Paris Dauphine University

About: Paris Dauphine University is a education organization based out in Paris, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Context (language use) & Population. The organization has 1766 authors who have published 6909 publications receiving 162747 citations. The organization is also known as: Paris Dauphine & Dauphine.

Exchange Traded Funds: History, Trading, and Research

Abstract: One of the most spectacular successes in financial innovation since the advent of financial futures is probably the creation of exchange traded funds (ETFs). As index funds, they aim at replicating the performance of their benchmark indices as closely as possible. Contrary to conventional mutual funds, however, ETFs are listed on an exchange and can be traded intradaily. Issuers and exchanges set forth the diversification opportunities they provide to all types of investors at a lower cost, but also highlight their tax efficiency, transparency, and low management fees. All of these features rely on a specific “in-kind” creation and redemption principle: New shares can continuously be created by depositing a portfolio of stocks that closely approximates the holdings of the fund; similarly, investors can redeem outstanding ETF shares and receive the basket portfolio in return. Holdings are transparent since fund portfolios are disclosed at the end of the trading day. ETFs were introduced to U.S. and Canadian exchanges in the early 1990s. In the first several years, they represented a small fraction of the assets under management in index funds. However, the 132% average annual growth rate of ETF assets from 1995 through 2001 (Gastineau, 2002) illustrates the increasing importance of these instruments. The launching of Cubes in 1999 was accompanied by a spectacular growth in trading volume, making the major ETFs the most actively traded equity securities on the U.S. stock exchanges. Since then, ETF markets have continued to grow, not only in the number and variety of products, but also in terms of assets and market value. Initially, they aimed at replicating broad-based stock indices; new ETFs extended their fields to sectors, international markets, fixed-income instruments, and, lately, commodities. By the end of 2005, 453 ETFs were listed around the world, for assets worth $343 billion. In the United States, overall ETF assets totaled $296.02 billion, compared to $8.9 trillion in mutual funds.

Regularity of Multivariate Refinable Functions

Abstract: The regularity of a univariate compactly supported refinable function is known to be related to the spectral properties of an associated transfer operator. In the case of multivariate refinable functions with a general dilation matrix A , although factorization techniques, which are typically used in the univariate setting, are no longer applicable, we derive similar results that also depend on the spectral properties of A .

Multiple Contour Finding and Perceptual Grouping using Minimal Paths

Abstract: We address the problem of finding a set of contour curves in an image. We consider the problem of perceptual grouping and contour completion, where the data is a set of points in the image. A new method to find complete curves from a set of contours or edge points is presented. Our approach is based on a previous work on finding contours as minimal paths between two end points using the fast marching algorithm (L. D Cohen and R. Kimmel, International Journal of Computer Vision, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 57–78, 1997). Given a set of key points, we find the pairs of points that have to be linked and the paths that join them. We use the saddle points of the minimal action map. The paths are obtained by backpropagation from the saddle points to both points of each pair. In a second part, we propose a scheme that does not need key points for initialization. A set of key points is automatically selected from a larger set of admissible points. At the same time, saddle points between pairs of key points are extracted. Next, paths are drawn on the image and give the minimal paths between selected pairs of points. The set of minimal paths completes the initial set of contours and allows to close them. We illustrate the capability of our approach to close contours with examples on various images of sets of edge points of shapes with missing contours.