Who knows what when? : the information content of pre-IPO market prices : [Version Mai 2004]

To resolve the IPO underpricing puzzle it is essential to analyze who knows what when during the issuing process. In Germany, broker-dealers make a market in IPOs during the subscription period. We examine these pre-issue prices and find that they are highly informative. They are closer to the first price subsequently established on the exchange than both the midpoint of the bookbuilding range and the offer price. The pre-issue prices explain a large part of the underpricing left unexplained by other variables. The results imply that information asymmetries are much lower than the observed variance of underpricing suggests

Who knows what when? : The information content of pre-IPO market prices : [Version March/June 2002]

To resolve the IPO underpricing puzzle it is essential to analyze who knows what when during the issuing process. In Germany, broker-dealers make a market in IPOs during the subscription period. We examine these pre-issue prices and find that they are highly informative. They are closer to the first price subsequently established on the exchange than both the midpoint of the bookbuilding range and the offer price. The pre-issue prices explain a large part of the underpricing left unexplained by other variables. The results imply that information asymmetries are much lower than the observed variance of underpricing suggests

Horizontality: From "Window" to "Ground", Exploring Immersive Audiotory Space as an Interactive Participant Medium

My sound-based arts practice is currently concerned with the shift of focus from the materiality of the sonic art object to the conceptual and semantic dimensions involved in interaction within a system. The twentieth century saw the dawn of technologies that could not only mediate the sonic arts in new ways but also inform its techniques and tropes. Over the last few decades we have seen the emergence of the genres Transmission and Telematic Art, the methodology of both often being informed by new concepts of space. The rise of post-industrial Capitalism situates us in a new epoch of spatial awareness. This seems particularly relevant now that mediated sonic and communication technologies are an integral part of our lives. Transmitting media “punching a hole in space” now ignore acoustic container boundaries: a sound heard and its source can exist separately yet simultaneously. Physical location and distance become less relevant. How does this create a shift in how we perceive the spatial within the practice of living?; and 2. redefining concepts of author and audience. All who participate are involved in authorship creating a form that is impossible to mediate to a passive audience 5. My work explores how this situation and the aesthetics deriving from it inform me as a practitioner within the medium of sound: the generative and emergent behaviour that arises from relationship as a form of “composition” and, of particular interest to me, the desire to shift focus from the traditional role of sound as an object of aesthetic expression to immersive interactive auditory space as a means of entering into dialogue with the multidimensional environment which humanity inhabits

Select Frameworks for 21st Century Skills

Presentation given at the Focus on Assessment Conference, August 18, 2016. Includes handout

Positron Annihilation in the Nuclear Outflows of the Milky Way

Observations of soft gamma rays emanating from the Milky Way from SPI/\textit{INTEGRAL} reveal the annihilation of $\sim2\times10^{43}$ positrons every second in the Galactic bulge. The origin of these positrons, which annihilate to produce a prominent emission line centered at 511 keV, has remained mysterious since their discovery almost 50 years ago. A plausible origin for the positrons is in association with the intense star formation ongoing in the Galactic center. Moreover, there is strong evidence for a nuclear outflow in the Milky Way. We find that advective transport and subsequent annihilation of positrons in such an outflow cannot simultaneously replicate the observed morphology of positron annihilation in the Galactic bulge and satisfy the requirement that $90$ per cent of positrons annihilate once the outflow has cooled to $10^4\,\mathrm{K}$.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letter

Contours of a Research Program

In this paper I sketch the contours of a research program which draws on the insights of both institutionalist theories of long term economic change and world system analysis in order to analyze the many ways in which national and global inequalities interact. While the political economy approach developed in the research program of Acemoglu and Robinson has provided important insights on the relationship between national inequalities and economic growth, world system analysis focuses on interactions and asymmetries in the global economic and political system and their effects on national trajectories. On the one hand, I propose ways to make national institutions endogenous to international economic and political interaction via the influences these may have on national inequalities. The key to this discussion is the realization that the impact of international economic interaction on domestic distribution may be changed significantly, even in sign, if rights are weakly enforced and “grabbing” type redistributive activities are ubiquitous, especially inside and by the state. On the other hand, I explore the gains from looking at the world system as an institutional system, applying ideas developed by Acemoglu and Robinson, and North, Wallis and Weingast to analyze inequalities and asymmetries in countries to the entire globe. Here, both the question of whether a global elite coalition is to be defined as a group of countries or as a network of global elites in states, business and media and the question of how the international institutional order limits access to global political and economic resources are central

A cognitive approach to obligatory control phenomena in English and German

The aim of the paper is to develop a uniform semantic-pragmatic theory of Controller choice for a numbei of German and English subject control verbs like promise/versprechen and object contiol verbs like request/bitten, recommend/empfehlen, force/zwingen, etc., which prototypically require a complement clause denoting an action performed by a human agent, who is left unexpiessed in the Infinitive clause (PRO). We propose the concept of Semanticpragmatic role* to account for a number of control phenomena which have hitherto been treated äs exceptions. We show that Controller choice and control switch heavily depend on two semanticpragmatic factors, i.e. 'degree of agentivity of PRO9 and 'role identity of a matrix N P and PRO9. Furthermore, at least in English, 'iconicity', i.e. the reflection of referential identity in formal closeness, plays an Import an t role. Our analysis is based on two experiments conducted with 35 native Speakers of German and 28 native Speakers of American English

Zur Identifikation leerer Subjekte in infinitivischen Komplementsätzen – ein semantisch-pragmatisches Modell

The interpretation of empty elements, i.e. signs that have no phonetic realization, constitutes a "classical" problem in modern linguistics. Null elements have been postulated on various levels of the linguistic system and its pragmatic use, in particular, in morphology and syntax. An adequate theory of discourse comprehension also requires an account of what is not said but only conversationally implicated. In the last thirty years the interpretation of empty subjects in non-finite clauses, which is known as the "control problem", has attracted the attention of many formal syntacticians. It has however become increasingly clear that the interpretation of such empty elements is only minimally guided by syntactic principles; in addition, a number of semantic and pragmatic factors have to be taken into consideration. The aim of our contribution is to sketch a cognitively based theory of "obligatory" control that explains how general control principles interact with language-specific coding devices. We focus on German data; we surmise, however, that they also hold for other languages. In particular, we aim at elucidating the interplay of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information in the comprehension of empty subjects in non-finite complement clauses. Using German and, to a lesser extent, English examples, we will demonstrate that the control principles we postulate account for numerous control verbs and control verb classes

Who knows what when? The Information content of pre-IPO market prices

To resolve the IPO underpricing puzzle it is essential to analyze who knows what when during the issuing process. In Germany, broker-dealers make a market in IPOs during the subscription period. We examine these pre-issue prices and find that they are highly informative. They are closer to the first price subsequently established on the exchange than both the midpoint of the bookbuilding range and the offer price. The pre-issue prices explain a large part of the underpricing left unexplained by other variables. The results imply that information asymmetries are much lower than the observed variance of underpricing suggests