A multilateral interchange fee is a commonly agreed interbank fee among all or a large group of service providers for interbank transfers of a given payment instrument (when a bilateral interchange fee, with the same effect is agreed only between a pair of service providers). MIFs are used especially in the card industry to transfer revenues/charges from the acquiring (merchant's) bank or institution to the issuing (cardholder's) bank or institution. Sometimes the MIF flow goes in the opposite direction, which can be interpreted as a negative MIF. MIFs have also been used with direct debit and cheque transactions in some countries.
Because the decision on MIF-pricing is made collectively between service providers in competition on the same market, this is a horizontal pricing decision among competitors. This implies according to general competition legislation basics that the service providers should prove that these kinds of cooperative decisions are to the benefit of the general public. A beneficial MIF should therefore improve the general efficiency of the payment market and thereby support the use of the more efficient payment instruments at the expense of less efficient ones and bring down the overall costs of paying in the economy. An MIF would not be needed with completely transparent payment pricing, as the customers would see the full costs of all payment instruments and thereby be in a good position to select the most efficient ones. Therefore the use of an MIF can only be efficient when it is used to correct misleading price signals on a market with heavily cross-subsidised payment services eg free or almost free cash services.
In this paper, we focus on the predictability of hedge fund index returns and its eventual application in a fund of hedge funds. There is now a consensus in empirical finance that expected asset returns are, to some extent, predictable, at least for traditional asset classes. However, literature on evidence on return predictability of hedge fund is still in its infancy. Amenc, El Bied and Martellini (2002) were the first to report both statistical and economic significance of predictability in hedge funds returns.
Like Amenc et al. (2002), we use factor models to find evidence of predictability in various hedge fund index returns. Given that the true set of predictive variables is virtually unknown, we extend Amenc et al. (2002) empirical analysis using various forecasting models to analyze hedge fund index returns predictability and its impact to tactical style allocation (TSA) strategies. We take into account a larger number of predictive variables reflecting the stage of the economic cycle, the interest rate environment, and the dynamic trading strategies applied by hedge funds. These variables are able to predict changes in hedge fund index returns. We finally expand the sample period until December 2003.
As most oil fields are growing older, resulting in wet crude oil production, it is necessary to provide desalting =dehydration systems to separate the oil and water before the oil can be further processed. Oil desalting=dehydration is the process of removing water-soluble salts from an oil stream. With the increasing regulations on effluent water and the ever- increasing cost of producingabarrel of oil, the use of emulsion-treatment plants has become an important practice in crude oil processing. Treat- mentofemulsions has always ranged from simple methods such as gravity settlement to highly sophisticated methods such astri-volted desalting and dehydration systems.
