Fair value versus historical cost-based valuation for biological assets: Predictability of financial information

There is an intense debate on the convenience of moving from historical cost (HC) toward the fair value (FV) principle. The debate and academic research is usually concerned with financial instruments, but the IAS 41 requirement of fair valuation for biological assets brings it into the agricultural domain. This paper performs an empirical study with a sample of Spanish farms valuing biological assets at HC and a sample applying FV, finding no significant differences between both valuation methods to assess future cash flows. However, most tests reveal more predictive power of future earnings under fair valuation of biological assets, which is not explained by differences in volatility of earnings and profitability. The study also evidences the existence of flawed HC accounting practices for biological assets in agriculture, which suggests scarce information content of this valuation method in the predominant small business units existing in the agricultural sector in advanced Western countries

Promoter DNA Hypermethylation and Gene Repression in Undifferentiated Arabidopsis Cells

Maintaining and acquiring the pluripotent cell state in plants is critical to tissue regeneration and vegetative multiplication. Histone-based epigenetic mechanisms are important for regulating this undifferentiated state. Here we report the use of genetic and pharmacological experimental approaches to show that Arabidopsis cell suspensions and calluses specifically repress some genes as a result of promoter DNA hypermethylation. We found that promoters of the MAPK12, GSTU10 and BXL1 genes become hypermethylated in callus cells and that hypermethylation also affects the TTG1, GSTF5, SUVH8, fimbrin and CCD7 genes in cell suspensions. Promoter hypermethylation in undifferentiated cells was associated with histone hypoacetylation and primarily occurred at CpG sites. Accordingly, we found that the process specifically depends on MET1 and DRM2 methyltransferases, as demonstrated with DNA methyltransferase mutants. Our results suggest that promoter DNA methylation may be another important epigenetic mechanism for the establishment and/or maintenance of the undifferentiated state in plant cells.

Fiscal policy and interest rates: the role of financial and economic integration

It is commonly believed that a fiscal expansion raises interest rates. However, these crowding out effects of deficits have been found to be small or non-existent. One explanation is that financial integration offsets interest rate differentials on globalised bond markets. This paper measures the degree of integration of government bond markets, using spatial modelling techniques to take this spillover on financial markets into account. Our main finding is that the crowding out effect on domestic interest rates is significant, but is reduced by spillover across borders. This spillover is important in major crises or in periods of coordinated policy actions. This result is generally robust to various measures of cross-country linkages. We find spillover to be much stronger among EU countries.

Financial stress transmission in EMU sovereign bond market volatility: a connectedness analysis

This paper measures the connectedness in EMU sovereign market volatility between April 1999 and January 2014, in order to monitor stress transmission and to identify episodes of intensive spillovers from one country to the others. To this end, we first perform a static and dynamic analysis to measure the total volatility connectedness in the entire period (the system-wide approach) using a framework recently proposed by Diebold and Yılmaz (2014). Second, we make use of a dynamic analysis to evaluate the net directional connectedness for each country and apply panel model techniques to investigate its determinants. Finally, to gain further insights, we examine the timevarying behaviour of net pair-wise directional connectedness at different stages of the recent sovereign debt crisis.

Model for interevent times with long tails and multifractality in human communications: An application to financial trading

Social, technological, and economic time series are divided by events which are usually assumed to be random, albeit with some hierarchical structure. It is well known that the interevent statistics observed in these contexts differs from the Poissonian profile by being long-tailed distributed with resting and active periods interwoven. Understanding mechanisms generating consistent statistics has therefore become a central issue. The approach we present is taken from the continuous-time random-walk formalism and represents an analytical alternative to models of nontrivial priority that have been recently proposed. Our analysis also goes one step further by looking at the multifractal structure of the interevent times of human decisions. We here analyze the intertransaction time intervals of several financial markets. We observe that empirical data describe a subtle multifractal behavior. Our model explains this structure by taking the pausing-time density in the form of a superstatistics where the integral kernel quantifies the heterogeneous nature of the executed tasks. A stretched exponential kernel provides a multifractal profile valid for a certain limited range. A suggested heuristic analytical profile is capable of covering a broader region.

Cytoplasmic accumulation of NCoR in malignant melanoma: Consequences of altered gene repression and prognostic significance

Invasive malignant melanoma (MM) is an aggressive tumor with no curative therapy available in advanced stages. Nuclear corepressor (NCoR) is an essential regulator of gene transcription, and its function has been found deregulated in different types of cancer. In colorectal cancer cells, loss of nuclear NCoR is induced by Inhibitor of kappa B kinase (IKK) through the phosphorylation of specific serine residues. We here investigate whether NCoR function impacts in MM, which might have important diagnostic and prognostic significance. By IHC, we here determined the subcellular distribution of NCoR in a cohort of 63 primary invasive MM samples, and analyzed its possible correlation with specific clinical parameters. We therefore used a microarray-based strategy to determine global gene expression differences in samples with similar tumor stage, which differ in the presence of cytoplasmic or nuclear NCoR. We found that loss of nuclear NCoR results in upregulation of a specific cancer-related genetic signature, and is significantly associated with MM progression. Inhibition of IKK activity in melanoma cells reverts NCoR nuclear distribution and specific NCoR-regulated gene transcription. Analysis of public database demonstrated that inactivating NCoR mutations are highly prevalent in MM, showing features of driver oncogene.