Relationship Between Expected Treasury Bill and Eurodollar Interest Rates: A Fractional Cointegration Analysis

In this paper, we extend Booth and Tse's (BT)1995 analysis of fractional cointegration between theexpected Eurodollar and Treasury bill interest ratesimplied by their respective futures contracts. Thedefinition of fractional cointegration suggested byCheung and Lai (1993) and used by BT is refined sothat it requires the cointegrating relationship to bestationary as well as mean-reverting. In addition tothe Geweke and Porter-Hudak method used by BT, a moreefficient Maximum Likelihood (ML) method is used toestimate the cointegrating relationship. The LM (Engle(1982)) test indicates the possible existence of aheteroscedastic cointegrating relationship. Therefore,we use heteroscedastic models (GARCH and ExponentialGARCH) to represent the cointegrating regressioninstead of the simple homoscedastic model used by BT.The empirical evidence cannot reject the nullhypothesis of a stationary fractional cointegrationrelationship between the Eurodollar and Treasury billinterest rates.     

A review of violent and traumatic deaths in Kathmandu, Nepal

The objective was to study the external causes of death reported in the autopsy centre in Kathmandu, Nepal. A retrospective review of case report documentation of all violent and traumatic death autopsies was conducted in Kathmandu from mid-July 2000 to mid-July 2004. A total of 4383 autopsies were conducted by the Department of Forensic Medicine in Kathmandu. There were 1072 (25%) cases of suicide, 380 (9%) homicide, 1399 (32%) accidental, 598 (14%) deaths as a result of natural diseases and 923 (21%) undetermined causes of death. The number of males was almost twice that of females (sex ratio 2.2:1). Persons aged 15 to 44 years comprised about two-thirds of the total reported fatalities (65.4%). Suicides were mostly reported due to hanging, homicides mostly due to firearms and explosives, accidents mostly due to road traffic injuries. More than 60% of road traffic injuries resulted among pedestrians. Suicides, homicides and accidental deaths remain a poorly identified public health issue in Nepal. Medico-legal autopsy reports can serve as an important tool in understanding fatalities from violence and injuries for countries similar to Nepal. Strengthening a regular mechanism for compilation and utilization of the information, however, remains a major challenge.     

Political decentralization and corruption: Exploring the conditional role of parties

This study investigates how national levels of corruption are influenced by the interaction of two factors in political decentralization: the presence of local elections and the organizational structure of national parties. Previous studies have focused primarily on the role of fiscal decentralization on corruption and have mostly ignored the institutions of political decentralization. Using new data in a series of expansive models across multiple countries and years, we find that corruption will be lower when local governments are more accountable to and more transparent toward their constituents. This beneficial arrangement is most likely to occur when local elections are combined with nonintegrated political parties, meaning that party institutions themselves are decentralized from national control. Such an institutional arrangement maximizes local accountability by putting the decision to nominate and elect local leaders in the hands of those best in a position to evaluate their honesty—local electors.