CMS physics technical design report : Addendum on high density QCD with heavy ions

Peer reviewe

The Physics of the B Factories

This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C

Local Government Efficiency: Evidence from the Czech Municipalities

We measure cost efficiency of 202 Czech municipalities of extended scope in period 2003-2008. The study is the first application of overall efficiency measurement of the local governments in the new EU member states, and the second in post-communist countries. We measure government efficiency through established quantitative and qualitative indicators of the provision of education, cultural facilities, infrastructure and other local services. First, we employ non-parametric approach of the data envelopment analysis and adjust the efficiency scores by bootstrapping. Second, we employ the stochastic frontier analysis and control for effects of various demographic, economic, and political variables. We compare scores under our preferred specification, i.e. pseudo-translog time-variant stochastic-frontier analysis with determinants, with alternative scores. The determinants that robustly increase inefficiency are population size, distance to the regional center, share of university-educated citizens, capital expenditures, subsidies per capita, and the share of self-generated revenues. Concerning political variables, increase in party concentration and the voters' involvement increases efficiency, and local council with a lower share of left-wing representatives also tend to be more efficient. We interpret determinants both as indicators of slack, non-discretionary inputs, and unobservable outputs. The analysis is conducted also for the period 1994-1996, where political variables appear to influence inefficiency in a structurally different way. From comparison of the two periods, we obtain that small municipalities improve efficiency significantly more that large municipalities

Is systematic downside beta risk really priced? evidence in emerging market data

Several studies advocating safety first as a major concern to investors propose downside beta risk as an alternative to the traditional systematic risk- beta. Downside measures are concerned with a subset of the data and therefore the results in the studies that consider the downside beta only may be biased. This study addresses this issue by including downside co-skewness risk in addition to the downside beta risk in the pricing model. In a sample of 27 emerging markets two-stage rolling regression analysis fail to support pricing models with downside risk measures. In a cross-sectional analysis inclusion of downside co-skewness improves model fit. When considered together, downside beta is potential and downside co-skewness is a risk to the rational investor. Even though our results are inconclusive the evidence strongly suggests a need for further investigation of co-skewness risk in pricing models that adopt a downside risk framework

Multivariate tests of asset pricing: simulation evidence from an emerging market

The finite sample performance of the Wald, GMM and Likelihood Ratio (LR) tests of multivariate asset pricing tests have been investigated in several studies on the US financial markets. This paper extends this analysis in two important ways. Firstly, considering the fact that the Wald test is not invariant to alternative non-linear formulation of the null hypothesis the paper investigates whether alternative forms of the Wald and GMM tests result in considerable difference in size and power. Secondly, the paper extends the analysis to the emerging market data. Emerging markets provide an interesting practical laboratory to test asset pricing models. The characteristics of emerging markets are different from the well developed markets of US, Japan and Europe. It is found that the asymptotic Wald and GMM tests based on Chi-Square critical values result in considerable size distortions. The bootstrap tests yield the correct sizes. Multiplicative from of bootstrap GMM test appears to outperform the LR test when the returns deviate from normality and when the deviations from the asset pricing model are smaller. Application of the bootstrap tests to the data from the Karachi Stock Exchange strongly supports the zero-beta CAPM. However the low power of the multivariate tests warrants a careful interpretation of the results