The transmission mechanism in a changing world

The paper aims to identify those factors that cause changes in the speed and strength of the international transmission of output shocks from the USA to specified European economies. These factors are identified through the use of generalized impulse response functions conditioned on histories defined by an abrupt transition VAR. The chosen transition variables comprise changes in exchange rates, financial prices, international capital flows, trade links and monetary policy instruments. Besides the identification of asymmetric responses, the proposed model is useful in analyzing the strong effect of the recent US recession on the European economies and changes in business cycle synchronization over time. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

世界本就如此

一个小孩正在河边走着,忽然看到水边有一只陷在网里的鳄鱼。鳄鱼也看到了男孩,求道：“你能可怜可怜我,把我救出去吗？     

Innovation, imitation and growth in a changing world economy

The rapid growth of East Asia, which has had such a dramatic impact on the world economy, is widely seen as a process of "catch-up" in which poorer nations grow rapidly assimilating Western and Japanese "know-how". However, this pattern is now changing. In particular, Korea and Taiwan are becoming centres of innovative activity. In this article, Michael Chui, Paul Levine, Joe Pearlman and Andrew Sentance analyse these developments. They argue that evidence of increasing innovation outside the West will be beneficial to world growth over the longer term and should be welcomed, not regarded as a threat.     

Heterogeneity in social values and capital accumulation in a changing world

In a society characterized by a multitude of heterogeneous agents and a large number of possibly immaterial goods, each one having distinct social and personal values, we study the impact of these relative values on intergenerational capital accumulation, as a function of economic and social parameters such as capital mobility, productivity and personal and social values discrepancies. Each agent is modelled by a one-period production function and a two-period intertemporal utility. Agents live, produce and consume over one period, but optimize over two periods, so providing a remaining stock of goods for the next generation. This creates a dynamics in capital accumulation depending on social and individual values. A threshold appears in capital stock accumulation that depends on personal and social values’ volatilities, and below which the initial stock will be depleted. Whereas volatility in social values increases the threshold, impairing capital accumulation, adverse shocks in goods’ values may reverse the dynamics of the accumulation process. Finally, capital mobility specifically favors forerunners, but capital accumulation in one or several sectors may shift social values in their direction, at the expense of other sectors.

     

Testing the constancy in varying-coefficient regression models

Two hypothesis testing problems are considered in this paper to check the constancy of the coefficients in the varying-coefficient regression model. Tests for the two corresponding hypothesis testing problems are derived by two p-values. The proposed p-values can be thought as the generalized p-values, which are given by linear interpolation based on fiducial method. When all of the coefficients are constants, the p-value is uniformly distributed on interval (0, 1). Furthermore, the bound of the difference between the cumulative distribution function of the p-value and the uniform distribution on (0, 1) is given, which tends to 0 under some conditions. Meanwhile, the proposed tests are proved to be consistent under mild conditions. In addition, the proposed new method could be extended to include a broader range of hypotheses. Some good finite sample performances of the tests are investigated by simulations, in which a comparison with other test is given. Finally, a simple example based on real data is given to illustrate the application of our test, different result was obtained based on the proposed test.     

Some tests for the constancy of regressions under heteroscedasticity

For testing the equality of coefficients of a linear regression model under heteroscedasticity, we suggest an F criterion conditioned on the posterior mean of the ratio of standard deviations of error terms in two subsamples. For pairable subsamples, and exact F test is derived. Sampling experiments show that the Chow test differs substantially from the nominal significance level when the two subsample sizes are unequal, and that the F test conditioned on the posterior mean is superior to other tests when sample sizes are small.     

Testing constancy of the error covariance matrix in vector models

In this paper a Lagrange multiplier test of the hypothesis that the covariance matrix of a multivariate time series model is constant over time is considered. It is assumed that under the alternative, the error variances are time-varying, whereas the correlations remain constant over time. Under the parameterized alternative hypothesis the variances may change continuously as a function of time or some observable stochastic variables. Small-sample properties of the test statistic are investigated by simulation. The assumption of constant correlations does not appear overly restrictive.     

The changing duties of today's foreman

There are, today, more foremen in ratio to the numbers of workers they are supervising; they have better educations than foremen have ever had before, or have ever been expected to have; and their responsibilities are expanding to new areas.