Sales forecasting in financial distribution: a comparison of quantitative forecasting methods

This paper deals with the issue of forecastability of sales activities of independent financial advisers (agents). Employing the most common quantitative methods on a diverse sample of timelines from multiple advisory companies, we have found that under most settings, these methods offer sub-par performance with high relative errors and no statistical differences between them. When a more granular approach is applied (reflecting sales unit size), ARIMA and the simple moving average emerge as significantly less accurate. This outcome is true for all sales units regardless of their size, when relative error is concerned. Thus, our analysis confirms the difficult forecastability of financial sales, speaking against the utilisation of more sophisticated forecasting methods, which mostly fail when compared to their much simpler and less costly counterparts.

     

The Origins and Development of the Latin American Structuralist Approach to the Balance of Payments, 1944–1964

The paper offers an historical account of the origins and development of the Latin American structuralist approach to the balance of payments between 1944 and 1964. We focus on the contributions by Raul Prebisch, Celso Furtado and Juan Noyola, all of them members of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) during the 1950s. Prebisch used the foreign trade multiplier concept to distinguish the business cycle mechanisms at the ‘centre’ and at the ‘periphery’. Noyola introduced the notion of external disequilibrium as a feature of the industrialization process. This was further elaborated by Prebisch's formula connecting the relative rates of growth to the ratio of income-elasticities of import. Furtado examined the implications of the external demand constraint for economic growth, an important element of the two-gap models of the 1960s. The main piece of empirical structuralist research was the CEPAL 1957 report about Mexican external disequilibrium elaborated by Furtado and Noyola, not published at the time; we discuss that report in the context of the Mexican devaluation of 1954.     

Editors’ note

Portuguese Economic Journal -     

Publishing performance of Spanish academics: 1970—2004

This work complements some of the results appearing in the article “Publishing Performance in Economics: Spanish Rankings” by Dolado et al. (Span Econ Rev 5: 80–103, 2003) Specifically we focus on the robustness of the results regardless of the time span considered, the effect of the choice of a particular database on the final results, and the effects on changes in the unit of institutional measure (departments vs. institutions as a whole). Differences are significant when we expand the time period considered. There are also significant but small differences if we combine datasets to derive the rankings. Finally, department rankings offer a more precise picture of the situation of the Spanish academics, although results do not differ substantially from those obtained when overall institutions are considered.     

Environmental Policy Instruments: Technology Adoption Incentives with Imperfect Compliance

We study the incentives to adopt advanced abatement technologies in the presence of imperfect compliance. Interestingly, incentives under emission taxes and pollution abatement subsidies are the same that in the perfect compliance scenario. However, under emission standards imperfect compliance can increase firms’ incentives to invest, whereas under an emission permit mechanism investment incentives decrease only if widespread non-compliance induces a reduction in the permit price. Our results are valid for fairly general characteristics of the monitoring and enforcement strategies commonly found in both, theoretical and empirical applications.     

International trade,job training,and labor reallocation

A large literature studies the impact of increased import competition on workers' outcomes, however, relatively few studies examine which policies can aid workers displaced by trade. In this article, we evaluate the impact of an industrial job training program in Brazil on workers displaced from manufacturing sectors. We find that industrial training increases the probability of re-entry into the formal labor market 1 year after displacement by about 17 percentage points and is even more effective for workers displaced from sectors exposed to high import competition. This effect is mainly associated with workers switching sectors and occupations after training.     

Environmental regulatory enforcement with “green” consumers

We consider a standard probabilistic model of random monitoring to analyze the interactions between a firm and a monitoring agency in the presence of “green” consumers when compliance payoffs are contingent on monitoring and monitoring costs are shared by the monitoring agency and the firm. When the amount paid by the firms if monitored is exogenously fixed, we find that full compliance is implemented with a finite fine. If there is an upper bound for the fine and the regulator determines endogenously the fine and the amount paid by the firms if monitored, we find that full compliance is also achieved, although the optimal fine is now set at its maximum level. The optimal amount paid by the firms if monitored is lower than the environmental premium the compliant firm gets.The author thanks two anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions     

Merger policy in innovative industries

We analyze optimal merger policy in R&D-intensive industries with product innovation aiming to improve the quality of products. Our results suggest that a permissive merger policy is rarely optimal in high-tech industries when the antitrust authority considers a welfare standard that balances the impact of mergers on consumers’ surplus and firms’ profits. In particular, relative to a benchmark where the effects from R&D are absent, we show that the optimal merger policy should not be substantially more permissive in the presence of those effects from R&D.     

The Return Performance of Cubic Market Model: An Application to Emerging Markets

This article studies the performance of the high-order moment capital asset pricing model (CAPM) market models in emerging markets. We apply the cubic market model (4-moment CAPM) to 16 emerging market stock indices ranging from January 2010 to September 2015. Performance of the model is evaluated through the Fama and MacBeth’s two-step regression and through different corrections proposed in the literature, as well as generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation. According to Fama–MacBeth’s procedure, CAPM, the quadratic and cubic market models seem to be insignificant for the analyzed sample; however, the GMM estimation shows that quadratic model is valid for Indian, Polish, and Thai country indices, whereas cubic market model is accurate for Indian country index.     

The Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism Needs Better Categories: Clearing up the Confusions that Result from Blurring Analytic and Lay Concepts

Synopsis It has been difficult to make progress in the study of ethnicity and nationalism because of the multiple confusions of analytic and lay terms, and the sheer lack of terminological standardization (often even within the same article). This makes a conceptual cleaning-up unavoidable, and it is especially salutary to attempt it now that more economists are becoming interested in the effects of identity on behavior, so that they may begin with the best conceptual tools possible. My approach to these questions has been informed by anthropological and evolutionary-psychological questions. I will focus primarily on the terms ‘ethnic group’, ‘nation’, and ‘nationalism’, and I will make the following points: (1) so-called ‘ethnic groups’ are collections of people with a common cultural identity, plus an ideology of membership by descent and normative endogamy; (2) the ‘group’ in ‘ethnic group’ is a misleading misnomer—these are not ‘groups’ but categories, so I propose to call them ‘ethnies’; (3) ‘nationalism’ mostly refers to the recent ideology that ethnies—cultural communities with a self-conscious ideology of self-sufficient reproduction—be made politically sovereign; (4) it is very confusing to use ‘nationalism’ also to stand for ‘loyalty to a multi-ethnic state’ because this is the exact opposite; (5) a ‘nation’ truly exists only in a politician’s imagination, so analysts should not pretend that establishing whether something ‘really’ is or is not ‘a nation’ matters; (6) a big analytic cost is paid every time an ‘ethnie’ is called a ‘nation’ because this mobilizes the intuition that nationalism is indispensable to ethnic organization (not true), which thereby confuses the very historical process—namely, the recent historical emergence of nationalism—that must be explained; (7) another analytical cost is paid when scholars pretend that ethnicity is a form of kinship—it is not.