Today SIRCA announced the success of its proposal to create a $40m Australian Financial Services Industry Innovation Partnership based around Sydney’s Barangaroo with a foundation commitment from the Australian Government of over $15m. A national consortium of Businesses, Universities and State Governments plan to match the Government’s investment in the initiative.
For the full press release please click here.
Sirca Members using AusEquities should have noticed a boost in performance recently. The Sirca team have more than doubled the processing power dedicated to the AusEquities service resulting in jobs moving through the system much faster.
We’ve also added a dedicated processing system for “small” requests (50 instrument days or less – i.e. 4 instruments for 5 days history = 20 instrument days) which means that small requests get serviced quickly and are not queued behind large jobs.
As always, Sirca welcomes your feedback so feel free to let us know via the Helpdesk link in the Member Portal
In May 2012 Sirca announced a series of initiatives that provide additional member benefits. These initiatives are all directed at enhancing research training and research support for our members. They are being overseen by a newly created Membership Research Committee (MRC) and the appointment of Professor Terry Walter as Sirca’s Chief Research Officer.
One such initiative is a Young Researcher Workshop. Under this proposal young researchers working or studying in member universities will travel to Sydney (with travel and accommodation costs being met by Sirca) to present their current finance or accounting research, and to receive expert commentary on the research from a member of the MRC. The Workshop will be held twice per year and five papers will be presented at each workshop.
We now invite young researchers to submit a current research paper for possible inclusion in the third workshop. Submitted papers should be sufficiently advanced to benefit from feedback and suggestions from a seminar presentation. Send papers to the following email address callforpapers@sirca.org.au. The deadline for submission is 15 September 2013. Notification of the six papers to be included will be made by 16 October 2013, at which time we will also advise the nominated MRC referee who will discuss the paper at the workshop. These six presentations will be made on Friday 8 November 2013. Sirca will also invite a further group of nine young researchers to the workshop as attendees and to participate in shorter research presentations in the afternoon of 7 November 2013. Discussions of these shorter presentations will be provided by young researchers attending the workshop. Sirca will meet all reasonable travel and accommodation costs for the presenters and the invited attendees.
To qualify for inclusion at least one of the authors of the submitted paper must be a young researcher. We define a young researcher to be a person currently engaged in PhD research or one whose PhD thesis was completed less than five years ago. We particularly encourage young researchers in regional universities to apply for the workshop. We prefer papers that are sole authored by a young researcher, however jointly authored papers also qualify.
Sirca wants to track the progress of papers submitted at this workshop and therefore be kept informed of publication outcomes.
The MRC has the following academic members:
We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2013 Asian Finance Association Annual Meeting’s Sirca Best Paper Award.
Congratulations to Sandy Lai (University of Hong Kong), Lilian Ng (University of Wisconsin) and Bohui Zhang (University of New South Wales) with their paper “Does PIN Affect Equity Prices Around the World?”
The prize is awarded to the best paper in any area of finance or accounting research that uses data supplied by Sirca as one of the sources of information in the paper. This year’s meeting was held in Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province, P.R. of China on July 15-17th.
SIRCA and RP Data to create a new world of property data for students and researchers at Australia and New Zealand’s leading universities
Today SIRCA agreed to partner with RP Data to provide researchers from leading Universities with access to Australia’s largest property data collection. “Australia’s housing market is the most valuable and important asset class in the nation, worth an estimated $4.7 trillion. There is a natural appetite from academic institutions both domestically and around the world to gain access to data from Australia’s largest property database and analytics via their SIRCA affiliation” said Mike Briers, CEO of SIRCA.
“Better data leads to better research and ultimately better Government policy and importantly more efficient private sector investment” noted Professor Terry Walter, Chief Research Officer, SIRCA. RP Data wants to ensure students and academics can gain exposure to Australia’s leading suite of property related analytics as well as raw data which can be used to further the analysis of property markets nationally.
The winning paper for the inaugural Philip Brown Best Published Paper Award was announced on Tuesday at the 2013 AFAANZ conference in Perth.
Congratulations to Ben Marshall (Massey University), Nhut Nguyen (University of Auckland) and Nuttawat Visaltanachoti (Massey University) with their paper “Commodity Liquidity Measurement and Transaction Costs” that was published in The Review of Financial Studies v25 n2 2012.
The award was established in recognition of the contribution Philip Brown has made to the establishment of Sirca and the work he did in developing databases to be used for finance and accounting research. The award has a cash value of $10,000 and is made based on a recommendation to the Sirca CEO by the Membership and Research Committee, a sub-committee of the Sirca Limited Board.
Watch this space for how to enter your paper for the 2013 award early next year!Last night SIRCA, NICTA, Macquarie University and the University of Sydney launched a new national research collaboration around applying the latest Big Data and Machine Learning software tools and techniques to some of today’s grand scientific challenges in Ecology, Geology and Physics.
Dr Rob Stokes MP, Member for Pittwater and Parliamentary Secretary for Renewable Energy commended the initiative and commented on how this project may not only be the key to unlocking many great scientific riddles like Sir Richard Southwood former Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford’s quest for a “periodic table” of ecology but also contribute new tools to advance fundamental understanding of other unrelated areas such as nutrition and medical science.
Sirca has decided to make an annual award for the best paper published in the previous calendar year that uses, at least in part, data supplied by Sirca. The award will be made based on a recommendation to the Sirca CEO by the Membership and Research Committee (MRC), a sub-committee of the Sirca Limited Board. It has an initial cash value of $10,000.
In recognition of the contribution Philip Brown made to the establishment of Sirca and the work he did in developing databases to be used for finance and accounting research, the award has been named in his honour. The 2012 best paper will be announced during the 2013 AFAANZ Conference in Perth (July 7-9), and Philip has agreed to make the inaugural presentation.
I write to invite you to submit papers that were published in the 2012 calendar year, that use (at least in part) data supplied by Sirca, and that you believe are of excellent quality. While not all excellent papers are published in the “best” journals (as a guide ABDC rank A and above) it is unlikely that papers published in journals below an A rank would qualify for the award. Please submit a full pdf version of the paper that provides details of the journal in which your paper is published.
Please respond prior to 15 June 2013 to philipbrownprize@sirca.org.au
Chi-X Australia data are now available in the Data Library. These data contain an historical archive of order book tick history for trading on the Australian Chi-X Exchange (Chi-X), which dates back to the commencement of the exchange on 25th October 2011.
These data are made available under license from Chi-X for the purposes of academic research.
Please contact us if you would like to gain access to these data.
