The determinants of a cross market arbitrage opportunity: theory and evidence for the European bond market

This paper examines the determinants of cross-platform arbitrage profits. We develop a structural model that enables us to decompose the likelihood of an arbitrage opportunity into three distinct factors: the fixed cost to trade the opportunity, the level at which one of the platforms delays a price update and the impact of the order flow on the quoted prices (inventory and asymmetric information effects). We then investigate the predictions from the theoretical model for the European Bond market with the estimation of a probit model. Our main finding is that the results found in the empirical part corroborate strongly the predictions from the structural model. The event of a cross market arbitrage opportunity has a certain degree of predictability where an optimal ex ante scenario is represented by a low level of spreads on both platforms, a time of the day close to the end of trading hours and a high volume of trade.

An evaluation of the theoretical potential and practical opportunity for using greywater for domestic purposes in Ghana

Assessments concerning the effects of climate change, water resource availability and water deprivation in West Africa have not frequently considered the positive contribution to be derived from collecting and reusing water for domestic purposes. Where the originating water is taken from a clean water source and has been used the first time for washing or bathing, this water is commonly called “greywater”. Greywater is a prolific resource that is generated wherever people live. Treated greywater can be used for domestic cleaning, for flushing toilets where appropriate, for washing cars, sometimes for watering kitchen gardens, and for clothes washing prior to rinsing. Therefore, a large theoretical potential exists to increase total water resource availability if greywater were to be widely reused. Locally treated greywater reduces the distribution network requirement, lower construction effort and cost and, wherever possible, minimising the associated carbon footprint. Such locally treated greywater offers significant practical opportunities for increasing the total available water resources at a local level. The reuse of treated greywater is one important action that will help to mitigate the reducing availability of clean water supplies in some areas, and the expected mitigation required in future aligns well with WHO/UNICEF (2012) aspirations. The evaluation of potential opportunities for prioritising greywater systems to support water reuse takes into account the availability of water resources, water use indicators and published estimates in order to understand typical patterns of water demand. The approach supports knowledge acquisition regarding local conditions for enabling capacity building for greywater reuse, the understanding of systems that are most likely to encourage greywater reuse, and practices and future actions to stimulate greywater infrastructure planning, design and implementation. Although reuse might be considered to increase the uncertainty of achieving a specified quality of the water supply, robust methods and technologies are available for local treatment. Resource strategies for greywater reuse have the potential to consistently improve water efficiency and availability in water impoverished and water stressed regions of Ghana and West Africa. Untreated greywater is referred to as “greywater”; treated greywater is referred to as “treated greywater” in this paper.

The real value of equality

This paper investigates how political theorists and philosophers should understand egalitarian political demands in light of the increasingly important realist critique of much of contemporary political theory and philosophy. It suggests, first, that what Martin O'Neill has called non-intrinsic egalitarianism is, in one form at least, a potentially realistic egalitarian political project and second, that realists may be compelled to impose an egalitarian threshold on state claims to legitimacy under certain circumstances. Non-intrinsic egalitarianism can meet realism’s methodological requirements because it does not have to assume an unavailable moral consensus since it can focus on widely acknowledged bads rather than contentious claims about the good. Further, an appropriately formulated non-intrinsic egalitarianism may be a minimum requirement of an appropriately realistic claim by a political order to authoritatively structure some of its members' lives. Without at least a threshold set of egalitarian commitments, a political order seems unable to be transparent to many of its worse off members under a plausible construal of contemporary conditions.