Fee Complexity and Investor Mistakes in Retail Financial Markets

Mutual funds sold via brokers offer fund portfolios that investors can purchase in one of three classes: A, B or C. These classes are distinguished only by their fee schedules and thus have different net performance results. An analysis of relative class performances for a set of U.S. mutual funds between 1992 and 2008 reveals a striking fact about class B: while classes A and C provide the best performance results at long and short holding periods, respectively, class B is dominated by either class A or C at any holding period. The inferiority yet popularity of class B at first suggests that naïve investors who do not understand the fee schedule of this class are being exploited. However, I propose two hypothetical clienteles which might rationally demand class B shares: one (a) with uncertain holding periods, or one (b) that desires to have long holding periods but is unable to commit to them. I identify whether investors rationally or naïvely purchase class B by examining the flow-fee sensitivity and estimating investor holding periods. My results support the naïve investor explanation.

Documents in Stone: Records of Lives and Deaths of Scots Abroad and in Scotland

It is a striking fact that imperial peoples seem to have a powerful desire to commemorate the dead as grandly as possible. This was certainly true of the British Empire as some grandly overblown cemeteries in India and South-East Asia amply testify. This chapter discusses why this might be true – examining the influence of exoticism, a sense of heroic lives (often cut short since the exotic is also dangerous), a search for immortality, in some cases a desire for racial distancing, plus the fact that materials and labour were perhaps cheaper than at home. Some memorials, notably in cathedrals and churches, were however produced by some of the most notable sculptors of the day and were exported at considerable cost. As far as Scottish graves are concerned, it is an extraordinary fact that many families seem to have had a desire to commemorate the deaths of relatives overseas, even although their bodies were buried in distant places. Thus, a scattered family might be brought together on a single stone. This chapter is illustrated with examples of both these phenomena and discusses why diasporic imperial deaths were noticed so prominently.

Any Target Function Exists in a Neighborhood of Any Sufficiently Wide Random Network: A Geometrical Perspective

It is known that any target function is realized in a sufficiently small neighborhood of any randomly connected deep network, provided the width (the number of neurons in a layer) is sufficiently large. There are sophisticated analytical theories and discussions concerning this striking fact, but rigorous theories are very complicated. We give an elementary geometrical proof by using a simple model for the purpose of elucidating its structure. We show that high-dimensional geometry plays a magical role. When we project a high-dimensional sphere of radius 1 to a low-dimensional subspace, the uniform distribution over the sphere shrinks to a gaussian distribution with negligibly small variances and covariances.

Accommodation to Injustice

Suppose we suffer or witness an injustice. Often we will respond with a combination of anger, grief, resentment, indignation, or horror. And it seems that this is how it should be: the injustice is the reason for our emotional response. However, it is a striking fact that our anger, grief, or horror will diminish over time, often fairly quickly, even if the injustice persists. We accommodate ourselves to the injustice. Indeed, this is good for us, and it may even seem appropriate; it is often wrong to dwell on a wrong. But how could accommodation be appropriate if the injustice remains unchanged? And how could we make sense of accommodation when we anticipate it? This chapter argues that accommodation to injustice poses an insurmountable problem for understanding our emotional response to injustice and reveals something incomprehensible at the heart of our moral outlook.

Political Thinking on Kingship in Democratic Athens

Democratic Athens seems to have been the first place in the Greek world where there developed systematically a positive theorising of kingship. Initially this might seem surprising, since the Athenians had a strong tradition of rejecting one-man-rule. The study of kingship among the political thinkers of the fifth and fourth century has not received much scholarly attention until recent years, and particularly not the striking fact that it was democratic Athens, or at least writers directing themselves to an Athenian democratic audience, that produced a positive theorising of kingship. The aim of this essay, then, is not only to show how the political language around kingship became a way of forming definitions of what democracy was and was not, but also (more significantly), among some fourth-century intellectuals, of shaping new ideas about what it could be.

Adaptation of olfactory receptor abundances for efficient coding

Olfactory receptor usage is highly heterogeneous, with some receptor types being orders of magnitude more abundant than others. We propose an explanation for this striking fact: the receptor distribution is tuned to maximally represent information about the olfactory environment in a regime of efficient coding that is sensitive to the global context of correlated sensor responses. This model predicts that in mammals, where olfactory sensory neurons are replaced regularly, receptor abundances should continuously adapt to odor statistics. Experimentally, increased exposure to odorants leads variously, but reproducibly, to increased, decreased, or unchanged abundances of different activated receptors. We demonstrate that this diversity of effects is required for efficient coding when sensors are broadly correlated, and provide an algorithm for predicting which olfactory receptors should increase or decrease in abundance following specific environmental changes. Finally, we give simple dynamical rules for neural birth and death processes that might underlie this adaptation.

Faute, culpabilité et dette

This paper attempts to analyse the relationship between Paul Ricœur and Friedrich Nietzsche starting from the specific problem of the debt that we owe to the past, that is of the legacy of the past. It is indeed a striking fact that in Memory, History, Forgetting, although Ricœur refers several times to Nietzsche, he does not take up the nietzschean analysis of the Schuld – “debt, fault”– in the Genealogy of Moral, even tacitly decline them. Starting from the importance of the notion of fault in Ricœur (particularly in The Symbolic of Evil) we will try to better understand this refusal and is hermeneutical implications.

The weak data on the water–energy nexus in Spain

This paper focuses on the fact that the water–energy nexus remains an irrelevant issue on the energy policy agenda and on the priorities of the energy leaders in Spain. This is a striking fact given that this takes place in the most arid country in Europe, where almost two-thirds of electricity generation would have to be halted in the absence of an adequate water supply. We contend that part of the explanation may lie in the lack of official statistics and inconsistent sources of information on the water–energy nexus in Spain. To illustrate this point, we provide examples of the uneven data available for one of the most intensive freshwater users in the thermoelectric sector in Spain: nuclear power plants. Our research demonstrates the need for improved indicators as policy instruments in the water–energy nexus in Spain since it is impossible to improve what cannot be measured.

West Africa

This chapter details how eight nations of Western Africa—Senegal, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Guinea Bissau—transformed from government-controlled economies to market economies. The French West African states have adopted laws to open markets and protect competition, often at the behest of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, the project has been set back by political and economic instability, the lack of human and financial capital, and regional preemption of domestic competition law. It is a striking fact that there is virtually no competition law enforcement in French West Africa and no merger control law. The obstacles may ultimately be overcome with focus, leadership, will, and a reset of the institutional environment to allow national law to work hand in hand with regional law.

Set Existence Principles and Closure Conditions: Unravelling the Standard View of Reverse Mathematics†

It is a striking fact from reverse mathematics that almost all theorems of countable and countably representable mathematics are equivalent to just five subsystems of second-order arithmetic. The standard view is that the significance of these equivalences lies in the set existence principles that are necessary and sufficient to prove those theorems. In this article I analyse the role of set existence principles in reverse mathematics, and argue that they are best understood as closure conditions on the powerset of the natural numbers.