Europe was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and Portugal was severely affected, having suffered three waves in the first twelve months. Approximately between Jan 19th and Feb 5th 2021 Portugal was the country in the world with the largest incidence rate, with 14-days incidence rates per 100,000 inhabitants in excess of 1000. Despite its importance, accurate prediction of the geospatial evolution of COVID-19 remains a challenge, since existing analytical methods fail to capture the complex dynamics that result from the contagion within a region and the spreading of the infection from infected neighboring regions. We use a previously developed methodology and official municipality level data from the Portuguese Directorate-General for Health (DGS), relative to the first twelve months of the pandemic, to compute an estimate of the incidence rate in each location of mainland Portugal. The resulting sequence of incidence rate maps was then used as a gold standard to test the effectiveness of different approaches in the prediction of the spatial-temporal evolution of the incidence rate. Four different methods were tested: a simple cell level autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model, a cell level vector autoregressive (VAR) model, a municipality-by-municipality compartmental SIRD model followed by direct block sequential simulation and a new convolutional sequence-to-sequence neural network model based on the STConvS2S architecture. We conclude that the modified convolutional sequence-to-sequence neural network is the best performing method in this task, when compared with the ARMA, VAR, and SIRD models, as well as with the baseline ConvLSTM model.

Purpose This study aims to study the impact of earnings quality on firms’ financial performance. Design/methodology/approach An unbalanced panel data of 237 small- and medium-sized Portuguese companies from the mold industry, using 2010–2018 yearly data was analyzed. While most studies focus only on earnings management when assessing earnings quality, in this study six proxies for earnings quality are used, namely, accruals quality (a proxy for earnings management), earnings persistence, earnings predictability, earnings smoothness, earnings timeliness and earnings conservatism. Moreover, two proxies of financial performance are considered, the return on assets and the economic value added. An econometric model was estimated using either a fixed-effects or a random-effects specification to account for the individual firm-specific effects and ensure heteroscedasticity corrected estimates. Findings The results show that managers must be concerned with the quality of reported earnings, as it can affect positively firms’ financial performance, especially regarding accruals quality. Persistence, predictability, smoothness, timeliness and conservatism are shown not to exert significant influence on financial performance in the sample. Research limitations/implications This work contributes not only as a literature review on these thematic but also to firms’ managers and stakeholders, who have information that helps them select strategies that guarantee earnings quality and improve firms’ financial performance. Originality/value This study proposed an econometric model that studies the relationship between earnings quality (using several proxies for it) and financial performance that can be applied to all companies.

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<p>Seismic oceanography as remote sensing of the ocean structure by multichannel reflection seismic method can provide high-resolution images enabling the study of fine-scale ocean processes along large distances.</p> <p>The seismic acoustic response depends on differences in ocean temperature and salinity, and the resulting seismic images track the interfaces between those thermohaline layers both laterally and in depth. The structural interpretation of observed seismic reflections provides valuable oceanographic insights to understand mixing processes and phenomena occurring at different water column depths.</p> <p>Three parallel 2D multichannel seismic reflection profiles acquired by the Portuguese Task Force for the Extension of the Continental Shelf in the Madeira Abyssal Plain (MAP), profiles covering 300km and ~100km apart from each other, dating from 2006, were processed to enhance the amplitudes of the water column (Azevedo, L. et al., 2021) and analyzed jointly with conductivity-temperature-depth probes (CTDs) from 2002 and 2005 acquired by Poseidon research vessel.</p> <p>The structure of the water column in this area is characterized by the intrusion of Mediterranean Outflow Waters (MOW), warmer and salty water mass expressing between the 500 and 1500 m depth, and overlaying Subarctic Intermediate Water where temperature and salinity decrease in depth. Due to the differences in temperature and salinity gradients, the MAP region is auspicious for developing double diffusion, specifically thermohaline staircases (van der Boog, C. et al., 2021). Double diffusion is shown to influence the efficiency of vertical mixing of the different water masses; it affects the vertical transport of nutrients, temperature, and salt and contributes to ocean circulation, which is intrinsically connected to the control of the earth’s climate. Nevertheless, it is still lacking information.</p> <p>We detected the thermohaline staircases expression in temperature and salinity profiles plotted as a function of depth, noticing that the interfaces of mixing followed by layers of well-mixed temperature and salinity are well defined as a step structure and were validated as double diffusion by calculating the Turner angle and Density Ratio at those depths.</p> <p>Simultaneously, the seismic profiles are characterized by continuous sub-horizontal reflections between the ~1200 to 2000 meters of depth. By correlating the CTD profiles with the seismic images, it is noticeable that the staircases on the vertical profiles correspond to the reflections on the seismic at the expected depths and are covering almost the entirety of seismic profiles.</p> <p>Since those reflections are present in the three parallel seismic profiles, we use them to predict the lateral continuity of the step-like structures and build models of the incidence of double-diffusive thermohaline staircases in the region, contributing to the knowledge of those processes' extension and expression in the Madeira Abyssal plain.</p> <p>References:</p> <p>van der Boog, C. G., Dijkstra, H. A., Pietrzak, J. D., & Katsman, C. A. (2021). Double-diffusive mixing makes a small contribution to the global ocean circulation. Communications Earth & Environment, 2(1), 1-9.</p> <p>Azevedo, L., Matias, L., Turco, F., Tromm, R., & Peliz, Á. (2021). Geostatistical seismic inversion for temperature and salinity in the Madeira Abyssal Plain. Frontiers in Marine Science, 8, 685007.</p>

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