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In the Covid-19 pandemic, it seems that African countries have been largely spared from the devastating effects observed elsewhere. Working and living in Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world located in West Africa, we wonder: How can the world know that there are only few Covid-19 cases in a country where the health system is weak and access to Covid-19 tests very limited? How can the world know that there is a low Covid-19 mortality in a country without a reliable civil registration and vital statistic system? In this article, we explore the (too) many unknowns of Covid-19 in Guinea-Bissau. The article was chosen as the 1st place winner of the 2020 Eye on Global Health Writing Competition.

We consider large N, T panel data models with fixed effects, common factors allowing cross-section dependence, and persistent data and shocks, which are assumed fractionally integrated. In a basic setup, the main interest is on the fractional parameter of the idiosyncratic component, which is estimated in first differences after factor removal by projection on the cross-section average. The pooled conditional-sum-of-squares estimate is root-NT consistent but the normal asymptotic distribution might not be centered, requiring the time series dimension to grow faster than the cross-section size for correction. Generalizing the basic setup to include covariates and heterogeneous parameters, we propose individual and common-correlation estimates for the slope parameters, while error memory parameters are estimated from regression residuals. The two parameter estimates are root-T consistent and asymptotically normal and mutually uncorrelated, irrespective of possible cointegration among idiosyncratic components. A study of small-sample performance and an empirical application to realized volatility persistence are included.

This thesis attempts to understand the ways in which popular film is integrated into the everyday lives of urban middle class youth in India. Approaching the study of film through an audience reception approach, I engaged in participant observation and interviews during a fieldwork period in New Delhi in order to better understand how a young audience might negotiate the fantasy of filmic images into the reality of their own lives. The two movies, Salaam Namaste and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (KANK), provided the platform for discussing sensitive or taboo topics in the interviews as well as in the larger public sphere. In portraying alternative lifestyles such as a premarital sexual live-in relationship in Salaam Namaste, and an extra-marital relationship in KANK, these movies presented a possibility for discussing as well as negotiating changing practices and attitudes concerning courtship and marriage in India. The concept of negotiation plays a key role in this interpretation and analysis of the challenges, or ‘paradox,’ young people face while integrating a modern, global outlook with traditional, “Indian” morality. Imagination, I argue, thus provides the necessary tool for negotiating modern dilemmas incurred as a result of processes of globalization.

Department of Mathematics, ETH Zürich, HG G32.2, 8092 Zurich, SwitzerlandAbstract: In this paper we study the asymptotic behaviour of power and multipower variationsof stochatstic processes. Processes of the type considered serve in particular, to analyse data of velocity increments of a uid in a turbulence regime with spot intermittency sigma. The purpose of the present paper is to determine the probabilistic limit behaviour of the (multi)power variations of Y , as a basis for studying properties of the intermittency process. Notably the processes Y are in general not of the semimartingale kind and the established theory of multipower variation for semimartingales does not suffice for deriving the limit properties. As a key tool for the results a general central limit theorem for triangular Gaussian schemes is formulated and proved. Examples and an application to realised variance ratio are given.