

Using new monthly series collected together for the first time for Finland, this paper analyses the performance and development of the Finnish equity and money markets as well as the equity premium and inflation from 1912 to 2009. The series are analyzed and compared to similar series from Sweden and USA. Continuously compounded nominal returns in Finland have been high, 12.91 and 6.44 % per annum for the stock and money markets, respectively. However, taking into account the high annual average inflation rate of 7.77, the Finnish market has provided clearly lower real returns than the US market. On the other hand, the equity premium, 10.14 % per annum, is found to be comparable to that of the United States (9.35 %) and higher than that in Sweden (6.01 %) using an approach similar to Mehra and Prescott (Handbook of the economics of finance, vol 1B. Financial Markets and Asset Pricing, North Holland, 2003). Finally, our empirical evidence suggests that as the Finnish stock market has matured, it shows an increasing degree of informational efficiency while at the same time becoming more intertwined with international markets.</p