Why Do African Banks Lend So Little?

We put forward a plausible explanation of African banking sector under‐development in the form of a bad credit market equilibrium. Using an appropriately modified Industrial Organization model of banking, we show that the root of the problem could be unchecked moral hazard (strategic loan defaults) or adverse selection (a lack of good projects). Applying a dynamic panel estimator to a large sample of African banks, we show that loan defaults are a major factor inhibiting bank lending when institutional quality is low. We also find that once a threshold level of institutional quality has been reached, improvements in the default rate or institutional quality do not matter. This provides support for our theoretical predictions.     

Connectedness and risk spillovers in China’s stock market: A sectoral analysis

This paper shows how sectors in the Chinese stock market are connected and investigates risk spillovers across these sectors. Using graph theory and a recently developed time series technique, we are able to identify the systemically important sector in the market and the patterns of risk spillovers across sectors over time. Unlike standard econometric modeling, graph theory enables us to approach this question in a more reader-friendly way. The empirical results show that Industrial sector plays a central role and should thus be considered the systemically most important sector in the Chinese stock market. The spillover structure is found to be time-varying. While Industrial sector dominates the system for most of the time, other sectors such as Consumer Discretionary sector also occasionally appear as the central sector. Our empirical results also indicate that the simple correlation-based approach can produce equally useful information as more advanced econometric models.     

Nowcasting Indian GDP

Nowcasting has become a useful tool for making timely predictions of gross domestic product (GDP) in a data‐rich environment. However, in developing economies this is more challenging due to substantial revisions in GDP data and the limited availability of predictor variables. Taking India as a leading case, we use a dynamic factor model nowcasting method to analyse these two issues. Firstly, we propose to compare nowcasts of the first release of GDP to those of the final release to assess differences in their predictability. Secondly, we expand a standard set of predictors typically used for nowcasting GDP with nominal and international series, in order to proxy the variation in missing employment and service sector variables in India. We find that the factor model improves over several benchmarks, including bridge equations, but only for the final GDP release and not for the first release. Also, the nominal and international series improve predictions over and above real series. This suggests that future studies of nowcasting in developing economies which have similar issues of data revisions and availability as India should be careful in analysing first‐ vs. final‐release GDP data, and may find that predictions are improved when additional variables from more timely international data sources are included.     

Prediction markets as meta-episteme: Artificial intelligence,forecasting tournaments,prediction markets,and economic growth

This paper presents a speculative framework suggesting that prediction markets (or its epistemic cousins such as artificial intelligence or forecasting tournaments) may constitute a break in the expansion of human knowledge in a manner similar to the impact of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Just as the scientific understanding of the natural world facilitated the development of useful technologies to move far faster than what is allowed by blind evolution and tinkering, tools such as prediction markets allow for scientific knowledge to move faster than its current evolutionary process. The intellectual bases for these tools, such as the interpretation of probabilities as bets, are relatively recent additions to human knowledge, which may have significant implications for how we evaluate past thinkers, versus what is now possible or may be possible in the future.     

A calibration method with dynamic updates for within-match forecasting of wins in tennis

In-match predictions of player win probabilities for professional tennis matches have a wide range of potential applications, including betting, fan engagement, and performance evaluation. The ideal properties of an in-play prediction method include the ability to incorporate both useful pre-match information and relevant in-match information as the match progresses, in order to update the pre-match expectations. This paper presents an in-play forecasting method that achieves both of these goals by combining a pre-match calibration method with a dynamic empirical Bayes updating rule. We present an optimisation rule for guiding the specifications of the dynamic updates using a large sample of professional tennis matches. We apply the results to data from the 2017 season and show that the dynamic model provides a 28% reduction in the error of in-match serve predictions and improves the win prediction accuracy by four percentage points relative to a constant ability model. The method is applied to two Australian Open men’s matches, and we derive several corollary statistics to highlight key dynamics in the win probabilities during a match.     

工业工程“四位一体”实习实训体系的构建

工业工程专业是实践性较强的专业,实习实训是培养学生工程实践能力的重要实践性教学环节。针对目前普通高校实习实训教学中存在的主要问题,结合本校工业工程专业实习实训的实际教学运行情况,从创建良好的校外实习基地和本专业的实验实训基地入手,采取校外实习基地校企合作、校内相关院系实验实训资源共享的方式,构建本专业"四位一体"的实习实训体系。通过加大对实习过程的指导力度,并利用网络教学和实验实训平台深化实验实训内容,在深度和广度上强化工业工程专业的实践教学环节,进一步提高学生的工程实践能力。     

Patenting,intellectual property rights and sectoral outputs in Industrial Revolution Britain, 1780–1851

Patenting rose sharply during the British Industrial Revolution. Utilizing time series methods, we investigate the causal relationships between 16 industries and patented inventions. The results show that increased patenting was essentially a consequence of fast growth in the cotton, iron, and mining sectors, which increased the value of protecting intellectual property. Conversely, protecting intellectual property was not a cause of the Industrial Revolution.     

一种改进的产业结构相似程度测度方法

本文发展了一种改进的产业结构相似程度测度方法——产业结构相似指数;这一指标具有一般性,改进克鲁格曼指数是其在2地区模型的一个特例。本文发现,在用于多地区模型时,研究者容易掉入产业结构相似系数、改进克鲁格曼指数等指标的“用法陷阱”;对这些指标予以两种方式的灵活应用,则可避免掉入“用法陷阱”。本文还发现,在讨论区域分工问题时,地区的相对规模因素具有重要的影响;如果忽略城市的相对规模因素,则会高估长江三角洲地区工业分工水平。     

Continuous‐time models,realized volatilities,and testable distributional implications for daily stock returns

We provide an empirical framework for assessing the distributional properties of daily speculative returns within the context of the continuous‐time jump diffusion models traditionally used in asset pricing finance. Our approach builds directly on recently developed realized variation measures and non‐parametric jump detection statistics constructed from high‐frequency intra‐day data. A sequence of simple‐to‐implement moment‐based tests involving various transformations of the daily returns speak directly to the importance of different distributional features, and may serve as useful diagnostic tools in the specification of empirically more realistic continuous‐time asset pricing models. On applying the tests to the 30 individual stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average index, we find that it is important to allow for both time‐varying diffusive volatility, jumps, and leverage effects to satisfactorily describe the daily stock price dynamics. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Citizenship and industrial relations

Under the Victorian ideal of laissez-faire, industrial relations are conducted unilaterally by employers unimpeded by employees' rights of citizenship. The four facets of citizenship—civil, political, industrial, and social—impinge in a variety of ways on the employment relationship. Civil citizenship, by barring discrimination on account of race or sex, interferes with maintenance of segregated pools of cheap secondary labor. Political citizenship enfranchises propertyless workers and alters the enactments of legislatures. Industrial citizenship creates the institutional basis for collective bargaining. Social citizenship confers economic benefits and protective regulations not driven directly by market forces. Political ascendancy of laissez-faire advocates undermines rights of citizenship and has a retrograde effect on industrial relations.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the First Industrial Relations Congress of the Americans in Quebec City to the Study Group on Industrial Relations as a Field and Industrial Relations Theory on August 27, 1988. I thank Jack Barbash for the opportunity to present it there.     

Combination schemes for turning point predictions

We propose new forecast combination schemes for predicting turning points of business cycles. The proposed combination schemes are based on the forecasting performances of a given set of models with the aim to provide better turning point predictions. In particular, we consider predictions generated by autoregressive (AR) and Markov-switching AR models, which are commonly used for business cycle analysis. In order to account for parameter uncertainty we consider a Bayesian approach for both estimation and prediction and compare, in terms of statistical accuracy, the individual models and the combined turning point predictions for the United States and the Euro area business cycles.     

Inflation Expectations in Manufacturing Industry

Firms' expectations regarding the future are useful in understanding economic behaviour and can be used to produce short term forecasts. In this article, Paul Robson examines how price expectations can be derived from business surveys and uses survey data from the CBI Industrial Trends Survey to generate a measure of manufacturers' price expectations. This series can be used to tell us how the view of firms about future inflation trends has been changing and how firms are now responding to the strength of the pound.     

湖南省工业能源消耗与经济发展的灰色关联分析

利用灰色关联度方法,运用湖南省2001～2006年的能源消费数,采用能源消费总量与能源利用效率两个输出变量,建立了湖南省工业能源消费与经济增长之间的灰色关联模型。研究表明:湖南省工业能源的消费与经济增长之间有显著的正相关的关系,且工业能源消费总量与全省GDP的关联度要更为突出;其原因归结为目前湖南省的工业经济仍然是粗放型的增长模式,能源消费总量仍然是影响经济增长的关键因素。     

The timing of trademark application in innovation processes

An emerging stream of literature is studying the extent to which trademarks can be used to measure innovation. The picture of the usefulness of trademarks for innovation studies, however, is far from complete. Starting with cues from the patent literature, this paper studies the relationship between the timing of trademark applications and innovation. The trademark literature provides competing predictions on whether companies apply for trademarks early or late in the innovation process. Using a large sample of trademarks referring to innovation, we undertake a first empirical test of these predictions. Our findings suggest that in many instances reality is not as clear cut as the predictions suggest. However, when trademark data is combined with data on firm age, sector and size it is possible to predict whether a trademark refers to early or late-stage innovation.     

Nonlinear deterministic forecasting of daily dollar exchange rates

We perform out-of-sample predictions on several dollar exchange rate returns by using time-delay embedding techniques and a local linear predictor. We compared our predictions with those by a mean value predictor. Some of our predictions of the exchange rate returns outperform the predictions of the same series by the mean value predictor. However, these improvements were not statistically significant. Another interesting result in this paper which was obtained by using a recently developed technique of nonlinear dynamics is that all exchange rate return series we tested have a very high embedding dimension. Additionally, evidence indicates that these series are likely generated by high dimensional systems with measurement noise or by high dimensional nonlinear stochastic systems, that is, nonlinear deterministic systems with dynamic noise.     

Multivariate Prediction with Nonlinear Principal Components Analysis: Theory

We propose the notion of multivariate predictability as a measure of goodness-of-fit in data reduction techniques which are useful for visualizing and screening data. For quantitative variables this leads to the usual sums-of-squares and variance accounted for criteria. For categorical variables we show how to predict the category-levels of all variables associated with every point (case). The proportion of predictions which agree with the true categories gives the measure of fit. The ideas are very general; as an illustration we use nonlinear principal components analysis (NLPCA) in association with ordered categorical variables. A detailed example using data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) will be given in Blasius and Gower (quality and quantity, 39, to appear). It will be shown that the predictability criterion suggests that the fits are rather better than is indicated by “percentage of variance accounted for”.This article was written while John Gower was a visiting professor at the ZA-Eurolab, at the Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung, University of Cologne, Germany. The ZA is a Large Scale Facility funded by the Training and Mobility of Researchers program of the European Union.     

Book reviews

Book reviewed in this article: The Industrial Relations Practices of Foreign-Owned Firms in Britain Peter J Buckley and Peter Enderwick Japanese Participation in British Industry John H Dunning Employee Consultation and Information in Multinational Corporations edited by Jacques Vandamme The Transformation of American Industrial Relations Thomas A Kochan, Harry C Katz and Robert B McKersie The Making of Labour Law in Europe edited by Bob Hepple Mansell Management and Society in Sweden Peter Lawrence and Tony Spybey Routledge and Kegan Paul The Trade Union Situation and Industrial Relations in Hungary The Trade Union Situation and Industrial Relations in Norway The Trade Union Situation and Industrial Relations in Spain The Trade Union Situation and Industrial Relations in Yugoslavia Labor-Owned Firms and Workers' Cooperatives S Jansson and A B Hellmark (eds) Towards a Democratic Rationality The Cooperative Workplace—potentials and dilemmas of organizational democracy and participation J Rothschild and J Allen Whitt Power and Performance in Organisations: An Exploration of Executive Process I Mangham Warwick Papers in Industrial Relations—School of Industrial and Business Studies, Industrial Relations Research Unit, University of Warwick     

浅谈我国工业遗产保护利用的对策与思路

工业遗产保护是近年来出现的一个重要课题。只有采取多元化的保护方案,保护与开发利用并举,让民众参与到工业遗产的保护中来,提升工业遗产保护意识,才能为工业遗产保护提供科学的方案,有效保护我国社会发展进程中的工业文明成果。     

CLIOMETRICS AND TIME SERIES ECONOMETRICS: SOME THEORY AND APPLICATIONS

Abstract The paper discusses a range of modern time series methods that have become popular in the past 20 years and considers their usefulness for cliometrics research both in theory and via a range of applications. Issues such as, spurious regression, unit roots, cointegration, persistence, causality, structural time series methods, including time varying parameter models, are introduced as are the estimation and testing implications that they involve. Applications include a discussion of the timing and potential causes of the British Industrial Revolution, income ‘convergence’ and the long‐run behaviour of English real wages 1264–1913. Finally some new and potentially useful developments are discussed including the mildly explosive processes; graphical modelling and long memory.     

工业工程现状及未来发展研究

在对我国工业工程发展现状分析的基础上,笔者提出了现代化工业工程的内容,并对工业工程未来的发展方向做出展望。为现代工业工程的可持续发展提供更有力的支持,需伴随着其在可持续领域的深入研究。