Benefits Transfer: Current Practice and Prospects

This paper introduces a special issue devoted to the benefits transfer methods used as part of benefit costs analysis for policy analysis. Benefits transfer methods, as they are applied for environmental policy analyses, use economic concepts together with existing empirical estimates to predict the incremental benefits from a change in some feature of an environmental resource. After giving two examples of the decisions that analysts confront in performing these analyses, I discuss the interconnections between the papers in this issue and the research challenges that emerged from discussions of them.     

Chinese Banking Sector’s Intrafinancial System Debt Issue

Chinese debt issue has been a major concern for investors. This study examines the intrafinancial system debt issue within Chinese banking sector. Based on quarterly data during Q1, 2008 to Q3, 2017, this study finds that the declining return from the real economy is the dominant factor that contributes to the growth of intra?nancial system debts, and the quantity indicator of expansionary monetary policy also plays a positive role. These findings are the first of its kind in the academic literature. Also, this study reviews the recent policy responses from Chinese regulatory authorities and concludes that more need to be done.     

The comparative performance of the iterative instrumental variables estimator using structural and predictive criteria

The purpose of this paper is to give experimental evidence on the small-sample properties of the iterative instrumental variables estimator originally proposed byLyttkens [1970], relative to the more conventional methods including ordinary least squares, limited information single equation maximum likelihood and three stage least squares.     

So What Do Parents Want and Expect from a Technology Education Programme? – An Exploration

Everyone seems to have a view on how and what should be taught in our schools and Technology Education is no exception. In New Zealand, as in the United Kingdom, recent legislation has encouraged parents to take a more active role and to voice their opinions (Banks 1994). Satchwell and Dugger (1996) observe that in the current context of educational reform, parents are questioning what students should be expected to know and be able to do. So what do parents want for their children? This investigation briefly documents a new partnership between a College of Education and a primary school in New Zealand. Parents were questioned over the course of the first year of this new partnership, in order to determine their expectations from the Technology programme.     

On the Assessment of Default Risk in Commercial Mortgage Lending

This paper takes an initial step toward the development of an empirically-based model of default risk assessment in the commercial mortgage market. A review of existing empirical studies of residential mortgage and commercial loan default provides evidence for appropriate model specification and estimation. A simple default risk model for commercial mortgages is then developed based upon the generalized default risk models of Jackson and Kaserman [1980] and Vandell [1981]. The model is then examined for its ability to successfully handle a variety of situations and used to test the validity of traditional ratio analysis "rules-of-thumb" employed in commercial lending. Ratio tests are found generally to be inconsistent with an objective of constraining default risk below some maximum. Finally, a modified ratio analysis consistent with the model and with a constrained default risk strategy is introduced.     

Weak complementarity and production

This paper describes how weak complementarity, a common assumption to characterize consumer preferences for recovering measures of willingness to pay for nonmarketed environmental resources, can be used to evaluate the effects of pollution that may affect profits or costs. In such cases, pollution serves as an externality imposed by third parties on production activities.     

Day Trader Behavior and Performance: Evidence from Taiwan Futures Market

By using a unique data from the Taiwan futures market to identify each trader’s trading records and focusing on the high-frequency day traders who trade at least 90 days over the sample year, this study closely examines their behaviors and performance. Day traders’ performances are “risk-adjusted” and analyzed to identify behavioral biases and the resulting impact on performance. There is no evidence found that trading too much is detrimental to investment performance. The high-frequency day traders are more aware of the danger of behavioral biases and are as a result less prone to the disposition effect. Contrary to expectations, day traders in my study are shown to be non-loss averse. Most of our sample except for the highest performance quintile follow a momentum strategy.