1,721,113 research outputs found
Bitcoin Futures: What use are they?
Early analysis of Bitcoin concluded that it did not meet the economic conditions to be classified as a currency. Since this conclusion, interest in Bitcoin has increased substantially. We investigate whether the introduction of futures trading in Bitcoin is able to resolve the issues that stopped Bitcoin from being considered a currency. Our analysis shows that spot volatility has increased following the appearance of futures contracts, that futures contracts are not an effective hedging instrument, and that price discovery is driven by uninformed investors in the spot market. We therefore argue that the conclusion that Bitcoin is a speculative asset rather than a currency is not altered by the introduction of futures trading
The influence pathways of financial development on environmental quality: New evidence from smooth transition regression models
Understanding the influence pathways of financial development on environmental quality is necessary for policy
makers in China to improve the quality of the environment through financial means; however, these points have
not been systematically discussed in the literature. Therefore, to fill this gap and depict these indirect influence
pathways in regions with different financial development levels, this paper categorizes the Chinese provinces
based on their financial development levels and a panel smooth transition regression model is used to analyze
province-level data in China over the period from 2001 to 2017. The different indirect impacts of financial
development on environmental quality through the pathways under different financial development levels are
identified and the transformation speed of the intensity of these impacts can be determined. The results indicate
that (1) financial development has significant indirect impacts on environmental pollution through various
pathways, and the impacts of these pathways are different in the various regions with low or high levels of
financial development. (2) In the regions with poor financial development, insufficient financial development
could indirectly result in environmental contamination through the pathways that involve stimulating economic
growth and promoting the development of secondary and tertiary industries. (3) In regions with relatively high
levels of financial development, financial development has mixed effects on environmental pollution, i.e.,
improving environmental quality by promoting technological innovation and attracting foreign direct investment and decreasing environmental quality by supporting secondary and tertiary industries. Local governments
should consider the different characteristics of regional financial development when formulating environmental
protection policies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Cryptocurrency uncertainty and volatility forecasting of precious metal futures markets
Several common properties shared by cryptocurrencies and precious metals, such as safe haven, hedge and diversification for risk assets, have been widely discussed since Bitcoin was created in 2008. However, no studies have explored whether cryptocurrency market uncertainties can help to explain and forecast volatilities in precious metal markets. By using the GARCH-MIDAS model incorporating cryptocurrency policy and price uncertainty, as well as several other commonly used uncertainty measures, this paper compares the in-sample impacts and out-of-sample predictive abilities of these uncertainties on volatility forecasts of COMEX gold and silver futures markets. The in-sample results demonstrate the significant impacts of cryptocurrency uncertainty on the volatilities of precious metal futures markets, and the out-of-sample evidence further confirms the superior predictive power of cryptocurrency uncertainty on volatility forecasting of the precious metal market. Our conclusions are robust through various model evaluation approaches based not only on predicting errors but also on forecasting directions across different forecasting time horizons
Gold and Inflation(s) - A Time-Varying Relationship
What is the relationship between the price of gold and inflation? How stable is it - over time and across measures of inflation? We examine this for three countries (the USA, the UK and Japan) over forty years and with a variety of measures of inflation and monetary liquidity. We apply a formal test for time variation and proceed to extract time varying cointegration relationships. Both formal and graphical evidence points to a break in the relationship(s) of gold and official inflation in the mid 1990s in the USA but to less clear results for the UK and Japan. However, gold seems to have offered a protection against an increase in money supply throughout nearly the entire past 40 year period in the US and the UK but failed to do so in Japan. Supporting previous findings we find evidence for a time-varying relationship in cointegration between gold and both predicted and realized inflation in nearly all cases. Contrasting multiple inflation indicators, we find evidence for the importance of money supply in the gold/inflation relationship
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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