Experts,firms, consumers or even hard data? Forecasting employment in Germany

In this article, we forecast employment growth for Germany with data for the period from November 2008 to November 2015. Hutter and Weber (2015) introduced an innovative unemployment indicator and evaluated the performance of several leading indicators, including the Ifo Employment Barometer (IEB), to predict unemployment changes. Since the IEB focuses on employment growth instead of unemployment developments, we mirror the study by Hutter and Weber (2015). It turns out that in our case, and in contrast to their article, the IEB outperforms their newly developed indicator. Additionally, consumers’ unemployment expectations and hard data such as new orders exhibit a high forecasting accuracy.     

ALLOWING FOR JUMP MEASUREMENTS IN VOLATILITY: A HIGH‐FREQUENCY FINANCIAL DATA ANALYSIS OF INDIVIDUAL STOCKS

Following recent advances in the non‐parametric realized volatility approach, we separately measure the discontinuous jump part of the quadratic variation process for individual stocks and incorporate it into heterogeneous autoregressive volatility models. We analyse the distributional properties of the jump measures vis‐à‐vis the corresponding realized volatility ones, and compare them to those of aggregate US market index series. We also demonstrate important gains in the forecasting accuracy of high‐frequency volatility models.     

Food safety recall effects across meat products and regions

Food safety is one of the key issues for the international meat market. As a major meat exporter, few things facing the U.S. meat industry in recent years have garnered more attention than food safety events and policies. The impacts of Food Safety Inspection Services (FSIS) recalls on United States consumer meat demand are estimated using monthly grocery-scanner data identifying effects across products, geographic regions, and recall type. Results suggest beef E. coli recalls significantly reduce the demand for recalled ground beef contemporaneously among most, but not all, regions in the United States. Evidence of heterogeneity in demand impacts across regions and products is provided for the first time. Domestic and international implications for policy makers, industry leaders, and researchers are discussed.     

Liquidity,information, strategic trading in an electronic order book: New insights from the European carbon markets

The electronic limit order book (LOB hereafter) has rapidly become the primary way of trading European carbon assets over the 4 years of the EU ETS programme (2008–2012). In this first attempt of examining the informational content of an electronic order book, we evidence that order flow imbalances have a moderate capacity to predict short term price changes. However, we find that both LOB slope and immediacy costs help to forecast quote improvements and volatility in the next 30 min. Further, we explain why informed trading is highly influential and show that it consists in mixing order splitting strategies and posting fleeting orders once the asymmetric information is reduced (Rosu, 2009). Overall, the consolidated status of the order book mirrors a high level of market uncertainty and a low degree of informational efficiency. In this way, strategic trading can in itself explain some of order book properties, independently of the degree of traders’ sophistication and market competition.     

Firm heterogeneity and immigrant wage assimilation

This article investigates the role of job mobility in immigrant wage assimilation. I use longitudinal linked employer–employee data for Portugal to estimate the immigrant wage catch-up in log wage regressions with both individual and firm fixed effects. I show that moving to firms with higher wage premiums accounts for approximately 30% of the immigrant wage catch-up in the first years.     

技术创新、金融创新与经济增长——基于中国省际面板数据

本文从实证分析层面对金融创新、技术创新与经济增长之间的作用关系进行探讨。基于我国 2000~2015 年省级面板数据，采用GMM估计方法，利用动态面板模型进行实证检验。结果表明：技术创新对经济增长的影响显著为正，单独的金融创新对经济增长起抑制作用，二者的交互作用则对经济增长起显著性正向作用。脱离实体经济的金融创新将抑制经济增长，也会间接阻碍技术创新对经济增长的影响。本文结合当前经济形势，从金融机构与创新企业相接轨共同提高创新水平、培养创新型人才等角度提出建议。     

Peer Effects among Swimmers

We develop a novel identification strategy and examine various aspects of peer effects using swimming data. We find that the performance of adjacent competitors positively influences swimmers' performances. In particular, swimmers are influenced by slower‐lane peers, suggesting that being chased improves one's performance. We use absenteeism data to directly compare the performances of swimmers with and without peers. We have found that swimmers swim faster with peers swimming behind them than when swimming alone, but that they swim slower with peers swimming ahead. Finally, we find that observability is a key determinant of peer effects, by comparing freestyle and backstroke competitions.     

数字图书馆防盗链设计以及实现研究

数字资源的拥有者应该设计图书馆数字资源的防盗链方案,提升数字图书馆的防盗链能力。本文通过对数字图书馆的了解,进行数字图书馆防盗链设计的研究。     

Factors of trade in Europe

We analyze how a set of determinants affect trade among European countries over the period 1992–2008. The factors encompass variables from the areas of geography, culture, institutions, infrastructure, and trade direction. Trade is analyzed for four types of goods: primary goods, parts and components, capital goods, and consumer goods. For each type of good we also distinguish its definition in terms of flows, intensive margin, and extensive margin. Methodologically, we first derive country-pair fixed effects over all possible pairs of export–import partners, and in the second stage we relate fixed effects with a set of influential factors. We show (i) the intuitive and varying effects of geographical, cultural, and institutional factors; (ii) the beneficial effects of soft and hard infrastructure; and (iii) the key importance of trade between old and new EU members.