In October, 1986, the 10th U.S.-German Seminar of State and Planning on Environmental Specimen Banking was held at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences in Gloucester Point, Virginia. At this meeting the current status of specimen banking activities in the U. S., FRG, Canada, and Japan was presented and discussed. This publication contains the proceedings of that meeting with contributions describing various activities related to banking and analysis of samples from aquatic, atmospheric, terrestrial, and human monitoring programs.

The purpose of the study is to empirically determine the relevance of PPP theory under the traditional arbitrage and the efficient markets (EPPP) frameworks during the recent floating period of the 1980s. Monthly data was collected for fifteen industrial nations from January 1980 to December 1986. The models tested included the short-run PPP, the long-run PPP, the EPPP, the EPPP with deviations from expectations, the forward rates as unbiased estimators of future spot rates, the EPPP and the forward rates, and the EPPP with forward rates and lagged values. A generalized regression method called Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) was employed to test the models. The results support the efficient markets approach to PPP but fail to support the traditional PPP in both the short term and the long term. Moreover, the forward rates are poor and biased predictors of the future spot rates. The random walk hypothesis is generally supported.