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This article compares two methods of collecting daily data: self-administered diaries and telephone interviews. Study participants included 44 men and 56 women between the ages of 16 and 35 who participated in a larger study of drinking, drug use, and sexual activity. Participants were randomly assigned to either the written diary or the telephone interview conditions; question wording and format were identical in both conditions. Daily data were collected for a period of 8 weeks. Results indicate that although telephone interviews resulted in slightly more missed days of data collection, they generally yielded less item-level missing data, produced cleaner data and therefore were less costly to process, and were as palatable to participants as self-administered diaries. Except for reports of drinking and vegetable consumption, telephone and diary conditions did not differ in the amount of behavior reported; more drinking and vegetable consumption were reported with telephone interviews, however. Telephone interviews also imposed considerably higher overall personnel costs.

Abstract. Climate warming increases the intensity of extreme precipitation. Studying extreme precipitation patterns and changes is vital to reducing risk. This paper investigates thresholds, changes and timescales for extreme precipitation using sub-daily records from meteorological stations in the Ganjiang River basin. We use the gamma distribution and select the L-moment method to estimate the parameters α and β. Results show that (1) continuous precipitation events of 36 h contributed the most precipitation to the total but with lower frequency, which would be key events for flood monitoring; (2) the intensity and the occasional probability of extreme precipitation will increase in spring in the future in stations like Yifeng, Zhangshu and Ningdu, which will in turn increase the risk of storm floods; and (3) spatial distribution of extreme precipitation risk shows that the risk increases as elevation increases in the northern lowland and the Jitai Basin in the midstream region, while the risk in the southern mountainous region decreases as elevation increases. These findings will facilitate emergency preparedness, including risk management and disaster assistance, in the study areas.

Northern Chile is one of the most arid regions in the world, as it includes the Atacama Desert. At high elevations, most precipitation is observed only during a short period of the year, from December until March. This renders water availability a major concern for policymakers. Accumulated rainfall varies considerably from one year to another, and for this reason, climate projections have a very low degree of confidence in this area. Consequently, in this region, it is more interesting to study the irregularity of precipitation itself than accumulated rainfall values, as they express in a clearer way the behaviour of precipitation. According to daily data from 161 meteorological stations, four irregularity indices of precipitation were calculated: concentration index, entropy, persistence index, and fractal dimension. These indices were measured according to observed values, and their spatial distribution was subsequently determined by interpolating following multivariate regression models that consider different geographical variables such as latitude, distance to the Amazon Basin, elevation, orientation, and curvature. The temporal trends of each index and for each meteorological station were also calculated, displaying different results depending on the latitude and elevation. These changes agree with the observed modifications on the inter‐tropical atmospheric circulation and with changes in the precipitation diurnal cycle. These results will help improve climate projections for this region, in the process facilitating the development of more accurate climate models and informing the formulation of water management policies. ; The authors want to thank the FONDECYT Project 11160059, the CLICES Project (CGL2017‐83866‐C3‐2‐R), and the Climatology Group (2017 SGR 1362, Catalan Government) for their support.

This paper aims to study and compare the efficiency in futures markets for soybean crop between Buenos Aires (MATBA) and Chicago (CME–CBOT) for the years 1994 through 2015. There are numerous studies that analyze this phenomenon independently, but few of them have done a comparative analysis between marke-
ts. Therefore, the main objective of this research — in addition to individually analyzing the efficiency in futures market in each country — is to be able to detect the existence of a relationship between the two markets. In this article we show that, in addition for market efficiency in all cases, market efficiency in MatBa was derived from the efficiency in CME–CBOT. This means that relevant information is transmitted from the Chicago market to the one in Buenos Aires. By using a cointegration approach based on Johansen (1995) we estimated the models with monthly and daily data.

Politische Ereignisse in 139 Ländern der Erde.

Themen: Erfassung der Art von politischen Ereignissen, wie
z.B. Demonstrationen, Polizeieinsatz, Aufruhr, Streik,
bewaffnete politische Konflikte, politisch motivierte Morde,
politische Streiks, Umsturzversuche, Wahlen, reguläre
Ablösungen von Machthabern bzw. einer Regierung; Lockerung von
Zensur und politischen Beschränkungen; Datum des Ereignisses;
Streitfrage und Ziel der politischen Aktion; Anzahl der Teilnehme
und Verletzten; angerichteter Schaden; Dauer und Ausdehnung des
Ereignisses; Anzahl der Toten; agierende Gruppen; Quelle, aus
der das Ereignis verkodet wurde.

This paper provides an econometric analysis of the short-run impact of interest rates on the Swiss franc exchange rate covering the period January 2001 to June 2011 using daily data. Our model includes both the exchange rate of the Swiss franc against euro and dollar and uses the plausible assumption that foreign interest rates and the euro-dollar exchange rate are exogenous. In addition, we consider not only money market interest differentials, but also those for 2 and 10 year governments bonds. GMM estimation indicates that a one-percentage point increase in the 3-month Swiss franc Libor rate leads to a 3.7 % appreciation of the Swiss franc against euro and dollar. This result seems to be robust with respect to considering only increasing or decreasing interest rates and omitting data around SNB target band adjustments. Our findings appear reasonable and are between the extremely low and high estimates of the impact of Swiss interest rate changes on the exchange rate reported in the literature.

51 Pags.- 12 Figs.- 3 Tabls. The definitive version is available at: http://www.int-res.com/journals/cr/cr-home/ ; This work presents a method for the reconstruction of fragmentary daily precipitation datasets. The method aims to preserve the local and temporal variability characteristic of high-frequency precipitation data, and does not use the time-structure of the data. Based on the precipitation values recorded at closest neighbours during a target day, 2 reference values (RVs) are computed: a binomial prediction (BP) expressing the probability of occurrence of a wet day; and a magnitude prediction (MP), referring to the amount of precipitation. Generalised linear models (GLMs) are used to compute the RVs using the precipitation data (occurrence and magnitude) of the 10 nearest neighbours as the dependent variable, and the geographic information of each station (latitude, longitude, and altitude) as the independent variables. The RVs are then used to (1) apply quality control to the data, flagging suspect records according to 5 predefined criteria; (2) obtain serially complete time series by imputing RVs to missing observations in the original dataset; and (3) create new time series at locations where there were no observations or gridded datasets with even spatial coverage over the study area. The routines used were compiled into an R-package called 'reddPrec' (reconstruction of daily data - Precipitation) available to any user. We applied these methods to the complete daily precipitation dataset of the island of Majorca in Spain, spanning the period from 1971-2014. ; This study was supported by research projects CGL2012-31668, CGL2015-69985-R, CGL2011-24185 and CGL2014-52135-C3-1-R, financed by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) and FEDER-ERDF funds. The researchers were supported by the Government of Aragón through the 'Programme of research groups' (groups H38, 'Clima, Cambio Global y Sistemas Naturales' and 'E68, Geomorfología y Cambio Global'). ; Peer reviewed