Assessing Dynamics of Palm Oil Import Demand: The Case of Six Asian Countries

This article uses annual data to investigate the palm oil import demand in selected Asian countries (India, China, Japan, Bangladesh, Korea, and Pakistan) through using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) technique. The findings of the study show that the palm oil and substitute oils prices and the national income of the importing countries are significant determinants of palm oil demand across the six models. Other factors such as biofuel mandate, trade policies, and exchange rate also proved to be important factors affecting import demand for palm oil in some of these countries.     

What if Trading Location Is Different from Business Location? Evidence from the Jardine Group

We examine the price behavior and market activity of the Jardine Group companies after they were delisted from Hong Kong in 1994. Although the trading activity of the Jardine Group moved to Singapore, the core businesses remained in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Evidence indicates the Jardine stocks are correlated less (more) with the Hong Kong (Singapore) market after the delisting. This result cannot be explained by various hypotheses, such as relocation of core business, time‐varying betas, migration of trading activity, and currency and tax distortions. We conclude that price fluctuations are affected by country‐specific investor sentiment.     

Momentum Strategies: Evidence from Pacific Basin Stock Markets

We investigate the profitability of momentum investment strategy in six Asian stock markets. Unrestricted momentum investment strategies do not yield significant momentum profits. Although we find that a diversified country‐neutral strategy generates small but statistically significant returns during 1981–1994, when we control for size and turnover effects we find that the country‐neutral profits dissipate. Our evidence suggests that the factors that contribute to the momentum phenomenon in the United States are not prevalent in the Asian markets.     

Catch-up in ICT standards: Policy,implementation and standards-setting in South Korea

Korea is home to the world-first introductions of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and subsequent third generation (3 G) mobile technologies. In addition to increased contributions to global ICT standards, Korean players gained prominence recently by proposing standards for homegrown systems. This paper takes stock of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) policy design, implementations of projects and standards-settings during the Korean catch-up in ICT sectors and attempts at highlighting their commonalities during three different phases: Implementation, Participation, and Definition of standards. The co-evolution of two types of policies and implementations – ‘generic’ and ‘targeted’³ – affect the rate, direction and processes of catch-up. The patterns of raising standards-setting capabilities are generally in line with traditional technological catch-up. However, the evidence implies latecomers must address a few issues related to standards in order to sustain their rates of learning and continued growth in the ICT industry, namely: 1) Clarity of focus on over-arching industry and standards policy and their timely integration, 2) managing the balance between targeted and generic projects to gain both technological and non-technological capabilities for standards-settings, especially implementation, and finally 3) embedding necessary institutional flexibility within a national system catering to multiple standards-setting strategies and processes.     

TIME-VARYING FACTORS AND CROSS-AUTOCORRELATIONS IN SHORT-HORIZON STOCK RETURNS

In this paper I show that the lead-lag pattern between large and small market value portfolio returns is consistent with differential variations in their expected return components. I find that the larger predictability of returns on the portfolio of small stocks may be due to a higher exposure of these firms to persistent (time-varying) latent factors. Additional evidence suggests that the asymmetric predictability cannot be fully explained by lagged price adjustments to common factor shocks: (i) lagged returns on large stocks do not have a strong causal effect on returns on small stocks; (ii) trading volume is positively related to own- and cross-autocorrelations in weekly portfolio returns; and (iii) significant cross-autocorrelation exists between current returns on large stocks and lagged returns on small stocks when trading volume is high.