BackgroundAdvance care planning (ACP) is a process of reflection on and communication of a person's future health‐care preferences. Evidence suggests visible minorities engage less in ACP. The South Asian ethnic group is the largest visible minority group in Canada, and information is needed to understand how ACP is perceived and how best to approach ACP within this diverse community.ObjectiveTo explore perspectives of South Asian community members towards ACP.DesignPeer‐to‐peer inquiry. South Asian community members who graduated from the Patient and Community Engagement Research programme (PaCER) at the University of Calgary utilized the PaCER method (SET, COLLECT and REFLECT) to conduct a focus group, family interviews and a community forum.Setting and participantsFifty‐seven community‐dwelling men and women (22‐86 years) who self‐identified with the South Asian community in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.ResultsThe concept of ACP was mostly foreign to this community and was often associated with other end‐of‐life issues such as organ donation and estate planning. Cultural aspects (e.g. trust in shared family decision making and taboos related to discussing death), religious beliefs (e.g. fatalism) and immigration challenges (e.g. essential priorities) emerged as barriers to participation in ACP. However, participants were eager to learn about ACP and recommended several engagement strategies (e.g. disseminate information through religious institutions and community centres, include families in ACP discussions, encourage family physicians to initiate discussions and translate materials).ConclusionsUse of a patient engagement research model proved highly successful in understanding South Asian community members' participation in ACP.

The emergence of new asset classes offers avenues to international investment community however understanding relationship between any two assets in a single portfolio is important. We investigate the risk dependence between daily Bitcoin and major Islamic equity markets spanning over from July 2010 to March 2018. We start by examining long memory properties of Bitcoin and sampled Islamic indices and report significant results. The residuals from fractionally integrated models are then used in bivariate time invariant and time varying copulas to investigate dependence structure. Among all Islamic indices, DJIUK, DJIJP and DJICA exhibit time varying dependence with Bitcoin. Finally, we apply VaR, CoVaR and CoVaR as risk measure to examine spillover between Bitcoin and Islamic equity markets. VaR of Bitcoin exceeds from VaR of Islamic indices and CoVaR of both Islamic and Bitcoin exceeds their respective VaR, suggesting presence of risk spillover between each other. Our results also report asymmetry between downside and upside CoVaR suggesting implications for investors with different risk preferences.

Micro finance has achieved an everlasting fame in all over the world by producing considerable evidence of poverty eradication. It provides financial services to those people, who have low incomes, minimal assets and don't have collateral to borrow a credit from commercial banks. The aim of the microfinance is to remove poverty by empowering poor and the unbanked with a little amount of credit. Present study is conducted to find out the impact of micro credit by Punjab Rural Support Programme (PRSP) in the rural areas of Tehsile Gujrat. A sample of 316 borrowers was randomly selected. Sample unit was the borrower who had completely repaid all the loan installments one month before from the day of survey. Survey technique was used and face to face interviews were conducted to collect the relevant information. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the characteristics of the borrowers while for econometric analysis, Multiple Linear Regression Model (MLRM) was used to know the impact of micro credit. The results of econometric analysis show that 1% increase in credit will bring 79% increase in the income of the borrowers. Education has also positive impact on income of the beneficiaries. MLRM analysis shows that increase in 1 year/ (1 level) of education will increase in income by 26.8% of the borrowers while family size is found insignificant. The study not only reveals the impact of micro financing but also gives some suggestions/policy implications for the betterment of micro credit schemes.

This study investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty on disaggregate US sector based returns. Our work is motivated by the presence of non-linear relationship between US economic policy uncertainty and equity returns of sampled US sectors. The paper uses weekly data from January 1995 to December 2015 for all the return indices and economic policy uncertainty data mainly based on policy issues, provision set for the US federal tax code and disagreement among economic forecasters. Our results indicate that information technology, utilities, industrial and telecommunication sectors remain insensitive to changes in the US economic policy uncertainty. However, financial and the consumer discretionary sectors show significant long run asymmetric relationship with the EPU.

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