Educational inequalities between children of marriage migrants and those of local-born parents – quantile regression results from Taiwan

ABSTRACT

This article studies educational inequalities between children of marriage migrants and those of local-born parents using student test scores from Taiwan. We first find an average raw score gap of 9.5% for children of foreign parents. We then employ quantile regression methodology and find that, after introducing our extensive list of covariates, score gaps vanish for children with a mother from mainland China in all quantiles and for children with a Southeast Asian mother in the highest quantiles. In contrast, we identify large residual score gaps for children with a parent from a culturally more distant country in all quantiles. Different from previous studies which found the largest impact for language usage and parent education, we find that the physical home environment has the highest explanatory power in our analysis.     

Modeling the volatility of futures return in rubber and oil—A Copula-based GARCH model approach

This paper attempts to make use of a Copula-based GARCH (Generalized AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity) Model to find out the relationships between the volatility of rubber futures returns in the Agricultural Futures Exchange of Thailand (AFET) and other four main markets, namely, the volatility of rubber futures returns in the Singapore Commodity Exchange (SICOM), the volatility of rubber futures returns, crude oil returns, and gas oil returns in the Tokyo Commodity Exchange (TOCOM). The results illustrate that the Student-t dependence only shows better explanatory power than the Gaussian dependence structure and the persistence pertaining to the dependence structure between rubber futures returns in AFET and oil futures returns, namely, crude oil futures returns and gas oil futures returns in TOCOM. Whereas, the Gaussian dependence shows better explanatory ability between rubber futures returns in AFET and other rubber futures returns, namely, the volatility of rubber futures in SICOM and TOCOM. For the multivariate Copula model, all the parameters between AFET and other variables are significant. Based on these results, with the liberalization of agricultural trade and the withdrawal of government support to agricultural producers, there is in many countries a new need for price discovery and even physical trading mechanisms, a need that can often be met by commodity futures exchanges. Hence, this paper recommends that the government supports the hedge mutual funds that can be invested in every commodities futures exchange in the world. It can also put the funds together that will contribute farmers to invest in each commodities futures market.     

Long-run waves or short-run fluctuations – what establishes the correlation between oil and food prices?

The strong correlation between food prices and energy prices has gained much attention in the public debate. In this article, we focus on the so-called excess co-movement, which is the correlation between crude oil price and the prices of food commodities after controlling for economic activity. We use a frequency domain Granger causality test to analyse short-run and long-run relationships between crude oil prices and prices of food commodities. For important biofuel inputs like maize, soybeans, rapeseed and EU sugar, we find evidence for long-run Granger causality in particular for the period after 2007. This supports the hypothesis that the increasing biofuel production creates the link between the prices of crude oil and food commodities. However, we also find short-run Granger causality for various food commodities. This result is more in line with herd behaviour or speculation in commodity markets.     

The relationship between the Vietnam stock market and its major trading partners – TECM with bivariate asymmetric GARCH model

This study employs threshold error-correction model with bivariate Glosten–Jagannathan–Runkle-generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model to examine the relationship between the Vietnam stock market and its major trading partners, the United States, Japan, Singapore and China. The results indicate that the Vietnam stock market and return risks are influenced by Japan and Singapore stock markets. We also find that the volatility of stock market in Vietnam and its trading countries have an asymmetrical effect. These findings could be valuable to individual investors and financial institutions holding long-run investment portfolios in the Vietnam stock market.     

Grey analysis of the relationship between grain output and major input factor in Guizhou Province：1983-2005

Because conditions for the grain production are not favorable and the input in the production factors ofmodern agriculture is not sufficient, the grain supply has been less than the demand for a long time. By means of greycorrelation analysis, this paper deals with the correlation situation among such input factors as the grain sown area, thetotal power of agricultural machinery, the fertilizer utilization volume, the actual irrigation area, the damage area, thenumber of farming labor force, in order to understand the major restricting and driving forces that have affected thegrain output in the recent 23 years. The analysis shows that the grain sown area and fertilizer utilization volume are thetwo most important leading factors that affect grain production in Guizhou Province, while the damage area and the totalpower of the farming-used machines are the following factors. Fertilizer utilization volume and the actual agriculturalmachinery and irrigation area are the two increasingly influential factors that affect grain production. The influence of thefarming labor force upon grain production became less strong. The main measures to increase grain production outputin Guizhou Province are to stabilize the arable land, increase the actual irrigation area, expedite the transfer of thefarming labor force and increase the input of modern agriculture.