EVIDENCE OF SHIFTS IN PORTFOLIO ASSET COMPOSITION AS A MARKET TIMING TOOL

Previous research has investigated portfolio timing success by analyzing possible shifts in the beta of professionally managed portfolios. The methodology used by these studies usually involves calculating the betas of portfolios under varing market conditions using ex post holding period yields. Since a portfolio's beta can shift for reasons other than timing efforts, the results and interpretation of this type of analysis are limited. This paper takes a more direct approach to the analysis of timing by analyzing shifts in the asset composition of professionally managed portfolios. The asset composition is first analyzed to determine if portfolio managers are attempting to adjust risk exposure. Any shifts that are identified are compared to the market conditions that existed subsequent to the shift to determine if the shift was appropriate in terms of correct timing.     

Incentives and public inputs

Considered in this paper is a mechanism to coordinate the decision to provide a public input to a group of firms designed to overcome the ‘free rider’ problem. The coordinating agent relies on information communicated by the firms and it is shown that the mechanism provides an incentive for each firm to send truthful information so that an optimal quantity of the public input will be provided.     

Interprovincial Reallocation of Market Sharing Quota for Industrial Milk

This paper examines allocations of industrial milk quota across provinces in Canada under two hypothetical scenarios. The study focuses on the case where considerable reallocation of production occurs across farms and provinces due to changes in the distribution of quota holdings. The allocations are determined using linear programming (LP) analysis, where the objective of the optimization problem is to minimize the delivered cost of products such as cheese, butter, ice cream, and yogurt. The LP model seeks to meet provincial targets for domestic disappearance on a milk-equivalent basis in the short to medium term, where limits are imposed on the maximum achievable growth of production and processing capacity in any one I he conclusions are that reallocation of existing quota across farms and provinces has a potential to reduce considerably the costs of industrial milk production and the cost of transporting manufactured products.     

The impact of protection and concentration on the labour intensity of U.K. industries

fr]Résumé L’effet de la protection et de la concentration sur l’intensité de main d’oeuvre des industries du Royaume-Uni. — Cette étude teste empiriquement la proposition que la structure du tarif douanier dans les pays industrialisés permet une protection plus haute en faveur des industries relativement fortes à main d’oeuvre. L’étude suggère que non seulement le niveau de protection mais aussi le degré de la concurrence est associé avec les intensités de main d’oeuvre. En utilisant les données pour l’industrie du R. U. les résultats démontrent que l’usage de main d’oeuvre et les co?ts de main d’oeuvre varient positivement avec les taux de protection, nominale ou effective, et négativement avec les rapports de concentration du marché de la production locale.

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Zusammenfassung Der Einflu\ von Protektion und Konzentration auf die Arbeitsintensit?t britischer Industrien. — Diese Studie testet empirisch die Hypothese, da\ die Zolltarifstruktur in Industriel?ndern den relativ arbeitsintensiven Industrien einen gr?\eren Zollschutz gew?hrt. Sie weist darauf hin, da\ nicht nur zwischen dem Protektionsniveau und der Arbeitsintensit?t, sondern auch zwischen dem Wettbewerbsgrad und der Arbeitsintensit?t ein Zusammenhang besteht. Unter Verwendung von Daten aus der britischen Industrie zeigen die Ergebnisse, da\ Arbeitseinsatz und Arbeitskosten mit den (nominalen oder effektiven) Protektionsraten positiv und mit den Konzentrationsgraden auf dem heimischen Markt negativ korreliert sind.

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Resumen El impacto de protecci?n y concentratión sobre la intensidad de mano de obra en las industrias del Reino Unido. — Este estudio examina empiricamente la propositión que la estructura tarifaria de los países industriales brinda una protección mayor a las industrias relativamente más intensivas en mano de obra. El estudio sugiere que no solamente el nivel de la protección sino que también el grado de competencia se asocia con las intensidades de mano de obra. Utilizando datos de la industria del Reino Unido los resultados demuestran, que el uso de mano de obra y el costo varian positivamente con las tasas de protección, nominal o efectiva, y negativamente con las relaciones de concentración del mercado de productión doméstico.

     

An introduction to the Millennium Project

The pace, complexity, and globalization of change requires attention to the future. The change of millennia — the coming of the year 2001 — provides an opportunity, a psychological focus, for a global review of past achievements and problems and a unique chance to assess and reflect on future issues and opportunities.Unfortunately, there is as yet no mechanism or information utility to support a worldwide effort to study past achievements and problems or future issues and opportunities. Although there are many individual, isolated, special purpose, and one-time study efforts underway, there is no international system that can provide coherence or continuity to these studies, including feedback and sharing of information, and, in particular, the systematic exploration of future possibilities and policy alternatives. With growing interest in the future, the spread of instantaneous and global communications, the advent of powerful new nondeterministic modeling techniques, the ability to evoke, capture, and share information and perceptions with systematic questioning techniques and software, the proliferation of data bases, and knowledge visualization, it is now possible for futurists, scholars and others around the world to interact globally and take a fresh look at the future possibilities and policies in ways not previously possible.As the World Bank provides an ongoing system for research and feedback to improve economic policy, so too the United Nations University could provide an ongoing system for the improvement of futures research and its application to the policy process. According to a series of interviews, questionnaires, and meetings with leading futurists and scholars around the world, the proposed “Millenium Project” has the potential to become such a system.This study had as its principal objective determining the design of an information system that could effectively tap contributors, worldwide, to focus on lessons of the past that bear on world issues and the potential of future developments for intensifying or mitigating these and future issues. The first phase of the feasibility study was both methodological and substantive. Worldwide panels of experts contributed their judgments about the method or process of organizing the project; and the system that emerged from this interaction was applied in a prototype study to the issues of growing world population and the environment.During the first phase of the feasibility study, we found that:

1. 1. The Millennium Project is feasible and likely to be helpful to many institutions in examining and resolving policy issues at several levels. An overview of the project design and objectives appears in Section 2 of this article.

2. 2. Organizations that have an issues scanning function, or have a mandate to keep abreast of a broad range of futures thinking, have a need for access to a non-political, scholarly, and international system of future studies. Such organizations have requested continued participation in the second and third phase of this feasibility study, as well as establishing formal relations with the full Millennium Project.

3. 3. While several questions remain, the design features of a system to collect judgments using the Delphi process that were suggested by the international panel (outlined elsewhere in this report) form a straight forward operational system. Among the remaining questions are the design and use of international information systems and data bases, integration with quantitative techniques such as system modeling, the requirements for special study teams, and institutionalization and financial support. The design of the operational system is described in detail in Section 3 of this report.

4. 4. Cost estimates have been made for establishing international panels and collecting and analyzing information they provide using the Delphi process. Several assumptions are required. If a maximum of four topics are addressed in a particular year, each of the four panels consists of 150–200 people, the staff is kept to a base of three people with an additional 1.5 per panel, and advisors are paid an honorarium of $1.500, then the cost of this element of the full scale Project is likely to be approximately $900,000 per year. While communications modes are important in terms of timing and information access, the costs of communications are the smallest of the Project's cost elements. Detail of our cost estimates appear in Section 7 of this report.

This is not the final feasibility study report, but only a report on part of Phase I. As such, it contains our initial findings about how the Project might be organized. We welcome comments from the reader. Please consider this as work in progress.     

Education and growth: A simple model with complicated dynamics

We construct a simple model of education and growth in which children spend a fraction of their time and parents spend a fraction of their income on education. Both a strategic complementarity and an intergenerational externality are present. The interactions between each pair of consecutive generations lead to rich dynamics. We show that multiple growth equilibria arise, some of them periodic and some aperiodic. We also find a negative correlation between volatility and growth, without a one‐way causal relationship between the two being, necessarily, present. Rather, this negative correlation is driven by the structural characteristics of the economy.     

Dynamic volatility and external security related shocks: The case of the Athens Stock Exchange

This paper analyses the impact of exogenous national security related shocks on the time-varying volatility structure of the Greek stock market. Alternative autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic models are estimated, in order to identify the best fit that adequately describes return volatility behavior, testing symmetric as well as asymmetric innovation responses. An external national security related shock factor is included as well as a military crisis dummy, in order to depict possible implications for the conditional variance. The empirical findings appear to support a statistically significant impact of both national security related factors on the Athens stock market returns.     

The regional impact of health care expenditure: the case of Italy

Decentralization invests the subcentral authorities of a country with autonomy in political and economic power the exercise of which may widen interregional divergence and inequality. This paper provides evidence demonstrating that in the case of Italy the central government's policies for rationalization and containment of the growth of health care expenditure in combination with decentralization in the administration and provision of health care have resulted in interregional inequality, aggravating the existing regional divergence.