Assessment of transport quality of life as an alternative transport appraisal technique

In the United Kingdom the New Approach to Transport Appraisal (NATA) is used to appraise the economic, environmental and social impacts of transport projects. This analytical tool has recently been updated, but still fails to fully evaluate individual’s experiences of transport. It is important to understand more about passengers current journey quality for an informed judgement on the impact of future schemes. This paper presents findings of a methodological tool that can appraise Transport quality of life (TQoL) on all modes of transport in one city. Quality of life (QoL) techniques were applied to the transport networks of Glasgow and Manchester to determine if this is a valuable alternative in transport appraisal. Effective assessment confirmed the validity of the method highlighting in both locations that fixed modes, particularly Light Rapid Transport, are providing a significantly better quality of life compared to the bus.     

秦汉内官职能辨正

秦汉内官的主要职能与逮捕罪人、看押囚犯等狱律令法事务有关。秦汉时的内官机构应是专门管理皇室宗亲及外戚成员的机构,可独立办理涉及皇室宗亲的案件,有相对独立的执法权。内官和廷尉分别负责皇室宗亲外戚和整个国家的司法事务,除涉及对象有别外,其职能基本相同。     

透过亚当斯领略黑白摄影的魅力

在漫长的黑白摄影发展的进程中,摄影大师安塞尔·亚当斯做出了卓越的贡献,尤其是f64小组和完善的区域曝光系统成为摄影史上的里程碑。黑、白、灰黑白摄影演绎着影调与影像的经典,即使在现代彩色摄影高度发展的今天,黑白摄影并没有失去它往日的光彩,也不会被彩色摄影所更替,它将以独特的魅力,以单纯、洗练、视觉冲击力强等审美优势继续发展,创造更多视觉财富。     

预算公开与廉洁政府关系的实证研究——基于OBI与CPI的相关性检测

预算公开与廉洁政府建设是学术界关注的热门话题,两者之间的关系更是其中的重点。2006、2008、2010与2012四个年度共同涉及的44个国家的预算公开指数与清廉指数的相关性检测表明,预算公开指数与清廉指数之间呈正相关关系,且基本属于高度相关,部分国家数据的不对称只是虚假背离。高度契合与虚假背离的背后起决定性作用的是成熟的民主政治,因此,预算公开推动廉洁政府建设需要以成熟的民主政治为前提和基石。     

Floating a “lifeboat”: The Banque de France and the crisis of 1889

When faced with a run on a “systemically important” but insolvent bank in 1889, the Banque de France pre-emptively organized a lifeboat to ensure that depositors were protected and an orderly liquidation could proceed. To protect the Banque from losses on its lifeboat loan, a guarantee syndicate was formed penalizing those who had participated in the copper speculation that had caused the crisis bringing the bank down. Creation of the syndicate and other actions were consistent with mitigating the moral hazard from such an intervention. This episode contrasts the advice given by Bagehot to the Bank of England to counter a panic by lending freely at a high rate on good collateral, allowing insolvent institutions to fail.     

Barriers to the investment in the Concentrated Solar Power sector in Morocco: A foresight approach using the Cross Impact Analysis for a large number of events

The Scenario Analysis methods have often been used by policy makers as an instrument to manage uncertainty and to support the shaping of long-term economy policies. In this research, we apply Scenario Analysis in order to identify the barriers affecting the decision to invest in the Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) sector in Morocco. Our results aim at facilitating the process of defining different paths in strategic political and policy actions. Using data from a survey on a panel of experts, the Cross Impact Analysis (CIA) and the Cross Impact Matrix System (SMIC) techniques are applied. The advantage of these techniques is that they allow including in the analysis the interlinkages between the events that will define the future scenarios. However, their limitation is that the number of events analyzed cannot be too high since the information collected from the experts increases exponentially according to the number of events introduced. We thus expand our analysis with a new methodological approach, combining the use of prospective and statistics techniques. This approach allows addressing the mentioned limitation and applying these techniques, initially restricted to 6 events in its common application, to a large number of events. The results show that uncertainty and informality would be key factors in promoting the arrival of companies in this sector. Additionally, regarding companies that already have a presence in Morocco’s renewable energy sector, an increase in activity would be achieved through improvements in the easing of financial and legal barriers.     

El efecto fin de mes en los principales mercados accionarios latinoamericanos

In equity markets, it is common to find calendar anomalies, which have been the subject of several studies in recent decades, even some of them showing that over time these anomalies have disappeared. In this context, this paper analyzes one of these anomalies, the end-of-the-month effect, in both return and volatility in six Latin American stock markets, namely Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Argentina during the period of 1993-2011. The importance of the evidence for the existence of this anomaly is to allow testing whether the effect has been disappearing over time. The findings of this research show the existence of positive abnormal returns and abnormal volatilities on days associated with the change of months for most of the countries under analysis. This research was performed according to three different periods defined in the literature to analyze the impact of the end-of-the-month effect. This research not only examines the key indexes of each market, but also the individual stocks of each, giving a much larger and demanding sample, which can lead to better conclusions about the existence of the phenomenon. Also, the transaction volume analysis is included to validate some hypotheses related with the high cash flow in the turn-of-month period.     

On the global supply of basic research

In a two-country Schumpeterian growth model, we study the incentives for basic research investments by governments in a globalized world. A country׳s basic research investments increase with the country׳s level of human capital and decline with its own market size. This may explain why some smaller countries invest so much in basic research. Compared with the optimal investments achievable when countries coordinate their basic research policies, a single country may over-invest in basic research. However, the total amount of decentralized basic research investments is always below the socially optimal investment level, which justifies policy coordination in this area.     

Scarcity of safe assets,inflation, and the policy trap

A goal of this paper is to make sense of the seemingly puzzling behavior of interest rates and inflation – and the role of central banks in that behavior – during and after the Great Recession, particularly in the United States. To this end, we construct a model in which government debt plays a key role in exchange, and can bear a liquidity premium. If asset market constraints bind, then there need not be deflation under an indefinite zero interest rate policy (ZIRP). Further, ZIRP may not be optimal under these circumstances. A Taylor-rule central banker could be subject to a ZIRP trap and persistently undershoot target inflation. As well, a liquidity premium on government debt creates additional Taylor rule perils, because of a persistently low real interest rate. We make a case that this is the key policy predicament currently faced by many central banks in the world.     

Does Accrual Management Impair the Performance of Earnings‐Based Valuation Models?

This study examines how accrual manipulations affect firm valuation in the years surrounding the passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX). We compare the absolute percentage pricing errors of RIM and DCF valuation models for a group of US firms suspected to have engaged in accrual manipulations to avoid a small loss or a small earnings decline vs. ‘Normal’ firms matched on industry, year and size. We find that RIM can better estimate intrinsic value than DCF for the matched Normal firms in the pre‐SOX period, but not so for accrual manipulators, and that SOX mitigates the harmful effect of accrual manipulations, completely eliminating the difference in RIM's accuracy advantage over DCF between Normal firms and accrual manipulators. As a further analysis, we redefine Suspect firms as real‐activity manipulators and find a significant across‐group difference in accuracy wedge in both sample periods, implying that SOX has prompted firms to favor real‐activity manipulations over accrual manipulations.