The value of coskewness in evaluating mutual funds

Recent asset pricing studies demonstrate the relevance of incorporating the coskewness in Asset Pricing Models, and illustrate how this component helps to explain the time variation of ex-ante market risk premiums. This paper analyzes the role of coskewness in mutual funds performance evaluation. We find evidence that adding a coskewness factor is economically and statistically significant. We document that some managers are managing the coskewness and show, in general, a persistent behaviour on time in their coskewness policy. One of the most striking results is that many negative (positive) alpha funds measured relative to the CAPM risk adjustments would be reclassified as positive (negative) alpha funds using a model with coskewness. Therefore, a ranking of funds based on risk adjusted returns without considering coskewness would generate an erroneous classification. Moreover, some fund characteristics, such as the turnover ratio or the category, are related to the likelihood of managing coskewness

Information Policies in Spain: Towards the New “Information Society”

The concept of a society based on information and knowledge is becoming the norm in every country, including Spain. The need to have well-designed information policies that allow us to come to terms with the new upsurge of media, technology and services that has taken place in our society is discussed first. Information policies required by these changes in society have been implemented in Spain and are described in relation to the new challenges of the “Society of Knowledge.” Similarly, the background and past efforts made in the field of information policy in Spain are analysed, along with the latest government projects that comprise an attempt to get this country to form part of the “Information Society” with the help of the supra-national information policy of the European Union

A non-projective greedy dependency parser with bidirectional LSTMs

The LyS-FASTPARSE team presents BIST-COVINGTON, a neural implementation of the Covington (2001) algorithm for non-projective dependency parsing. The bidirectional LSTM approach by Kipperwasser and Goldberg (2016) is used to train a greedy parser with a dynamic oracle to mitigate error propagation. The model participated in the CoNLL 2017 UD Shared Task. In spite of not using any ensemble methods and using the baseline segmentation and PoS tagging, the parser obtained good results on both macro-average LAS and UAS in the big treebanks category (55 languages), ranking 7th out of 33 teams. In the all treebanks category (LAS and UAS) we ranked 16th and 12th. The gap between the all and big categories is mainly due to the poor performance on four parallel PUD treebanks, suggesting that some `suffixed' treebanks (e.g. Spanish-AnCora) perform poorly on cross-treebank settings, which does not occur with the corresponding `unsuffixed' treebank (e.g. Spanish). By changing that, we obtain the 11th best LAS among all runs (official and unofficial). The code is made available at https://github.com/CoNLL-UD-2017/LyS-FASTPARSEComment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 5 table

Do Quasi-Hyperbolic Preferences Explain Academic Procrastination? An Empirical Evaluation

Traditional neoclassical thought fails to explain questions such as problems of self-control. Behavioural economics have explained these matters on the basis of the intertemporal preferences of individuals and, specifically, the so-called (β, δ) model which emphasises present bias. This opens the way to the analysis of new situations in which people can adopt incorrect indecisions that make it necessary for the government to intervene. The literature which has developed the (β, δ) model and its implications has generated a categorisation of people that is widely used but which lacks a systematic empirical evaluation. It is important to value the need for this public action. In this article, we develop a method which makes it possible to verify the main implications that this model has to explain the procrastination of university students. Using an experimental time discount task with real monetary incentives, we estimate the students’ β and δ parameters and we analyse their correlation with their answers to a series of questions concerning how they plan to study for an exam. The results are ambiguous given that they back some of the model’s conclusions but reject others, including a number of the most basic ones, such as the relation between present biases and some of the categories of people, these being essential to predict their behaviour