Ammonia converter operation

Optimization for the operating conditions of Kellogg's four-stage adiabatic quench converter was achieved in a 1000 MTPD plant of Asean Aceh Fertilizer in Indonesia by adjusting the temperature profile through the catalyst beds with adjustments of quench flows.     

Threshold effect in international linkage of stock prices

This paper examines whether the international linkage of the stock price indexes found in previous studies is confirmed for the case where the stock index changes only slightly, utilizing the daily stock price index data from 1975 to 1995 for the US, UK, Germany, and Japan. Using dummy variables in the regressions, it is shown that small changes in the stock price index of any country do not affect the other country's index. In contrast, large changes have a significant effect in most cases. Thus, there is a threshold effect in international linkage of stock prices. It is also shown that negative large changes have a clearer effect than positive ones.     

The Chinese Stock Market Does not React to the Japanese Market: Using Intraday Data to Analyse Return and Volatility Spillover Effects

In this paper, we use high‐frequency data to explore the effects of return and volatility spillover during periods in which trading hours in China and Japan overlap. Specifically, we utilize 5‐min returns to estimate fractionally integrated asymmetric power autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity and fractionally integrated exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity models, then use the models' standardized residuals to employ a cross‐correlation function approach that tests for the degree to which the Chinese and Japanese markets affect each other. Results indicate a unidirectional influence of the Chinese stock market on Japanese markets in terms of return. This result is likely attributable to restrictions on foreign investment in the Chinese market and the lack of diversified international portfolios among individual Chinese investors.     

Effect of intergenerational asset transfers on land distribution in rural Cambodia: case studies of three rice‐growing villages

After land reallocation in the early 1980s, inequality in landholdings has re‐emerged in rural Cambodia. Besides land sales and purchases, intergenerational transfers of assets may foster inequality in landholdings among “second generation” (2G) couples who, having wed after the 1980s reallocation, received no land from the government. Data analysis of three rice‐growing villages reveals that land received directly from parents accounts for 18–41% of inequality in landholdings among sample 2G couples. Although net land gain after marriage, primarily through purchases, is the largest contributor to the inequality, nonland assets received from parents positively affect the net gain. Direct and indirect effects combined, assets received from parents account for 35–57% of inequality in landholdings. The effect of assortative matching of the acreage received from parents has hitherto been small.     

Special Quotes Invoke Autocorrelation in Japanese Stock Prices*

It is reported in the present paper that 1‐min returns on TOPIX have exhibited significant autocorrelation at 5‐min intervals since 1997/1998. Special quotes that are issued whenever there is a price jump in excess of a predetermined band seem to be the source of this autocorrelation, because these have been automatically updated at 5‐min intervals since August 1998 and have appeared during the first 30 min from opening. Individual stock returns also exhibit fifth‐order autocorrelation, but this disappears when the data with special quotes are excluded from the sample. Therefore, the autocorrelation is caused by the special quotes: a type of market microstructure noise.     

On a Non-linear Risk Analysis for Stock Market Indexes

We propose a method to detect early signs of a potential major crash in the market from only the information of the time series representing its stock market data. As reinforcement of the abnormality test Test(ABN) developed in Okabe, Matsuura, and Klimek (International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, 3, 443–484, 2002), we introduce in this paper a risk graph to measure abnormality of time series by using the non-linear prediction analysis in the theory of KM₂O-Langevin equations. By applying it to real data of stock market indexes on the Black Monday of 1987 and those during the past 7 years from January 2000 to December 2006, we investigate whether we can detect early signs of a potential major crash in the market by watching the behavior of the risk graph. An erratum to this article can be found at