The future of Russian gas exports to East Asia: Feasibility and market implications

For a long time, the Russian government has aimed to diversify gas exports to East Asian countries. This gearing of Russia towards Asia will have great consequences on world energy, the global economy, and geopolitics in the coming years. This paper analyzes the growth potential of Russia's diversification strategy and the impact this policy would have on sales to Europe. As the most likely scenario is for total gas exports to grow at a moderate rate from 2010 to 2030, any increase in sales to Asia could make difficult the raising of exports to Europe. Our thesis is that this trade-off will depend primarily on domestic consumption trends, geographic targeting of investments, and commercial and financial alliances with foreign partners. However, imports from Central Asia, declining exports to Ukraine and Belarus, and Gazprom investments in other gas-producing countries could also affect gas exports and gas distribution among different markets.     

Good news, bad news and rating announcements: An empirical investigation

In this paper we employ a new approach to test the contribution of information in rating announcements. This is the first study to test and corroborate how the CDS market responds to rating actions after controlling for the presence of concurrent public and private information. We show that since the clustering of rating announcements characterizes economically significant developments, the common practice of using “uncontaminated” samples underestimates market response. As in previous studies, we find that the market response to bad news is stronger than to good news. Nevertheless, bad news and negative rating announcements tend to cluster. Therefore, the residual contribution of negative rating announcements is small and in some cases insignificant. Positive rating announcements are less frequent and less clustered, though their residual contribution is still significant.     

P-star in times of crisis – Forecasting inflation for the euro area

In this paper we present three empirically testable versions of the common p-star model and evaluate their forecasting performance using conventional techniques. We try to answer the question if the p-star approach is preferable to achieve a reliable short-run inflation forecast and with regard to the latter we incur the need for a stable demand for money function. Our findings indicate the recurrence of the relevance of the monetary pillar of the ECB's two-pillar framework. In addition, we check for the effects of the current financial and economic crisis that started in 2007 on the forecasting performance, using two sub-sample periods, one excluding and one including the latter, and analyze the impact of the applied filter technique to compute the required equilibrium values.     

Do optimal diversification strategies outperform the 1/N strategy in U.K. stock returns?

This paper examines whether optimal diversification strategies outperform the 1/N strategy in U.K. stock returns. The study focuses on the performance of recent strategies developed by Tu and Zhou (2011) and Kirby and Ostdiek (2010). I find that a number of optimal asset allocation strategies can significantly outperform the 1/N strategy even after adjusting for trading costs. The strategies developed by Kirby and Ostdiek outperform the 1/N strategy, even at higher trading costs, due to the low turnover of these strategies. The strategies of Tu and Zhou have mixed performance after adjusting for trading costs due to the high turnover of these strategies. The results of the paper provide support for the use of optimal diversification strategies.     

Gold and the US dollar: Hedge or haven?

Using a model of dynamic conditional correlations covering 23 years of weekly data for 16 major dollar-paired exchange rates, this paper addresses a practical investment question: Does gold act as a hedge against the US dollar, as a safe haven, or neither? Key findings are as follows. (i) During the past 23 years gold has behaved as a hedge against the US dollar. (ii) Gold has been a poor safe haven. (iii) In recent years gold has acted, increasingly, as an effective hedge against currency risk associated with the US dollar.     

Exchange rate regime choice and currency crises

Exchange rate regime choice is not exogenous, but it depends on the structural, political and financial features of countries. However, it is often the case that the regime actually pursued and the one that is imposed by country features do not match one to one. The existing empirical crisis models do not take fully into account the regime in which the crisis unfolded. The aim of this paper is to incorporate the appropriateness of the regime choice into the standard currency crisis model. The results show that the odds of crisis increase significantly in countries which have chosen regimes inconsistently.     

“主体-技术”协同视角下的战略性新兴产业创新网络分类研究——以新能源汽车产业为例

本文以“主体-技术”协同视角来分析战略性新兴产业创新网络形成的内在机理和分类模式。在结合2-模网络理论基础上，从核心技术和创新主体两个维度出发，将战略性新兴产业创新网络分为单核心实验室型、单核心产业链型、单核心辅助型、单核心复合型、多核心实验室型、多核心产业链型、多核心辅助型和多核心复合型。同时，以中国新能源汽车产业为例，通过实证分析发现：除了单核心辅助型和多核心辅助型之外，其它6种模式均存在，并进一步对其创新网络的分类模式及相关特征进行了全面分析。     

Measuring price discovery: The variance ratio, the R, and the weighted price contribution

We analyze the statistical properties of three price discovery measures: The variance ratio, the weighted price contribution (WPC), and the R² of unbiasedness regressions. We find that, if the price process is a driftless martingale, only the WPC is an unbiased estimator for the return variance explained during a time interval. For autocorrelated processes with a drift, only the R² of the unbiasedness regression is consistent, but it is biased for small samples.     

县级耕地质量等别年度更新评价研究——以南城县为例

本文将以南城县2013年土地利用变更调查数据为基础,对南城县近三年内增加或减少的耕地做耕地质量等别年度更新评价,并与2011年耕地质量等级成果补充完善成果进行对比分析2011-2013年南城县耕地质量变化趋势。