This paper explores investor behaviour during the South Sea Bubble—the first major speculative boom and bust on the stock markets. Previous literature debates whether investors during this episode acted rationally. Newly acquired data involving parallel markets for the South Sea Company's stock and subscription receipts are analysed, and widening valuation gaps are observed between these substitutable financial instruments. Rational explanations do not prove adequate, and the anomalies are explained by the biased decision‐making of investors, and their tendency to view financial markets as wagering markets. The implications of these findings for the current debate on rationality in financial markets are identified.

Summary The APSES protein family comprises a conserved class of fungus‐specific transcriptional regulators. Some members have been identified in partial ascomycetes. In this study, the APSES protein StuA (AoStuA) of the nematode‐trapping fungus Arthrobotrys oligospora was characterized. Compared with the wild‐type (WT) strain, three ΔAoStuA mutants grew relatively slowly, displayed a 96% reduction in sporulation capacity and a delay in conidial germination. The reduced sporulation capacity correlated with transcriptional repression of several sporulation‐related genes. The mutants were also more sensitive to chemical stressors than the WT strain. Importantly, the mutants were unable to produce mycelial traps for nematode predation. Moreover, peroxisomes and Woronin bodies were abundant in the WT cells but hardly found in the cells of those mutants. The lack of such organelles correlated with transcriptional repression of some genes involved in the biogenesis of peroxisomes and Woronin bodies. The transcript levels of several genes involved in the cAMP/PKA signalling pathway were also significantly reduced in the mutants versus the WT strain, implicating a regulatory role of AoStuA in the transcription of genes involved in the cAMP/PKA signalling pathway that regulates an array of cellular processes and events. In particular, AoStuA is indispensable for A. oligospora trap formation and virulence.

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This paper investigates the effect of including the customer loan approval process to the estimation of loan performance and explores the influence of sample selection bias in predicting the probability of default. The bootstrap variable reduction technique is applied to reduce the variable dimension for a large dataset drawn from a major UK retail bank. The results show a statistically significant correlation between the loan approval and performance processes. We further demonstrate an economically significant improvement in forecasting performance when taking into account sample selection bias. We conclude that financial institutions can obtain benefits by correcting for sample selection bias in their credit scoring models

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