Trade networks and economic fluctuations in Asian countries

The paper presents a new methodology, based on tensor decomposition, to map dynamic trade networks and to assess its strength in forecasting economic fluctuations at different periods of time in Asia. Using the monthly merchandise import and export data across 33 Asian economies, together with the US, EU and UK, we detect the community structure of the evolving network and we identify clusters and central nodes inside each of them. Our findings show that data are well represented by two communities, in which People's Republic of China and Japan play the major role. We then analyze the synchronisation between GDP growth and trade. Furthermore we apply our model to the prediction of economic fluctuations. Our findings show that the model leads to an increase in predictive accuracy, as higher order interactions between countries are taken into account.     

The Right Choice at the Right Time: A Herding Experiment in Endogenous Time

Herding describes the phenomenon in decision-making where an economic agent disregards his own private information to follow the actions of his predecessors as in Banerjee (1992). With later decision-makers simply copying earlier decisions their private information cannot be inferred by other decision-makers and will be forever lost. There is some experimental evidence on simple sequential herding of this type in the literature, notably Anderson and Holt (1997). This paper differs by allowing subjects to delay their decision-making in order to benefit from observing others' actions as in more recent herding models such as Chamley and Gale (1994). The results in this paper suggest that subjects will indeed delay when their private information is not sufficiently strong. Despite this ability to wait, as predicted in the theoretical literature, cascades remained ubiquitous and more worrying still, reverse-cascades occurred in which incorrect decisions made by early decision-makers produced informational cascades on the wrong action. In an alternative design, informing subjects that they had made incorrect choices only made matters worse as subjects moved further away from rational behavior.     

A Dynamic Analysis of Fixed- and Adjustable-Rate Mortgage Terminations

This paper provides a side-by-side comparison of loan-level statistical models for fixed- and adjustable-rate mortgages. Multinomial logit models for quarterly conditional probabilities of default and prepayment are estimated. We find that the estimated impacts of embedded option values for prepayment and default are generally quite similar across both FRM and ARM loans, providing additional empirical support for the basic predictions of the options theory. We also find that differences in estimates of conditional probabilities of prepayment and default associated with mortgage age, origination period, original LTV, and relative loan size, indicate the continued significance of these other economic and demographic factors for empirical models of mortgage terminations.     

无限缓存下自相似网络通信量复用策略

研究了自相似网络通信量的统计复用策略。首先讨论了在采用FIFO(First In First Out)服务策略且缓存趋于无限大时，满足一定溢出概率要求的统计复用带宽要求，然后对这种情况进行了仿真分析。研究表明网络通信量的自相似特性对复用增益有较大的影响，并且自相似性越强、复用通信量数量越大，所取得的复用增益越大，这对于网络设计是很重要的。     

An investigation of transformation-based prediction interval for the Weibull median life

Statistical inference based on the Weibull distribution, a distribution widely used in reliability and survival analysis, is usually difficult as it often involves numerical computation and approximation. However, this distribution can be transformed to near-normality by a simple power transformation. Based on this transformation, a prediction interval (PI) for its median can be easily constructed through an inverse transformation. The procedure for selecting the best power transformation through minimizing Kullback-Leibler information is described. The property of this transformation-based PI is investigated. Simple correction factors are also proposed. It is shown that the transformation-based PI with corrections performs well, irrespective of the sample size and parameter values. Simulation results show that the new PI generally outperforms the existing PI. Numerical examples are given for illustration.     

Conditioning as disintegration

Conditional probability distributions seem to have a bad reputation when it comes to rigorous treatment of conditioning. Technical arguments are published as manipulations of Radon–Nikodym derivatives, although we all secretly perform heuristic calculations using elementary definitions of conditional probabilities. In print, measurability and averaging properties substitute for intuitive ideas about random variables behaving like constants given particular conditioning information.
One way to engage in rigorous, guilt-free manipulation of conditional distributions is to treat them as disintegrating measures—families of probability measures concentrating on the level sets of a conditioning statistic. In this paper we present a little theory and a range of examples—from EM algorithms and the Neyman factorization, through Bayes theory and marginalization paradoxes—to suggest that disintegrations have both intuitive appeal and the rigor needed for many problems in mathematical statistics.     

The market’s view on the probability of banking sector failure: cross-country comparisons

Hall and Miles (1990) suggest an approach of estimating default probabilities of banks using stock market information, and in this paper we apply an aggregated version of their approach to banking sectors around the world in both developed and emerging economies. We study the market’s assessment of the probability of systemic banking crises world wide over the last decade, including the Asian crisis 1997–1998. In addition, we investigate whether there is a relationship between the failure probability and institutional features of the actual banking sector. The quality of governance and the degree of law and order in a country is found to be significantly negatively related to the market based failure probabilities as is an explicit deposit insurance during periods of crisis.     

违约损失率问题初探

巴塞尔新资本协议强调内部评级法在风险管理和资本监管中的重要作用。内部评级法的关键在于对违约率及其相关因素的测量,其中违约概率(PD)和违约损失率(LGD)是内部评级法的核心变量。对国际上关于LGD的表现及影响因素的讨论进行了总结与分析,并重点对LGD与PD之间的关系进行了介绍。     

企业推广排污权交易的可行性研究

排污权交易(Ernission trading)是一种基于市场(Market-based)的环境政策。本文坚持以科学的发展观，来研究经济发展与环境保护的协调关系，目的是实现环境资源和环境容量的可持续利用。本文分析了企业的排污行为决策，并将环境资源和环境容量的稀缺性纳入排污权交易价格之中。通过价格这个经济杠杆去调节人们对环境资源和环境容量的利用，反映于企业为其排污行为所作的选择，进而论述企业推进排污权交易的可行性。