An analysis of some issues in asset price behaviour

The equity premium puzzle, described by Mehra and Prescott in 1985, has baffled financial economists for almost two decades and still lacks a satisfactory resolution. For an area of economics, whose main focus is on measuring risks and rewards for risk taking, not being able to explain the difference in expected returns between two major classes of financial assets - equity and bonds - is a major challenge. We examine some of the issues associated with the equity premium and related puzzles. The main contribution of the thesis is in establishing that a representative agent model can be used to approximate the solutions of an over lapping generations economy when markets are conditionally complete and then using this approximation to examine age-related liquidity restrictions as possible explanations for the puzzle. We conclude that such restrictions by themselves can not explain the equity premium puzzle

Seasonal and long-term sea level variability in the marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean

One of the parameters useful for monitoring large-scale climate variability in the Arctic Ocean is sea level. It integrates virtually all static and dynamic processes in the hydrosphere and atmosphere of the Arctic. Previously unavailable mean monthly sea level data at 44 coastal and island stations in the Kara, Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi seas covering years from 1950 to 1990 were used to analyse seasonal and inter-annual variability. Sea level has a significant annual cycle with an average seasonal amplitude (from peak to peak) in the coastal zone of the Arctic seas on the order of 20 - 30 cm. The analysis of inter-annual and inter-decadal changes has shown that at nearly all stations in the Kara, Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi seas from the beginning of the 1950s through the end of 1980s there is a positive trend in sea level variability. The main contribution to the sea level rise was in the 1980s; on average for the coastal zone of Siberian shelf the sea level in the 1980s was 5 - 6 cm higher than in the previous decades. A reasonable agreement between observed decadal mean sea level values and the results of diagnostic model simulations suggests that this rise in the Arctic seas is connected with the reorganization of large-scale circulation of the Arctic Ocean, rather than the regional lowering of the coasts, as has been suggested previously

Application for video analysis based on machine learning and computer vision algorithms

An application for video data analysis based on computer vision methods is presented. The proposed system consists of five consecutive stages: face detection, face tracking, gender recognition, age classification and statistics analysis. AdaBoost classifier is utilized for face detection. A modification of Lucas and Kanade algorithm is introduced on the stage of tracking. Novel gender and age classifiers based on adaptive features and support vector machines are proposed. All the stages are united into a single system of audience analysis. The proposed software complex can find its applications in different areas, from digital signage and video surveillance to automatic systems of accident prevention and intelligent human-computer interfaces