A new perspective on the exporter productivity premium: online trade

We use a unique firm-level data set including 9000 companies from 26 European Union countries covering four different sectors to take a close look at the relationship between online exports and productivity. The online exporter productivity premium is estimated using different techniques (ordinary least squares, quantile regressions and robust estimation). Results consistently indicate that the estimated online exporter productivity premium is statistically different from zero, positive and significant from an economic point of view. European online exporters, according to these results, are approximately 2% more productive than non-online exporters. Productivity differences between firms could be related to variables that are not included in the empirical model. More research would be needed to address this issue in the future.     

改进高阶容积粒子滤波的系统状态估计算法

传统粒子滤波（PF）直接采用状态转移先验分布作为重要性密度函数来近似后验概率密度函数，使得后验概率密度函数未包含量测信息。针对此问题，提出了一种改进高阶容积粒子滤波(CPF)的系统状态估计算法。算法采用七阶正交容积卡尔曼滤波（7th-CQKF）对PF的粒子进行传递，使得先验分布更新阶段融入最新量测信息；通过7th-CQKF设计重要性密度函数，提高对状态后验概率密度的逼近程度；通过反比例函数计算粒子权重，突出大噪声粒子与小噪声粒子权重差别，提高粒子有效性。仿真结果表明，改进高阶容积粒子滤波的估计精度高于容积粒子滤波（CPF）。     

Corrigendum to “Characterization of the asymptotic distribution of semiparametric M-estimators” [J. Econometrics 159 (2) (2010) 252–266]

This note provides correction to Ichimura and Lee (2010).     

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.     

The Local Whittle Estimator of Long-Memory Stochastic Volatility

We propose a new semiparametric estimator of the degree of persistencein volatility for long memory stochastic volatility (LMSV) models.The estimator uses the periodogram of the log squared returnsin a local Whittle criterion which explicitly accounts for thenoise term in the LMSV model. Finite-sample and asymptotic standarderrors for the estimator are provided. An extensive simulationstudy reveals that the local Whittle estimator is much lessbiased and that the finite-sample standard errors yield moreaccurate confidence intervals than the widely-used GPH estimator.The estimator is also found to be robust against possible leverageeffects. In an empirical analysis of the daily Deutsche Mark/USDollar exchange rate, the new estimator indicates stronger persistencein volatility than the GPH estimator, provided that a largenumber of frequencies is used.     

Time Inhomogeneous Multiple Volatility Modeling

Price variations at speculative markets exhibit positive autocorrelationand cross correlation. Due to large parameter spaces necessaryfor joint modeling of variances and covariances, multivariateparametric volatility models become easily intractable in practice.We propose an adaptive procedure that identifies periods ofsecond-order homogeneity for each moment in time. To overcomethe high dimensionality of the problem we transform the multivariateseries into a set of univariate processes. We discuss thoroughlythe implementation of the adaptive technique. Theoretical andMonte Carlo results are given. We provide two applications ofthe new method. For a bivariate exchange rate series we comparethe multivariate GARCH approach with our method and find thelatter to be more in line with the underlying assumption ofindependently distributed innovations. Analyzing a 23-dimensionalvector of asset returns we underscore the case for adaptivemodeling in high-dimensional systems.     

Beyond Single-Factor Affine Term Structure Models

This article proposes a new approach to testing for the hypothesisof a single priced risk factor driving the term structure ofinterest rates. The method does not rely on any parametric specificationof the state variable dynamics or the market price of risk.It simply exploits the constraint imposed by the no-arbitragecondition on instantaneous expected bond returns. In order toachieve our goal, we develop a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and applyit to data on Treasury bills and bonds for both the United Statesand Spain. We find that the single risk factor hypothesis cannotbe rejected for either dataset.     

部分石化项目专利费的分析和测算

介绍了专利费的特点和测算原则，并对引进的部分专利技术的专利费作了分析和预测。     

Option Trading and the Intervalling Effect Bias in Beta

Prior studies show that the beta coefficient of a security changes systematically as the length of measurement interval is varied. This phenomenon, which is called the intervalling effect bias in beta, has been attributed to the friction in the trading system that causes the delays in the price-adjustment process. This study shows that option listing is associated with a decline in the beta intervalling effect bias. The decline is most pronounced for small firms. We also find that our sample firms grow significantly after option listing. Since prior research indicates that market value is a major determinant of the magnitude of the intervalling effect, we re-examine our results using a subsample that controls for market value. The results indicate that the decline in the beta bias from the pre-listing to post-listing period is still prevalent after we control for the change in firm size. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the notion that option trading reduces the delays in the price-adjustment process, which in turn reduces the intervalling effect bias in beta.