6,565 research outputs found
Financial conditions, alternative asset management and political risks: trying to make sense of our times.
Developments in the financial sector have led to an expansion in its ability to spread risks. The increase in the risk bearing capacity of economies, as well as in actual risk taking, has led to a range of financial transactions that hitherto were not possible, and has created much greater access to finance for firms and households. On net, this has made the world much better off. Concurrently, however, we have also seen the emergence of a whole range of intermediaries, such as hedge funds, whose incentive structures can lead them to take more risk, especially in times of plentiful liquidity and stability. As a result, under some conditions, economies may be more exposed to financial-sector-induced turmoil than in the past. I highlight concerns about the political spillovers if such instability arises.
Construction of Block Orthogonal STBCs and Reducing Their Sphere Decoding Complexity
Construction of high rate Space Time Block Codes (STBCs) with low decoding
complexity has been studied widely using techniques such as sphere decoding and
non Maximum-Likelihood (ML) decoders such as the QR decomposition decoder with
M paths (QRDM decoder). Recently Ren et al., presented a new class of STBCs
known as the block orthogonal STBCs (BOSTBCs), which could be exploited by the
QRDM decoders to achieve significant decoding complexity reduction without
performance loss. The block orthogonal property of the codes constructed was
however only shown via simulations. In this paper, we give analytical proofs
for the block orthogonal structure of various existing codes in literature
including the codes constructed in the paper by Ren et al. We show that codes
formed as the sum of Clifford Unitary Weight Designs (CUWDs) or Coordinate
Interleaved Orthogonal Designs (CIODs) exhibit block orthogonal structure. We
also provide new construction of block orthogonal codes from Cyclic Division
Algebras (CDAs) and Crossed-Product Algebras (CPAs). In addition, we show how
the block orthogonal property of the STBCs can be exploited to reduce the
decoding complexity of a sphere decoder using a depth first search approach.
Simulation results of the decoding complexity show a 30% reduction in the
number of floating point operations (FLOPS) of BOSTBCs as compared to STBCs
without the block orthogonal structure.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures; Minor changes in lemmas and construction
Diurnal-scale signatures of monsoon precipitation over India
The pattern of diurnal-cycle signatures of precipitation varies with season and region. This study focuses on spatio-temporal variations in numerical model based forecasts of the rainfall amount and its intensity over Indian region during the monsoon season 2013 and some specific days of monsoon season 2017. Spatial patterns of 3-hourly rainfall during the season, as seen in day-1, day-3 and day-5 predictions of two numerical weather prediction models viz NGFS and NCUM have been examined here. Temporal changes in the frequency distribution of hourly rainfall amounts have been studied. It is noted that NGFS model predicts more rain than NCUM model during all the hours of the day. Maximum rainfall over the land and oceanic region has been predicted during the late afternoon and early morning hours, respectively
Staggered fermion matrix elements using smeared operators
We investigate the use of two kinds of staggered fermion operators, smeared
and unsmeared. The smeared operators extend over a hypercube, and tend to
have smaller perturbative corrections than the corresponding unsmeared
operators. We use these operators to calculate kaon weak matrix elements on
quenched ensembles at , 6.2 and 6.4. Extrapolating to the continuum
limit, we find . The
systematic error is dominated by the uncertainty in the matching between
lattice and continuum operators due to the truncation of perturbation theory at
one-loop. We do not include any estimate of the errors due to quenching or to
the use of degenerate and quarks. For the
electromagnetic penguin operators we find
and . We also use the ratio of unsmeared to
smeared operators to make a partially non-perturbative estimate of the
renormalization of the quark mass for staggered fermions. We find that tadpole
improved perturbation theory works well if the coupling is chosen to be
\alpha_\MSbar(q^*=1/a).Comment: 22 pages, 1 figure, uses eps
Corporate Hierarchies and the Size of Nations: Theory and Evidence
Corporate organization varies within a country and across countries with country size. The paper starts by establishing some facts about corporate organization based on unique data of 660 Austrian and German corporations. The larger country (Germany) has larger firms with flatter more decentral corporate hierarchies compared to the smaller country (Austria). Firms in the larger country change their organization less fast than firms in the smaller country. Over time firms have been introducing less hierarchical organizations by delegating power to lower levels of the corporation. We develop a theory which explains these facts and which links these features to the trade environment that countries and firms face. We introduce firms with internal hierarchies in a Krugman (1980) model of trade. We show that international trade and the toughness of competition in international markets induce a power struggle in firms which eventually leads to decentralized corporate hierarchies. We offer econometric evidence which is consistent with the models predictions
Shafranov's virial theorem and magnetic plasma confinement
Shafranov's virial theorem implies that nontrivial magnetohydrodynamical
equilibrium configurations must be supported by externally supplied currents.
Here we extend the virial theorem to field theory, where it relates to
Derrick's scaling argument on soliton stability. We then employ virial
arguments to investigate a realistic field theory model of a two-component
plasma, and conclude that stable localized solitons can exist in the bulk of a
finite density plasma. These solitons entail a nontrivial electric field which
implies that purely magnetohydrodynamical arguments are insufficient for
describing stable, nontrivial structures within the bulk of a plasma.Comment: 9 pages no figure
Financial experts on the board: does it matter for the profitability and risk of the u.k. banking industry?
This paper explores the relation between board-level financial expertise, the profitability and the risk profile with panel data from the UK banking industry. The empirical findings document that collectively, financial experts have a positive influence on the performance outcomes of banks, they contribute to higher risks, especially in the case of large banks, while they improve the stock performance of the associated banks. Moreover, the results highlight that board-level qualified accountants have no statistical effect on that profitability, while such a positive link is established for the case of financial and banking professors, as well as for financial experts from other industries. Such findings imply that these two groups of professional financial experts may be easier adopted at group-level profits enhancement. Robustness checks confirm the results for all types of banking institutions, except those with a strong real-estate activity portfolio. Finally, certain commercial and/or policy implications of the results are reported.N/
Pd/Cu Site Interchange and Non-Fermi-Liquid Behavior in UCu_4Pd
X-ray-absorption fine-structure measurements of the local structure in
UCu_4Pd are described which indicate a probable lattice-disorder origin for
non-Fermi-liquid behavior in this material. Short Pd-Cu distances are observed,
consistent with 24 +/- 3% of the Pd atoms occupying nominally Cu sites. A
"Kondo disorder" model, based on the effect on the local Kondo temperature T_K
of this interchange and some additional bond-length disorder, agrees
quantitatively with previous experimental susceptibility data, and therefore
also with specific heat and magnetic resonance experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 3 PostScript figures, to be published in PR
RELEASE: A High-level Paradigm for Reliable Large-scale Server Software
Erlang is a functional language with a much-emulated model for building reliable distributed systems. This paper outlines the RELEASE project, and describes the progress in the first six months. The project aim is to scale the Erlangâs radical concurrency-oriented programming paradigm to build reliable general-purpose software, such as server-based systems, on massively parallel machines. Currently Erlang has inherently scalable computation and reliability models, but in practice scalability is constrained by aspects of the language and virtual machine. We are working at three levels to address these challenges: evolving the Erlang virtual machine so that it can work effectively on large scale multicore systems; evolving the language to Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang; developing a scalable Erlang infrastructure to integrate multiple, heterogeneous clusters. We are also developing state of the art tools that allow programmers to understand the behaviour of massively parallel SD Erlang programs. We will demonstrate the effectiveness of the RELEASE approach using demonstrators and two large case studies on a Blue Gene
- âŠ