Monetary policy announcements and stock reactions: An international comparison

This article investigates the impact of domestic monetary policy rate announcements on the stock markets of New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and the euro area, using event-study methods to identify stock price reactions to the unanticipated/surprise component of announcements. As Australia and New Zealand did not reach the zero bound we investigate whether there is an impact from the global financial crisis on stock market reactions that can be distinguished from the asymmetric reactions to surprises that characterise the business cycle. We find that the euro area and the UK both show a financial crisis effect but behaviour in New Zealand and Australia does not change. We conduct robustness checks and explore confounding factors, especially the impact of ‘guidance’ from central banks that prepares markets for policy rate changes.     

An international comparison of economic leading indicators of telecommunications traffic

The purpose of this paper is to draw international comparisons of the coherence of indexes of leading economic indicators with selected telecommunications traffic series. The traffic series under consideration are total Australian telephone outgoing and U.S. outgoing telephone to Australia with data consisting of monthly observations spanning the period 1970–1983. The response of the telecommunications traffic to these indexes is analysed using cross-spectral techniques. Additionally, a dynamic regression forecasting model for Australian traffic is estimated using the Australian index as an explanatory variable. In comparison to an ARIMA model for the telecommunications data this model reduces post-sample MSE by 19 percent.     

Testing whether the underlying continuous-time process follows a diffusion: An infinitesimal operator-based approach

We develop a nonparametric test to check whether a process can be represented by a stochastic differential equation driven only by a Brownian motion. Our testing procedure utilizes the infinitesimal operator-based martingale characterization combined with a generalized spectral approach. Such a testing procedure is feasible and convenient because the infinitesimal operator of the diffusion process has a closed-form expression. The proposed test is applicable to both univariate and multivariate processes and has an N(0,1)$N(0,1)$ limit distribution under the diffusion hypothesis. Simulation and empirical studies show that the proposed test has reasonable performance in small samples.     

An international comparison of human resource management objectives and activities

The paper reports on mailed surveys of human resource professionals in Canada, South Africa and Zimbabwe who were asked for their views on the priorities they set in terms of human resource objectives and activities. Respondents were also asked to indicate the challenges facing the field and the resulting changes that may be required in each country. The results indicate considerable agreement between the three countries on the need for flexibility and cost effectiveness, but disagreement on priorities among some other activities. There are major differences between perceptions of immediate and long-term priorities to be set. There is a concern that short-term efficiency may be accorded a priority which prevents due consideration being given to future development and societal issues.     

Identifying the age profile of patent citations: new estimates of knowledge diffusion

Previous research studies the age profile of patent citations to learn about knowledge flows over time. However, identification is problematic because of the collinearity between application year, citation year, and patent age. We show empirically that a patent's ‘citation clock’ does not start until it issues, and propose a highly flexible identification strategy that uses the lag between application and grant as a source of exogenous variation. We examine the potential bias if our assumptions are incorrect, and discuss extensions into other research areas. Finally, we use our method to re‐examine prior results on citation age profiles of patents from different technological fields and application year cohorts. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An international comparison of educational systems: a temporal analysis in presence of bad outputs

This study uses the global non-radial Malmquist index to measure performance change in the educational systems of 29 countries/economies participating in PISA 2003 and 2012 for students at age 15 in the disciplines of mathematics and reading. This methodology is particularly appropriate both for its desirable properties as well as its suitability for the educational context. Results indicate a positive evolution in educational systems’ performance during this period. This improvement is mainly due a positive efficiency change, which offsets the negative technological change observed. Nevertheless, a deeper scrutiny at the country level shows that results varied remarkably among them.     

Accounting for growth in retail trade: an international productivity comparison

In this paper we argue that the standard approach for measuring output and productivity in the trade sector has become obsolete. The key problem is that changes in prices of goods purchased for resale are not accounted for. We outline a consistent accounting framework for measuring trade productivity and provide new estimates, taking into account purchase prices of goods sold in a double deflation procedure. We find strong productivity improvements in the UK and US compared to France, Germany and The Netherlands since the mid-1990s. This finding is robust for various productivity measurement models.

Global governance in new public environmental management: An international and intertemporal comparison of voluntary standards' impacts

The aim of this paper is to analyse the indirect effects of environmental management system implementation and certification. Specifically, the paper comprehensively assesses the effects of International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 14001 and European Union Eco‐Management and Auditing Scheme (EMAS) certification as well as experience with implementing environmental management systems on (a) organisational activities outside the scope of environmental management systems, (b) pollution prevention, and (c) product stewardship. This is done by applying multivariate regression analysis to a large multicountry and multiperiod dataset. The analysis finds heterogeneous effects that are limited specifically as concerns pollution prevention and product stewardship and cannot establish clear links to national business systems. Given this and the differences between environmental management system standards, implications for global governance in the context of new public environmental management and the role of national governments in implementing sustainability, even beyond environmental protection, are discussed. Ultimately, the paper evidences on potential limitations of the major international environmental management system standards ISO 14001 and EMAS in supporting the diffusion of advanced practices such as pollution prevention and product stewardship that are necessary for sustainable development. In doing so, it highlights that government‐led public environmental management remains crucial for organising governance, especially in the context of voluntary standards that are applied internationally.     

Parameter estimation for the drift of a time inhomogeneous jump diffusion process

This work deals with parameter estimation for the drift of jump diffusion processes which are driven by a Lévy process and whose drift term is linear in the parameter. In contrast to the commonly used maximum likelihood estimator, our proposed estimator has the practical advantage that its calculation does not require the evaluation of the continuous part of the sample path. In the important case of an Ornstein‐Uhlenbeck‐type jump diffusion, which is a widely used model, we prove consistency and asymptotic normality.     

Models of exchange rates : A comparison of forecasting results

In this note we compare the results of several published papers on exchange rate forecasting. With regard to univariate time series models, we confirm the result that such models, on average, do not outperform the simple random walk forecasting rule. This conclusion corrects results reported in this Journal by Alexander and Thomas (1987).     

舞弊审计准则的国际比较

本文在借鉴国际和美国等的舞弊审计准则的基础上,结合我国的实际情况,论述了修订我国现行舞弊审计准则的必要性,并在对比分析的基础上提出了修订我国舞弊审计准则的具体建议.     

Corporate governance and the returns to acquiring firms' shareholders: an international comparison

We examine the effects of mergers on the returns to acquiring companies' shareholders for a large sample of companies from both Anglo‐Saxon and non‐Anglo‐Saxon countries over the 1980s and 1990s. With the important exception of Japan, we find similar patterns of returns across both types of countries. For a sample of 9733 acquiring companies the mean percentage gain over a short window of 21 days is 0.6%. This picture changes dramatically as the market has more time to evaluate the mergers and/or the acquiring firms. After three years, acquirers' shareholders in the United States and continental Europe lost on average 19% of their market value compared to a portfolio of non‐merging firms in their size deciles and their two‐digit industry, in Canada, Australia and New Zealand roughly 16%, and in the four Scandinavian countries almost 15%. Further analysis indicates that some mergers are consistent with the hypothesis that mergers generate synergies, but that a majority of mergers in Continental Europe are explained by the managerial discretion and/or hubris hypothesis. Our findings also suggest that corporate governance institutions in the United States and the other Anglo‐Saxon countries lead to better investment performance than in continental Europe, when one confines one's attention to mergers. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multinationals,labour management and the process of reverse diffusion: A case study

This paper investigates a form of diffusion largely overlooked in the literature, namely reverse diffusion, in which practices flow from the overseas to the domestic plants. It examines the process of this type of diffusion, focussing on the role of the HQ and the way in which plant managers are influenced by management at this level. Evidence is presented from a case study of a British MNC.     

中国城市化:水平测算与国际比较

城市化水平是衡量一个国家或地区城市化进程程度的一项重要指标,由于这一指标在测算我国城市化水平时,未能考虑我国隐性城镇人口,往往导致我国的城市化水平普遍低于世界其它国家.本文在充分考虑我国隐性城镇人口的基础上,对普遍意义上的城市化水平测算公式进行修正,并具体用于测算我国的城市化水平.通过与世界其它国家城市化水平的比较,得出我国的城市化水平并不滞后的结论.     

生态城市建设模式的国际比较与借鉴

外国生态城市建设主要采取政府导向型、科技先导型、项目带动型、交通引导型、组织驱动型、城乡互动型建设等模式。借鉴国际建设模式和发展经验,我国应采取如下措施加快生态城市建设:发挥政府职能作用,加强科技创新的基础作用,实施重点突破战略,构建生态城市交通体系,引导公众广泛参与,强化城乡融合建设理念。     

国际劳工标准的本土化探析

国际劳工标准,狭义而言是国际劳工组织制订的一系列公约和建议书的总称,是国际法的重要组成部分,也是国际社会推动世界劳动权益保障发展的主要力量,它的产生对世界范围的人权保护和民主政治发挥了巨大的作用。近年     

The extinguishing process: A case study of steel technologies in the world industry

This article examines the elimination of two old steel technologies, the Bessemer method and oxygen-steelmaking. This particular aspect of technological change has not been explored much, whereas substantial effort has been put into determining how these, and other steel technologies were originally adopted. The limited objective of this paper is to conduct a time analysis, i.e., to establish when the two processes began to be phased out, the pattern of such elimination, and how long it took for the steel industry to abandon completely these once-dominant technologies. While the elimination, or extinguishing of the two technologies was relatively fast in terms of their whole life-span, old technologies tend to hang on in a residual role a rather long period of time.     

A comparison among partial adjustment,rational expectations and error correction estimates of the canadian demand for money

Starting from a dynamic optimization principle, the currently most popular approaches to modelling money demand functions are derived. The partial adjustment/adaptive expectations, rational expectations, and error correction mechanism formulations are then estimated using a common data set. The error correction mechanism equation is found to dominate the others either because their implicit restrictions are rejected (rational expectations) or by employing the encompassing principle (partial adjustment/adaptive expectations). Surprisingly all three forms have similar long-run solutions. Since the short-run dynamics differ substantially, the results have important implications for the conduct of monetary policy.     

A comparison of the appraisal process for auction and private treaty residential sales

This paper examines residential sale mechanisms from an appraisal perspective and empirically tests for differences in the valuation process for auctioned and private treaty sales. We test the hypothesis that agents use different criteria in preparing the guide prices for auctioned housing, with an element of under pricing in order to aid in the marketing of the property. The empirical tests are undertaken on a sample of auctioned and private treaty sales in Dublin, Ireland for the period of 1997–2004. We find that the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that agents do adjust valuations for auctions to attract additional potential bidders.