The role of exercise during adolescence on adult happiness and mood

The main research question for this paper was: Does exercise during adolescence predict happiness and positive moods in adult life? Data was collected through an online questionnaire (N?=?438). The questionnaire included a measure of happiness (The Subjective Happiness Scale), moods (The Profile of Mood States) and questions on current exercise and exercise during adolescence. Exercise during adolescence was a significant predictor for positive moods, even when controlling for current exercise. There is also a connection between exercise during adolescence and happiness, although it appears to be that exercise during adolescence predicts exercise in adult life, which in turn has a connection to happiness. Exercise was not a significant predictor of negative moods in adulthood.     

Risk perception and risk management in Norwegian aquaculture

This exploratory study seeks to provide empirical knowledge about fish farmers' risk attitudes, risk sources and risk management tools by presenting the results from a survey among Norwegian fish farming companies. The results show that fish farmers think of themselves as only moderately risk averse compared, for instance, to crop and livestock farmers. The most important sources of risk are considered to be future salmon prices, institutional risks and fish diseases, while keeping costs low is the most important risk management tool.     

Voluntary management earnings forecasts and discretionary accruals: evidence from Danish IPOs

This paper seeks to determine whether Danish managers exercise discretionary accruals to reach earnings forecast targets they voluntarily specify in conjunction with initial public offerings (IPOs). Because the Danish accounting and legal environment is more permissive than the US, we use Denmark as a natural laboratory for learning how business would occur without strict rules, enforcement and sanctions. Danish managers often volunteer pro forma financial statements for results that are expected to occur subsequent to the IPO. We examine a sample of 58 Danish firms that issue voluntary management earnings forecasts in connection with IPOs that occur between 1984 and 1996. The evidence we uncover strongly suggests that pre-managed earnings are adjusted toward these targets. In contrast with Kasznik's (1999 Kasznik, R. (1999). On the association between voluntary disclosure and earnings management. Journal of Accounting Research, 37: pp. 57–81 [Google Scholar]) results related to voluntarily forecasting American firms, managers of Danish firms exercise discretionary accruals to mitigate earnings forecast errors regardless of whether pre-managed earnings are less, or greater, than the IPO forecast amount.     

Is the European union a natural currency area, or is it held together by policy makers?

Is the European Union a Natural Currency Area, or Is It Held Together by Policymakers? — In 1999, EMU started with 11 members, but with considerable uncertainty about the depth of the convergence between them. The optimal currency area literature stresses the need for shocks which are symmetric and of similar size across countries. Our results show that symmetries in the core are only marginally stronger than those in the periphery; and that these symmetries have been increasingly maintained by policy interventions. Consequently, Europe may evolve into an optimal currency area; but the symmetries will be policy-induced rather than a market phenomenon. This suggests a fragility which could be reflected in the value of the new currency.     

Volatility spill-overs in commodity spot prices: New empirical results

The classical rational expectations model of commodity markets implies that expected spot price risk is an explanatory variable in spot price regressions; and also that inventory carryover, which is reduced by a larger price variance, creates autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic processes in spot prices. In order to falsify/verify this theory, it has typically been assumed that the square root of the conditional variance of spot prices, a proxy for spot price risk, enters the conditional mean function of spot prices. Based on this simple representation, a typical but counter intuitive outcome has been that spot price risk has an insignificant impact on spot prices, see, e.g., Beck (Beck, S., 1993. A Rational Expectations Model of Time Varying Risk Premia in Commodities Futures Markets: Theory and Evidence. International Economic Review 34, 149–168, Beck, S., 2001. Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity in Commodity Spot Prices. Journal of Applied Econometrics 16, 115–132). In this paper, we propose an alternative functional relationship (from GARCH(1,1) to GARCH(1,1)-AR(m)) between spot price risk and spot prices that is fully supported by the classical rational expectations model, and based on this new representation we are able to provide stronger empirical support for Muth's rational expectation theory.     

Laws of large numbers for Hayashi–Yoshida-type functionals

The main object in the statistical analysis of high-frequency financial data are sums of functionals of increments of stochastic processes, and statistical inference is based on the asymptotic behaviour of these sums as the mesh of the observation times tends to zero. Inspired by the famous Hayashi–Yoshida estimator for the quadratic covariation based on two asynchronously observed stochastic processes, we investigate similar sums for general functionals. We find that our results differ from corresponding results for synchronous observations, a case which has been well studied in the literature, and we observe that the asymptotic behaviour in the setting of asynchronous observations is not only determined by the nature of the functional, but also depends crucially on the asymptotics of the observation scheme. Several examples are discussed, including the case of \(f(x_{1},x_{2}) = |x_{1}|^{p_{1}} |x_{2}|^{p_{2}}\) which has various applications in empirical finance.

     

Why East Germany Failed to Become an Economic Tiger: Sobering Convergence Lessons from German Unification

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -