Capital market integration in ASEAN: A non-stationary panel data analysis

Motivated by the establishment of ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) at the end of 2015, we examine saving-investment relationship in various subgroups of ASEAN to assess their capital market integration. The results from second generation panel unit-root and cointegration tests that account for cross-sectional dependence as well as estimates of long-run saving-retention rate provide some evidence of market integration in ASEAN. The analysis of short-run dynamics suggests that capital mobility in ASEAN during 1980–2014 appears similar to that in OECD countries during 1970–1999. More importantly, across different panel estimators and subgroups of membership, there is considerable heterogeneity among the member countries. The saving-investment association is very weak, thereby implying very high capital mobility, in more developed members such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei; the association is very strong, implying very low capital mobility, for much less developed members such as Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. The results call for renewed effort to develop capital markets in less developed nations and integrate them with the rest of the membership in ASEAN. In this paper, we also address several major shortcomings of the original Feldstein-Horioka framework.     

Panel LM unit root tests with level and trend shifts

This paper considers a Lagrange multiplier (LM) based panel unit root test that allows for heterogeneous structural breaks in both the intercepts and slopes of a series. We note that many popular time series variables are likely to exhibit changing means and/or trends over time. Given that the usual tests will depend on the nuisance parameters indicating the locations of the trend breaks, we adopt a transformation procedure that makes our new panel unit root tests invariant to the nuisance parameters. To illustrate the importance of the power gain provided by our test, we examine the convergence hypothesis using relative ratios of per capita health care expenditures in 20 OECD countries. Our results provide evidence that the convergence hypothesis is supported.     

Does corruption slow down innovation? Evidence from a cointegrated panel of U.S. states

I investigate the long-run relationship between corruption and innovative activity using annual data from 48 contiguous U.S. states between 1977 and 2006. Using U.S. data allows me to work with a panel long enough to exploit time series properties of the data. I use two different measures of innovative activity: one measuring the quantity and the other measuring the quality of the patents granted. I also use two different measures of corruption: one based on the number of corruption convictions, the other based on number of corruption stories covered in Associated Press news wires. Following Pedroni (1999, 2000), I estimate the cointegrating relationship between corruption and innovative activity with Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS). The results indicate that corruption indeed slows down innovation in the long-run.     

Consistent inference in fixed-effects stochastic frontier models

The classical stochastic frontier panel data models provide no mechanism to disentangle individual time invariant unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency. Greene (2005a, b) proposed the so-called “true” fixed-effects specification that distinguishes these two latent components. However, due to the incidental parameters problem, his maximum likelihood estimator may lead to biased variance estimates. We propose two alternative estimators that achieve consistency for $n\to \infty$ with fixed $T$. Furthermore, we extend the Chen et al. (2014) results providing a feasible estimator when the inefficiency is heteroskedastic and follows a first-order autoregressive process. We investigate the behavior of the proposed estimators through Monte Carlo simulations showing good finite sample properties, especially in small samples. An application to hospitals’ technical efficiency illustrates the usefulness of the new approach.     

Tourism as an alternative source of regional growth in Portugal: a panel data analysis at NUTS II and III levels

The role of tourism is of vital economic importance, particularly for small countries with a privileged geographical location and favourable weather conditions. This paper examines the importance of tourism as a conditioning factor for higher regional growth in Portugal by employing the conditional convergence hypothesis of Barro and Sala-i-Martin, associated with the endogenous growth theory. The panel data estimation approach provides evidence of the positive impact of tourism (through the accommodation capacity) on the growth in per-capita income among the Portuguese regions, increasing the rate of convergence. Therefore, tourism can be considered as an alternative source for stimulating higher regional growth in Portugal, if the supply characteristics of this sector are improved.     

Efficiency outcomes of market concentration and managed care

The paper examines how hospital cost efficiency has reacted to extensive horizontal integrations of hospitals and rapid growth of managed care in the US health care industry. Cost efficiency is estimated by using panel data approaches to relax the assumptions for the hospital effects imposed in earlier studies. The paper shows that higher managed care penetration over time is associated with greater hospital efficiency, and higher market concentration is positively associated with efficiency when markets are highly competitive or highly concentrated.     

Consumption and stock markets in Asian economies

This paper investigates the causal links between stock market performance and consumption for five Asian economies by applying the bound tests of Pesaran et al. and lag augmented VAR of Toda and Yamamoto . We find two‐way causal relationships between stock market performance and consumption in the cases of Hong Kong and Taiwan in the long run. The existence of such two‐way causal links indicates that stock market performance and consumption mutually affect each other, implying that the previous studies may have overestimated the wealth effect of the stock markets without taking account of the reverse causation from consumption to the stock markets. The short‐run effect of the stock market on consumption is more visible than the long‐run effect in most of the sample economies, suggesting that changes in consumption directly reflect stock market fluctuations.     

抽油机V带执行标准现状及有关问题探讨

阐述了国内外V带现行标准状况，指出通用V带标准应用于抽油机V带存在的问题。针对抽油机用V带寿命不足5000h的问题，提出制定符合中国油田实际的《抽油机用V带》新标准，并从五个方面提出了编写新标准的建议。     

Evidence on the existence of speculative bubbles in farmland prices

We conduct tests for the contribution of speculative bubbles to farmland prices. These tests are carried out under the hypothesis that farmland investors rationally form expectations. The outcome of tests reported here allows us to infer whether farmland prices are determined by market fundamentals-discounted returns from the highest economic land use-or whether rumors about farmland price movements are self-fulfilling. The tests are stationarity and cointegration tests relating farmland prices to rents. The tests are carried out using data from three farm production regions-the Corn Belt, the Northern Plains, and the Lake States. In each region, we find little evidence to reject the hypothesis that market fundamentals determine farmland prices.