Exchange-rate volatility, trade and “fixing for life” in Thailand

At the outset of the 1997 financial crisis, the quest to find a more suitable exchange-rate policy has become an urgent task facing the East Asian economies. One of the key policies agreed under Thailand’s August 1997 Letter of Intent (LOI) with the IMF was the adoption of a more flexible exchange-rate policy. However, the country re-adopted its pre-1997 crisis rigid exchange-rate policy in early 1999. To grasp this “fixing for your life” phenomenon, we test the impact of the exchange-rate volatilities of Thailand’s baht against the yen and the US dollar on the performance of the country’s bilateral trades with the two key partners.     

UNIFORM TECHNICAL PROGRESS: CAN IT BE HARMFUL?

Abstract.  In a model incorporating trade in final goods, intermediate goods and capital, we show how 'uniform' technical progress across sectors can lead to immiserization. The condition for immiserizing technical progress crucially depends on the pattern of specialization. Our results tend to hold in a more general specification of the basic structure.     

What Drives TBL Reporting: Good Governance or Threat to Legitimacy?

This paper provides two complementary explanations for the adoption of triple bottom line (TBL) reporting by Australian companies. The first explanation is that companies adopt TBL reporting to legitimise their relationship with society because of adverse publicity from the media. The second explanation is that TBL reporting is adopted because of the company's desire to achieve high‐quality reporting and transparency inferred by strong corporate governance. Companies with TBL reporting had significantly more adverse media coverage before implementing TBL reporting than non‐TBL companies. TBL reporting is also significantly and positively related to the existence of an environmental or sustainable development committee and the frequency of meetings of the audit committee.     

Volatility behavior of exchange rate future contracts

The increasing globalization of economies and the concurrent increase in the risk of currency exposure has stimulated the development of new instruments to allow both investors and traders to hedge their currency risk. The expansion of these derivatives, however, has raised some concerns. This paper studies the determinants of the dynamics of exchange rate future contracts as a means to identify the sources of such concerns. By using a mean-exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (M-EGARCH) model for five different future contract lengths and six developed economies, it is found that an M-EGARCH(1,1) effectively describes the exchange rate futures' daily dynamic. Sign, size, and persistence effects on the volatility of future contracts are all significant, thus providing important information to both policy makers and market participants.     

Exchange Rate Asymmetry and Flexible Exchange Rates under Inflation Targeting Regimes: Evidence from Four East and Southeast Asian Countries

While many have underscored the role of a flexible exchange rate policy under an inflation targeting (IT) regime, very few studies have examined what actually happens to exchange rate policy once the emerging market announces that it will adopt inflation targeting. The central contention of this paper is that while the adoption of an inflation targeting (IT) policy may lead to more flexible exchange rate movements, for various reasons it is possible that the degree of flexibility will be significantly higher on one side of the market. In this study, we demonstrate that four Asian economies—namely, Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines and Thailand—whom were among the first group of emerging markets to embrace the inflation targeting framework of monetary policy, tend to adopt a form of asymmetrical exchange rate behavior, wherein appreciation pressures are restrained more substantially than depreciation pressures.     

Is Regionalism Viable? A Case for Global Free Trade

We assume an imperfectly competitive world with n commodities and address the question of whether or not (regional) trade blocs are viable. To answer this fundamental question, we use a notion of stability, offered by Greenberg (1990) , and show that regional trade blocs are not viable as they are not stable. On the other hand, we demonstrate that a global trade bloc is viable. Therefore, our results provide theoretical support for advocates of global free trade.     

A measure of regional influence with the analytic network process

The metropolitan region is commonly defined by a socio-spatial network of urban nodes that are linked in territory and function. Such a network is differentiated by size and dominance of the linked nodes, characterized by physical or virtual flows of a wide-ranging variety. The analytic network process (ANP) is a multi-criteria analytic method that measures the influence or dominance of the nodes in a network with feedback. We illustrate how ANP determines county rank as a measure of influence in a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) defined by its interrelated socio-economic and spatial elements qualitatively and quantitatively. We compare the ANP results to similar measures of regional influence in the literature.     

Mixture of MLP-experts for trend forecasting of time series: A case study of the Tehran stock exchange

A new method for forecasting the trend of time series, based on mixture of MLP experts, is presented. In this paper, three neural network combining methods and an Adaptive Network-Based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) are applied to trend forecasting in the Tehran stock exchange. There are two experiments in this study. In experiment I, the time series data are the Kharg petrochemical company’s daily closing prices on the Tehran stock exchange. In this case study, which considers different schemes for forecasting the trend of the time series, the recognition rates are 75.97%, 77.13% and 81.64% for stacked generalization, modified stacked generalization and ANFIS, respectively. Using the mixture of MLP experts (ME) scheme, the recognition rate is strongly increased to 86.35%. A gain and loss analysis is also used, showing the relative forecasting success of the ME method with and without rejection criteria, compared to a simple buy and hold approach. In experiment II, the time series data are the daily closing prices of 37 companies on the Tehran stock exchange. This experiment is conducted to verify the results of experiment I and to show the efficiency of the ME method compared to stacked generalization, modified stacked generalization and ANFIS.