Foreign inflows and economic growth: An emiprical study of the SAARC region

The study examines and highlights the impact of selected foreign inflows (aid, trade, FDI, debt and remittances) on the economic growth of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries. The existent literature lacks a comprehensive analysis of the SAARC countries as countries like Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives have largely been ignored due to the shorter time periods of available data. The study is empirical in nature and utilizes panel data techniques on macroeconomic data for the period 2008–2015. Foreign aid and foreign direct investment are found to impact economic growth positively. Foreign debt and trade flows are found to adversely affect economic growth. No relationship is established between the flow of remittances and the economic growth of these countries. The obtained results are robust to different proxy variables and the addition of macroeconomic variables. For the first time, the study provides policy implications based on the data of all SAARC countries. The study recommends focusing on increasing the inflows of resources in the form of aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) from the developed world to achieve higher economic growth.     

Racial disparity in the atlanta housing market

Atlanta has the reputation of being a city of opportunity for blacks. However, in Atlanta, as well as in other cities across the nation, the nexus of racism and economic discrimination has resulted in disparities between the housing status of blacks and whites. This article examines racial disparities in the Atlanta housing market. It begins by tracing recent trends in the Atlanta-area economy and by providing background information on the local housing market. It then discusses the roles of the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 and Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 in the efforts of local groups to reduce racial disparities in the housing market. The final section discusses recent local developments that might lead to improvements in the housing status of black Atlantans.     

Estimation methods for stochastic volatility models: a survey

Abstract.  Although stochastic volatility (SV) models have an intuitive appeal, their empirical application has been limited mainly due to difficulties involved in their estimation. The main problem is that the likelihood function is hard to evaluate. However, recently, several new estimation methods have been introduced and the literature on SV models has grown substantially. In this article, we review this literature. We describe the main estimators of the parameters and the underlying volatilities focusing on their advantages and limitations both from the theoretical and empirical point of view. We complete the survey with an application of the most important procedures to the S&P 500 stock price index.     

The dialectics of globalization: what are the effects for management and organization in Germany and Japan

The globalization literature has been limited cumulative. Different disciplines have different accents, use different definitions, rely on divergent theories and focus on different units of analysis. As a corollary, they have come to divergent opinions on the concept of globalization, on its broader consequences as well as on the more specific consequences for organization and management. This article contributes to the literature by proposing a societal theory of institutional change to analyze globalization effects in a more systematical way. It explores the effects of globalization forces on organization and management in Germany and Japan in comparison to the US and the UK, by tracing their impact on the systems of corporate governance, industrial relations and human resources. The article shows that different patterns of change exist at different levels of analysis. These differences help us explain why no generalized pattern of convergence towards the same economic model should be expected.     

Promoting Tourism,Projecting Power: The Role of Television Commercials

This paper analyzes television commercials (TVCs) launched by Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) from 1999 to 2012. By repeating shots of traditional and Korean popular (k-pop) culture, high-tech machinery, and sportsmanship, it is fair to say that Korean tourism TVCs both reflected and fueled the fad a target audience has for Korea. Hence the commercials not only promoted tourism, they were also projecting national power in general and cultural power in particular. It is surmised that through power projection the TVCs intend to create a country halo effect so that the country’s products and services may enjoy an aspired added value.     

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.     

The Adjusted Big Mac Methodology: A Clarification

The Economist's adjusted Big Mac index takes GDP into account in currency valuation, but the methodology is not explained. We show that the key to understanding the methodology is to distinguish between a currency's bilateral valuation (versus a specific currency) and the currency's overall valuation (versus a “basket” of a large number of currencies). Also, the adjusted Big Mac estimates of intrinsic foreign exchange (FX) rates have been better forecasts of actual FX changes than those of the original “raw” Big Mac index.