A critical overview of privacy-preserving approaches for collaborative forecasting

Cooperation between different data owners may lead to an improvement in forecast quality—for instance, by benefiting from spatiotemporal dependencies in geographically distributed time series. Due to business competitive factors and personal data protection concerns, however, said data owners might be unwilling to share their data. Interest in collaborative privacy-preserving forecasting is thus increasing. This paper analyzes the state-of-the-art and unveils several shortcomings of existing methods in guaranteeing data privacy when employing vector autoregressive models. The methods are divided into three groups: data transformation, secure multi-party computations, and decomposition methods. The analysis shows that state-of-the-art techniques have limitations in preserving data privacy, such as (i) the necessary trade-off between privacy and forecasting accuracy, empirically evaluated through simulations and real-world experiments based on solar data; and (ii) iterative model fitting processes, which reveal data after a number of iterations.     

Does remittance fuel labour productivity in Bangladesh? The application of an asymmetric non-linear ARDL approach

Bangladesh, a labour-abundant country, is finally learning to reap gains from her labour abundance. The historical under-optimized capital–labour ratio of Bangladesh is slowly moving towards its optimum as the migration of its labour force and consequent inflow of remittance strategically converts its abundant labour into capital. Though the fear that remittance as an alternative source of earning may result in Dutch disease for existing family members; annual data for 1982–2013 and through applying standard testing methodologies, our empirical findings suggest that such a fear is not valid since remittance flow significantly improves domestic labour productivity in Bangladesh in the long run.     

Least Squares Asymptotics in Spurious and Cointegrated Panel Regressions with Common and Idiosyncratic Stochastic Trends*

This article makes an analytical study of the effects of the presence of both common and idiosyncratic stochastic trends on the pooled least squares estimator. The results suggest that the usual result of asymptotic normality depends critically on the absence of the common stochastic trend.     

Sustainability marketing research: past,present and future

Abstract

This paper provides a synthesis and critical assessment of the sustainability marketing literature, from the period 1998–2013, building on a previous assessment from 1971 to 1998. It details research within major marketing journals and critically assesses this research in relation to the on-going conversation which focuses on marketing’s relationship with the natural environment. Differences in the content and depth of sustainability coverage in marketing journals are considered. Potential avenues for future sustainability marketing research are proposed, with a particular call for theoretical and managerial reflections which tackle broader systemic and institutional issues within the discipline.     

Regulation of relationships between heterogeneous farmers and an aquifer accounting for lag effects

Many environmental problems are due to damage caused by pollutants that accumulate with a time lag following their emission. In this study, we focus on nitrates used in agriculture, which can pollute groundwater many years after their initial application. A dynamic optimal control problem with heterogeneous farmers is proposed. The usual structural parameters such as the discount rate, the natural clearing rate and the lagged time interval between the occurrence of soil‐level pollution and the impact on groundwater are taken into account. We also examine pollution as caused by a continuous set of farms characterised by their individual performance index and by their individual marginal contribution to the pollution. The issue is further investigated by taking account of change in the information context, successively related to perfect information and to asymmetric information. As a result, when the delay between the spreading of N‐fertilizer and the impact on the aquifer increases, that is, the longer the lag, the steady‐state pollution stock and the steady‐state shadow price of the stock both increase. Moreover, we show that the optimal regulation may require a decreasing amount of fertilizer over time, even in the case of initial underpollution.     

Reducing the distance: financial services education in web-extended learning environments

It is estimated that financial services comprise around 15% of the global economy. From the supply side, one key to meeting this demand is being able to educate and certify the people who provide these services. With the advent of the internet and related technologies, the ability to deliver financial services education synchronously to both online and on-campus attendees has become a viable alternative to pure face-to-face or pure online asynchronous education. Nonetheless, one question remains: can virtual technology deliver comparable quality of financial services educational experience as face-to-face teaching? It is this question our paper addresses using the theory of transactional distance. The theory of transactional distance postulates that for optimal learning, the cognitive gap between instructor(s) and learner(s) needs to be minimized. We explore how transactional distance in financial services education varies by attendance modality (in-class, online and mixed) in a synchronous, web-extended classroom. The implications for managers and researchers are explored.     

Global financial crisis and dependence risk analysis of sector portfolios: a vine copula approach

We use regular vine (r-vine), canonical vine (c-vine) and drawable vine (d-vine) copulas to examine the dependence risk characteristics of three 20-stock portfolios from the retail, manufacturing and gold-mining equity sectors of the Australian market in periods before, during and after the 2008–2009 global financial crisis (GFC). Our results indicate that the retail portfolio is less risky than the manufacturing counterpart in the crisis period, while the gold-mining portfolio is less risky than both the retail and manufacturing sector portfolios. Both the retail and gold stocks display a higher propensity to yield positively skewed returns in the crisis periods, contrary to the manufacturing stocks. The r-vine is found to best capture the multivariate dependence structure of the stocks in the retail and gold-mining portfolios, while the d-vine does it for the manufacturing stock portfolio. These findings could be used to develop dependence risk- and investment risk-adjusted strategies for investment, rebalancing and hedging which more adequately account for the downside risk in various market conditions.     

Frequency and Motives for Stock Dividends in a Unique Environment

We investigate the possible differences in the information content of stock dividends between firms that distribute stock dividends frequently (frequent distributors) and firms that distribute stock dividends infrequently (infrequent distributors) using a unique data set from Oman where the market microstructure frictions are either absent or limited. We find that infrequent stock dividend distributors have higher postdistribution operating performance relative to frequent distributors. We also find that the illiquidity measure is significantly related to the announcement effect only for frequent stock dividend distributors, whereas short‐term performance is significantly related to the announcement effect only for infrequent distributors. Our findings indicate that infrequent stock dividends are used mainly to convey favorable private information about the firms’ future prospects, and frequent stock dividends are used to reduce stock price to an optimal trading range in order to improve trading liquidity. JEL classification: G14, G35.     

Organizational mindfulness,mindful organizing,and environmental and resource sustainability

The research theorizes that environmental vulnerability can be minimized through mindfulness‐based strategies, and redesigning organizing processes, so that richer thinking is activated more quickly among greater number of people all of whom try to update their knowledge regardless of the knowledge source. It empirically evaluates the effects of organizational mindfulness and mindful organizing on resources and environmental sustainability. The model was tested in a very appropriate setting—Saudi Arabia, where increasing demand for and supply of energy culminates in unsustainable resources utilization and rise in greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental vulnerabilities. Data were collected from Saudi firms operating in the oil and gas sector and analyzed using SmartPLS software. The measurement and structural models were evaluated. The measurement model exhibits adequate model fit. The tests for the structural models show that four (of five) dimensions of organizational mindfulness (viz., commitment to resilience, deference to expertise, preoccupation with failure, and reluctance to simplify interpretations) and mindful organizing are significantly related at 5% significance level. Sensitivity to operations has no significant relationship with mindful organizing. Mindful organizing is significantly related to environmental and resources sustainability. Moreover, mindful organizing fully or partially mediates in the relationship between some of the dimensions of organizational mindfulness and environmental and resources sustainability. The study is one of the first to integrate mindfulness‐based approaches to sustainability and environmental research.