Analysing UK real estate market forecast disagreement

Given the significance of forecasting in real estate investment decisions, this paper investigates forecast uncertainty and disagreement in real estate market forecasts. Using the Investment Property Forum (IPF) quarterly survey amongst UK independent real estate forecasters, these real estate forecasts are compared with actual real estate performance to assess a number of real estate forecasting issues in the UK over 1999-2004, including real estate forecast error, bias and consensus. The results suggest that real estate forecasts are biased, less volatile compared to market returns and inefficient in that forecast errors tend to persist. The strongest finding is that real estate forecasters display the characteristics associated with a consensus indicating herding.

An evaluation of the performance of UK real estate forecasters

Given the significance of forecasting in real estate investment decisions, this paper investigates forecast uncertainty and disagreement in real estate market forecasts. It compares the performance of real estate forecasters with non-real estate forecasters. Using the Investment Property Forum (IPF) quarterly survey amongst UK independent real estate forecasters and a similar survey of macro-economic and capital market forecasters, these forecasts are compared with actual performance to assess a number of forecasting issues in the UK over 1999-2004, including forecast error, bias and consensus. The results suggest that both groups are biased, less volatile compared to market returns and inefficient in that forecast errors tend to persist. The strongest finding is that forecasters display the characteristics associated with a consensus indicating herding.

Liquidity in commercial property markets: deconstructing the transaction process

This paper draws from a wider research programme in the UK undertaken for the Investment Property Forum examining liquidity in commercial property. One aspect of liquidity is the process by which transactions occur including both how properties are selected for sale and the time taken to transact. The paper analyses data from three organisations; a property company, a major financial institution and an asset management company, formally a major public sector pension fund. The data covers three market states and includes sales completed in 1995, 2000 and 2002 in the UK. The research interviewed key individuals within the three organisations to identify any common patterns of activity within the sale process and also identified the timing of 187 actual transactions from inception of the sale to completion. The research developed a taxonomy of the transaction process. Interviews with vendors indicated that decisions to sell were a product of a combination of portfolio, specific property and market based issues. Properties were generally not kept in a “readiness for sale” state. The average time from first decision to sell the actual property to completion had a mean time of 298 days and a median of 190 days. It is concluded that this study may underestimate the true length of the time to transact for two reasons. Firstly, the pre-marketing period is rarely recorded in transaction files. Secondly, and more fundamentally, studies of sold properties may contain selection bias. The research indicated that vendors tended to sell properties which it was perceived could be sold at a ‘fair’ price in a reasonable period of time.

Internal doubts about Cohen's Rescue of Justice

G.A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality is the culmination of twenty years' work on Rawls's theory of justice. In this paper I distinguish three prongs of attack advanced by Cohen, and show how two of the prongs (the claim that egalitarianism includes productive demands and the claim that equality is best understood as 'luck egalitarianism') are incompatible.

What people study when they study Twitter: classifying Twitter related academic papers

PURPOSE: Since its introduction in 2006, messages posted to the microblogging system Twitter have provided a rich dataset for researchers, leading to the publication of over a thousand academic papers. This paper aims to identify this published work and to classify it in order to understand Twitter based research. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Firstly the papers on Twitter were identified. Secondly, following a review of the literature, a classification of the dimensions of microblogging research was established. Thirdly, papers were qualitatively classified using open coded content analysis, based on the paper’s title and abstract, in order to analyze method, subject, and approach. FINDINGS: The majority of published work relating to Twitter concentrates on aspects of the messages sent and details of the users. A variety of methodological approaches are used across a range of identified domains. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS: This work reviewed the abstracts of all papers available via database search on the term “Twitter” and this has two major implications: 1) the full papers are not considered and so works may be misclassified if their abstract is not clear, 2) publications not indexed by the databases, such as book chapters, are not included. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: To date there has not been an overarching study to look at the methods and purpose of those using Twitter as a research subject. Our major contribution is to scope out papers published on Twitter until the close of 2011. The classification derived here will provide a framework within which researchers studying Twitter related topics will be able to position and ground their work

Food and Health Forum meeting - nutritional approaches to cardiovascular health: workshop report

This report summarises the proceedings of a meeting held by the Food and Health Forum at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, on 12 October 2011. The objective of the meeting was to highlight nutritional strategies targeted at cardiovascular health. This included a review of the effects of various foods, nutrients and ingredients on maintenance of healthy cholesterol levels, endothelial function and blood pressure

A novel approach to national technological accumulation and absorptive capacity: aggregating Cohen and Levinthal

The paper develops a more precise specification and understanding of the process of national-level knowledge accumulation and absorptive capabilities by applying the reasoning and evidence from the firm-level analysis pioneered by Cohen and Levinthal (1989, 1990). In doing so, we acknowledge that significant cross-border effects due to the role of both inward and outward FDI exist and that assimilation of foreign knowledge is not only confined to catching-up economies but is also carried out by countries at the frontier-sharing phase. We postulate a non-linear relationship between national absorptive capacity and the technological gap, due to the effects of the cumulative nature of the learning process and the increase in complexity of external knowledge as the country approaches the technological frontier. We argue that national absorptive capacity and the accumulation of knowledge stock are simultaneously determined. This implies that different phases of technological development require different strategies. During the catching-up phase, knowledge accumulation occurs predominately through the absorption of trade and/or inward FDI-related R&D spillovers. At the pre-frontier-sharing phase onwards, increases in the knowledge base occur largely through independent knowledge creation and actively accessing foreign-located technological spillovers, inter alia through outward FDI-related R&D, joint ventures and strategic alliances.

How Twitter is studied in the medical professions: a classification of Twitter papers indexed in PubMed

Background: Since their inception, Twitter and related microblogging systems have provided a rich source of information for researchers and have attracted interest in their affordances and use. Since 2009 PubMed has included 123 journal articles on medicine and Twitter, but no overview exists as to how the field uses Twitter in research. // Objective: This paper aims to identify published work relating to Twitter indexed by PubMed, and then to classify it. This classification will provide a framework in which future researchers will be able to position their work, and to provide an understanding of the current reach of research using Twitter in medical disciplines. Limiting the study to papers indexed by PubMed ensures the work provides a reproducible benchmark. // Methods: Papers, indexed by PubMed, on Twitter and related topics were identified and reviewed. The papers were then qualitatively classified based on the paper’s title and abstract to determine their focus. The work that was Twitter focused was studied in detail to determine what data, if any, it was based on, and from this a categorization of the data set size used in the studies was developed. Using open coded content analysis additional important categories were also identified, relating to the primary methodology, domain and aspect. // Results: As of 2012, PubMed comprises more than 21 million citations from biomedical literature, and from these a corpus of 134 potentially Twitter related papers were identified, eleven of which were subsequently found not to be relevant. There were no papers prior to 2009 relating to microblogging, a term first used in 2006. Of the remaining 123 papers which mentioned Twitter, thirty were focussed on Twitter (the others referring to it tangentially). The early Twitter focussed papers introduced the topic and highlighted the potential, not carrying out any form of data analysis. The majority of published papers used analytic techniques to sort through thousands, if not millions, of individual tweets, often depending on automated tools to do so. Our analysis demonstrates that researchers are starting to use knowledge discovery methods and data mining techniques to understand vast quantities of tweets: the study of Twitter is becoming quantitative research. // Conclusions: This work is to the best of our knowledge the first overview study of medical related research based on Twitter and related microblogging. We have used five dimensions to categorise published medical related research on Twitter. This classification provides a framework within which researchers studying development and use of Twitter within medical related research, and those undertaking comparative studies of research relating to Twitter in the area of medicine and beyond, can position and ground their work.

Typography papers, 9

This latest issue of the series of Typography papers opens with a beautifully illustrated article by the type designer Gerard Unger on ‘Romanesque’ letters. A further installment of Eric Kindel’s pathbreaking history of stencil letters is published in contributions by him, Fred Smeijers, and James Mosley. Maurice Göldner writes the first history of an early twentieth-century German typefounder, Brüder Butter. William Berkson and Peter Enneson recover the notion of ‘readability’ through a history of the collaboration between Matthew Luckiesh and the Linotype Company. Paul Luna discusses the role of pictures in dictionaries. Titus Nemeth describes a new form of Arabic type for metal composition. The whole gathering shows the remarkable variety and vitality of typography now.