Stock Market Volatility: Examining North America, Europe and Asia

An understanding of volatility in stock markets is important for determining the cost of capital and for assessing investment and leverage decisions as volatility is synonymous with risk. Substantial changes in volatility of financial markets are capable of having significant negative effects on risk averse investors. Using daily returns from 1992 to 2002, we investigate volatility co-movement between the Singapore stock market and the markets of US, UK, Hong Kong and Japan. In order to gauge volatility comovement, we employ econometric models of (i) Univariate GARCH (ii) Vector Autoregression and (iii) a Multivariate and Asymmetric Multivariate GARCH model with GJR extensions. The empirical results indicate that there is a high degree of volatility co-movement between Singapore stock market and that of Hong Kong, US, Japan and UK (in that order). Results support small but significant volatility spillover from Singapore into Hong Kong, Japan and US markets despite the latter three being dominant markets. Most of the previous research concludes that spillover effects are significant only from the dominant market to the smaller market and that the volatility spillover effects are unidirectional. Our study evinces that it is plausible for volatility to spill over from the smaller market to the dominant market. At a substantive level, studies on volatility co-movement and spillover provide useful information for risk analysis.Multivariate GARCH, Volatility Spillover, comovement

Computer vision based traffic monitoring system for multi-track freeways

Nowadays, development is synonymous with construction of infrastructure. Such road infrastructure needs constant attention in terms of traffic monitoring as even a single disaster on a major artery will disrupt the way of life. Humans cannot be expected to monitor these massive infrastructures over 24/7 and computer vision is increasingly being used to develop automated strategies to notify the human observers of any impending slowdowns and traffic bottlenecks. However, due to extreme costs associated with the current state of the art computer vision based networked monitoring systems, innovative computer vision based systems can be developed which are standalone and efficient in analyzing the traffic flow and tracking vehicles for speed detection. In this article, a traffic monitoring system is suggested that counts vehicles and tracks their speeds in realtime for multi-track freeways in Australia. Proposed algorithm uses Gaussian mixture model for detection of foreground and is capable of tracking the vehicle trajectory and extracts the useful traffic information for vehicle counting. This stationary surveillance system uses a fixed position overhead camera to monitor traffic

Exchange rate exposure of stock returns at firm level

The use of conventional augmented CAPM specification in estimating the exchange rate exposure may result in less reliable estimates for, at least, two reasons. First, it does not take into account a few important stylized facts associated with financial time series. Second, one cannot estimate the total impact of the exchange rate changes on stock returns as a single coefficient with it and for this reason it does not help us analyze the reinforcing or offsetting interactions between direct and indirect exchange rate exposure effects. In this paper, we suggest an orthogonalized GJR-GARCH-t version of augmented CAPM that simultaneously addresses the above issues. Our findings have important implications for hedging and investment decision making.Exchange rate exposure, GARCH, t distribution, Asymmetric volatility

Quantum electrodynamics of resonance energy transfer in nanowire systems

Nonradiative resonance energy transfer (RET) provides the ability to transfer excitation energy between contiguous nanowires (NWs) with high efficiency under certain conditions. Nevertheless, the well-established Forster formalism commonly used to represent RET was developed for energy transfer primarily between molecular blocks (i.e., from one molecule, or part of a molecule, to another). Although deviations from Forster theory for functional blocks such as NWs have been studied previously, the role of the relative distance, the orientation of transition dipole moment pairs, and the passively interacting matter on electronic energy transfer are to a large extent unknown. Thus, a comprehensive theory that models RET in NWs is required. In this context, analytical insights to give a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the distance and orientation dependence of RET in NWs is presented within the framework of quantum electrodynamics. Additionally, the influence of an included intermediary on the rate of excitation energy transfer is illustrated, embracing indirect energy transfer rate and quantum interference. The results deliver equations that afford new intuitions into the behavior of virtual photons. In particular, results indicate that RET efficiency in a NW system can be explicitly expedited or inhibited by a neighboring mediator, depending on the relative spacing and orientation of NWs

An Efficient Polyphase Filter Based Resampling Method for Unifying the PRFs in SAR Data

Variable and higher pulse repetition frequencies (PRFs) are increasingly being used to meet the stricter requirements and complexities of current airborne and spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems associated with higher resolution and wider area products. POLYPHASE, the proposed resampling scheme, downsamples and unifies variable PRFs within a single look complex (SLC) SAR acquisition and across a repeat pass sequence of acquisitions down to an effective lower PRF. A sparsity condition of the received SAR data ensures that the uniformly resampled data approximates the spectral properties of a decimated densely sampled version of the received SAR data. While experiments conducted with both synthetically generated and real airborne SAR data show that POLYPHASE retains comparable performance to the state-of-the-art BLUI scheme in image quality, a polyphase filter-based implementation of POLYPHASE offers significant computational savings for arbitrary (not necessarily periodic) input PRF variations, thus allowing fully on-board, in-place, and real-time implementation

Utilization of Trade Agreements in Sri Lanka: Perceptions of Exporters vs. Statistical Measurements

This study will explore several areas, (i) the extent and the degree to which the Sri Lankan exporters use the preferences negotiated in various trade agreements, (ii) the benefits and costs of using trade agreements (iii) impact of multiple RoO on industries, and (iv) measures that can be taken to increase utilization of trade agreements will be observed.Trade agreement, Sri Lanka, Trade Facilitation

A rare case of hepatic duct injury from blunt abdominal trauma

Background: A 25 year-old male was brought to the emergency room following an apparent suicide attempt by jumping from the fourth floor. Case Report: Patient had a large abdominal laceration in the right upper quadrant (RUQ). CT scan showed a sub-scapular hematoma of the liver. Due to the repeated episodes of hypotension, a laporotomy was performed and the left hepatic artery was ligated while the ductal injury was managed with a Roux-en-Y left hepatic jejunostomy and stent. Bile leakage was resolved post-operatively by day 5 and the patient was discharged home on day 13 after clearance from psychiatry. Conclusions: While non-iatrogenic extrahepatic biliary trauma is rare, a high degree of suspicion is essential, especially in cases like the one discussed in this report. Diagnosis can be difficult in patients undergoing observation