Search results for "RULE"
showing 10 items of 1403 documents
A Study of Seasonality on the SAFEX Wheat Market
2015
This paper examines seasonality in returns and volatilities in the South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX) wheat futures contract in order to seek market inefficiencies that can be exploited for financial gain. Non-parametric and parametric-based techniques are used to study sample regimes before and after the peak in wheat prices that occurred during the global economic crisis in 2008. Findings of the study indicate that wheat returns on Mondays and Kansas City Board of Trade (KCBT) holidays are significant and positive while Tuesday returns are negative and significant. These seasonal patterns occur largely in the second sample of the wheat dataset. Furthermore, it is observed that volatil…
A quest between fiscal and market discipline
2023
Fiscal rules are typically seen as government constraints. Yet, the extent to which they are substituted or complemented by market discipline (especially, during financial stress) remains unexplored. Using data for 71 countries over the period 1985–2015, we estimate an “augmented” fiscal reaction function to assess the impact of both fiscal and market discipline. We find that different market signals influence fiscal policy, but fiscal discipline depends on market incentives. In the EU and the OECD, market signals complement fiscal rules. These are less effective in the EMU and non-OECD countries that are “debt intolerant”. Yet, there are unintended consequences: (i) neither output and debt…
Unawareness and Partitional Information Structures
1999
Abstract We claim first that simple uncertainty is not an adequate model of a subject's ignorance, because a major component of it is the inability to give a complete description of the states of the world, and we provide a formal model of unawareness. In Modica and Rustichini (1994) we showed a difficulty in the project, namely that without weakening of the inference rules of the logic one would face the unpleasant alternative between full awareness and full unawareness. In this paper we study a logical system where non full awareness is possible, and prove that a satisfactory solution to the problem can be found by introducing limited reasoning ability of the subject. A determination theo…
One Rule to Rule Them All? Organisational Sensemaking of Corporate Responsibility
2015
Corporate responsibility (CR) has often been criticised as a decoupled organisational phenomenon: a publicly espoused rule that is not followed in daily organisational practices. We argue that a crucial reason for this criticism arises from the dominant in-house assumption of CR literature, which mitigates tensions and contradictions in organisational life by claiming that integrated rules result in coupled practices. We aim to provide new insights by problematising this in-house assumption and by examining how members of two organisations discursively make sense of CR, as a daily rule-bound practice, via three strategies: integration, differentiation and fragmentation. We elaborate the con…
Trade imbalances within the euro area and with respect to the rest of the world
2015
Abstract Many studies have explored the determinants of current account balances in Europe. However, only in a few studies has trade balance been decomposed into intra balance, trade balance vis-a-vis the euro area, and extra balance, trade balance vis-a-vis the rest of the world. This decomposition is necessary for us to understand why some core euro area countries are acting as financial intermediaries for the periphery countries. Furthermore, the determinants of intra and extra balances might be different because nominal exchange rate cannot adjust between the EMU countries while their financial markets are highly integrated. Thus, we apply this decomposition and supplement the previous …
Deciphering the rules underlying xenogeneic silencing and counter-silencing of Lsr2-like proteins
2019
ABSTRACTLsr2-like nucleoid-associated proteins play an important role as xenogeneic silencers (XS) of horizontally acquired genomic regions in actinobacteria. In this study, we systematically analyzed the in vivo constraints underlying silencing and counter-silencing of the Lsr2-like protein CgpS inCorynebacterium glutamicum. Genome-wide analysis revealed binding of CgpS to regions featuring a distinct drop in GC-profile close to the transcription start site (TSS), but also identified an overrepresented motif with multiple A/T steps at the nucleation site of the nucleoprotein complex. Binding of specific transcription factors (TFs) may oppose XS activity leading to counter-silencing. Follow…
Key Electoral Institutions and Rules Influencing Proportionality and Partisan Bias in Spanish Politics
2021
The current paper focuses on the Spanish electoral rules governing political competition for the central “Congreso de los Diputados”. It is well-documented that the system as a whole has traditionally favoured one or the other of the two main political parties (PP and PSOE) at the expense of proportionality and the remaining political parties. This paper focuses on some key Spanish electoral rules and investigates how much the observed biases could be altered by introducing some alternative rules taken from the Swedish electoral system, ceteris paribus. Measures of disproportionality are made through the Loosemore–Hanby index and the Gallagher index. The electoral raw data used for our esti…
SEAI: Social Emotional Artificial Intelligence Based on Damasio’s Theory of Mind
2018
A socially intelligent robot must be capable to extract meaningful information in real-time from the social environment and react accordingly with coherent human-like behaviour. Moreover, it should be able to internalise this information, to reason on it at a higher abstract level, build its own opinions independently and then automatically bias the decision-making according to its unique experience. In the last decades, neuroscience research highlighted the link between the evolution of such complex behaviour and the evolution of a certain level of consciousness, which cannot leave out of a body that feels emotions as discriminants and prompters. In order to develop cognitive systems for s…
Isolation and characterization of anavirulent Candida albicansyeast monomorphic mutant
2003
Mutagenesis of Candida albicans strain ATCC 26555 with N-methyl-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine followed by plating on solid yeast nitrogen base-N-acetylglucosamine medium at 37 degrees C yielded colony morphology variants that were characterized as forming smooth colonies, in contrast to the rough colonies formed by the parental strain. One yeast monomorphic mutant, CAL4, was studied in detail. Strain CAL4 is defective in filamentous growth, unable to form hyphae or pseudohyphae in vivo and in vitro. These filamentous structures are not elicited by commonly used external stimuli such as serum. The mutant had no obvious alterations in its mannan, glucan or chitin content. The total quantity of non…
Vindicating Pablo Avecilla’s Spanish ‘Imitation’ of Hamlet (1856)
2012
This essay examines Pablo Avecilla’s Hamlet, an ‘imitation’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy of the prince of Denmark published in 1856, both in its own terms and in the historical context of its publication. This Shakespearean adaptation has been negatively judged as preposterous and unworthy of comment, but it deserves to be approached as what it claimed to be, a free handling of the Shakespearean model, and as responding to its own cultural moment. Avecilla turns the Shakespearean sacrificial prince into a righteous sovereign that has kept the love of a lower-ranked lady and, by pursuing revenge, has successfully overthrown a dishonourable and corrupt ruler. This re-focusing of the Shakespearean…