THE CANADIAN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION FUNCTION

Fitting production junctions has become little more than a quantitative exercise for economists. They have been computed for virtually every phase of the real economy with a considerable degree of accuracy. One of the areas that has continued to present some difficulties in this regard is agriculture. The difficulties have been of such magnitude in the United States that an accepted technique has been to proceed directly to the supply function. The authors suggest that the above procedure need not be followed in the Canadian case. They fit a five variable linear multiple regression relation to Canadian agriculture which fits the industry quite Well in terms of explained variation and adherence to the assumption of the analysis. This is substantially in contrast with the U.S. experience indicating a substantial difference in either data, the agricultural industries, or both. An aggregate production function of use for policy formulation purposes has been made available for the Canadian case. ?adjustage des fonctions de production ne devient guére que de ?eiercice quantatif pour les économistes. Elles ont été calculées avec un degré de précision notable pour presque toute phase de ?économie réelle. Vn des domaines qui continuent à présenter des difficultés à ce sujet est ?agriculture. Les difficultés ont été?une telle ampleur aui Etats-Unis qu'une technique accreditée est de se rendre directement à la fonction ?offre. Les auteurs suggérent qu'au Canada on n'est pas obligé de suivre le procédé ci-dessus mentioné. Ils ajustent une relation linéaire de régression multiple à cinq variables à?agriculture canadienne. Elle s'ajuste à?industrie assez bien quant à la variation expliquée et à?appui des présomptions de ?analyse. Le contraste entre ces faits et ?expérience américaine indique qu'il y a une différence considérable ou des donnees ou des industries agricoles ou les deux. On met à la disposition de ?investigateur canadien une fonction de production globale qui est utile à formuler des politiques.     

COMMON STOCHASTIC TRENDS AMONG THE CYPRUS STOCK EXCHANGE AND THE ASE,LSE AND NYSE

Common stochastic trends among major international stock price indices have been an intensively analysed issue mainly as a result of the 1987 stock market crash and the need for policy coordination in financial markets. This paper investigates the existence of common stochastic trends among an emerging equity market, the Cyprus Stock Exchange, and three mature equity markets, namely the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE), the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).     

Predicting direct marketing response in banking: comparison of class imbalance methods

Customers’ response is an important topic in direct marketing. This study proposes a data mining response model supported by random forests to support the definition of target customers for banking campaigns. Class imbalance is a typical problem in telemarketing that can affect the performance of the data mining techniques. This study also contributes to the literature by exploring the use of class imbalance methods in the banking context. The performance of an undersampling method (the EasyEnsemble algorithm) is compared with that of an oversampling method (the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) in order to determine the most appropriate specification. The importance of the attribute features included in the response model is also explored. In particular, discriminative performance was enhanced by the inclusion of demographic information, contact details and socio-economic features. Random forests, supported by an undersampling algorithm, presented very high prediction performance, outperforming the other techniques explored.     

Human Capital Spillovers and Regional Development

This paper introduces technological interdependence into the theoretical framework of Gennaioli et al. (Quarterly Journal of Economics 2013; 128 : 105–164). This extension leads to an expression for regional development with spatial effects that motivates the incorporation of the geographical dimension into their newly constructed database and empirical analysis. Our estimation results corroborate both the necessity of accounting for the presence of spatial dependence to study the determinants of regional income per capita and the importance of educational attainment in explaining regional development differences. Furthermore, we provide evidence that human capital generates positive spatial spillovers. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Monetary policy and exchange market pressure–evidence from sub-Saharan Africa

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of monetary policy on foreign exchange market pressure (EMP) in developing country contexts for some selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and to measure the ability of monetary policy to significantly address currency pressures that arise from trading on the global market. This study was motivated by the fact that most of the SSA countries are developing economies that have negative net export positions and stand to lose significantly from consistently deteriorating foreign exchange position. The study, therefore, employs a dynamic panel model to test the hypothesis that a tighter monetary policy stance lends strength to a currency and vice versa, using 20 SSA economies for the period from 1991 to 2010. This study finds a negative and significant relationship between monetary policy and EMP, implying an easing of EMP in the face of contractionary monetary policy. The findings also point to significant relations between aggregate output, levels of public debt, the current account balance, terms of trade and EMP. Findings of this study have important implications as regards the policy direction on exchange rate and currency management.     

Employers' hiring practices,employment protection,and costly search: A vacancy-level analysis

An employer with a vacancy may respond to high search costs by lowering hiring requirements. While such an adjustment increases the employer's chances of filling the vacancy, it also more likely results in a match that terminates when the match is hit by match-specific productivity shocks. Drawing on a novel Slovenian vacancy dataset, we find that employers who are searching to fill temporary positions are more likely to hire underqualified workers when search costs are high. We find that search costs are taken into consideration when employers are searching to fill permanent positions in some specifications but not all. These findings suggest that for employers who are searching to fill a permanent position, the benefits of lowering hiring requirements when search costs are high are likely outweighed by: a) high firing costs if an under-qualified worker is hired on a permanent contract or b) the costs of undertaking a new search later if an under-qualified worker is hired on a temporary contract. These are novel findings about the employers' hiring practices in the presence of employment protection laws and costly search.     

Detecting changes in a multivariate renewal process

Some recent extreme value asymptotics for multivariate renewal processes are used to derive an asymptotic changepoint test. This test is proven to be consistent in the multivariate framework where we assume that at most one change (AMOC) occurrs in any of the component renewal processes. Since the actual covariance structure is often unknown, we also suggest an appropriate estimate. This research was partially supported by an Auckland University Research Grant and by a travel grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.