Economists historically measure the degree to which the market is surprised by an earnings announcement by the consensus forecast error, defined as difference between the actual earnings and the consensus forecast. The consensus might be calculated using either the mean or median of security analysts forecasts. The premise of this measure is that the consensus forecast is a good proxy for the markets expectation of earnings. Hence the consensus forecast error captures how surprised the market is when the earnings is announced. The consensus forecast error is a building block of a host of studies across finance, accounting and economics (see for a survey of event studies in Kothari (2001)). For instance, in finance and accounting, it is used in event studies of how efficiently markets react to earnings announcements. Efficient market studies when it comes to bond or currency markets and macroeconomic

The main object of this paper is to find a criterion for comparison of two tests for non-parametric hypotheses, taking advantage of the qualitative information that may exist. After a detailed analysis of the problem and some earlier suggestins for its solution (sections 2–4), a criterion is suggested in section 5. In order to apply it to a concrete case, a location problem is specified in section 6. The rank tests to be compared are analyzed in section 7, and the comparison by way of the criterion is carried out in section 8. It turns out that sign tests, sometimes slightly modified, are very often optimal according to the criterion used.

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Recently, Tsai-Tseng-Yau constructed new invariants of symplectic manifolds: a sequence of A-infinity algebras built of differential forms on the symplectic manifold. We show that these symplectic A-infinity algebras have a simple topological interpretation. Namely, when the cohomology class of the symplectic form is integral, these A-infinity algebras are equivalent to the standard de Rham differential graded algebra on certain odd dimensional sphere bundles over the symplectic manifold. From this equivalence, we deduce for a closed symplectic manifold that Tsai-Tseng-Yau's symplectic A-infinity algebras satisfy the Calabi-Yau property, and importantly, that they can be used to define an intersection theory for coisotropic/isotropic chains. We further demonstrate that these symplectic A-infinity algebras satisfy several functorial properties and lay the groundwork for addressing Weinstein functoriality and invariance in the smooth category.

We give a new, simple algorithm for simultaneous degree elevation and knot insertion for B-spline curves. The method is based on the simple approach of computing derivatives using the control points, resampling the knot vector, and then computing the new control points from the derivatives. We compare our approach with previous algorithms and illustrate it with examples.