A REVIEW OF THE ESTIMATION OF TRANSITION PROBABILITIES IN MARKOV CHAINS

A chronological review of the development of estimation procedures for unknown constant Markovian transition probabilities is presented with emphasis on applications involving the availability of macrodata, as opposed to microdata. Monte Carlo results comparing various estimation methods are analysed and several suggestions for estimating non-stationary probabilities are made.     

The aims and methods of the education and training of shop stewards: a case study

The author's research indicates that management's objectives in releasing shop stewards for courses and the shop stewards' objectives may be quite different. Views on how far courses should be “education” and how far “training”, and the best structure for courses, also emerged from this study.     

An analytical approach to academic department location in a multi-campus university2

An educational institution faced with the operation of several campuses with which to accomplish its many functions also is typically faced with transportation, class scheduling and lost student time as problems directly related to the multi-campus operation. A model using an implicit enumeration approach with bounds on the objective function values is developed with the objective to determine the optimal allocation of indivisible academic departments to each of the several campuses. This allocation minimizes a constructed measure of operating costs while satisfying space availability constraints. Solutions for a three campus and fifty-seven department case are presented.     

The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Beyond

This study expands on the results of a previous article I (Javier Carrillo-Hermosilla) co-wrote with Gregory Unruh (2006) Carrillo-Hermosilla, Javier and Gregory Unruh. “Technology Stability and Change: An Integrated Evolutionary Approach.” Journal of Economic Issues 40, 3 (2006): 707–742.[Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] and published in this journal. The present paper aims to identify and evaluate the relationships existing between the main characteristics of industries and the attributes of the technology standardization processes within them. To achieve this goal, six different sensitivity analyses were carried out on the effects of incremental modifications in the parameters of our agent based model (ABM). In addition to increasing returns, long term stability, or persistent standards, appears to require other variables, such as a low innovation rate, high user survival rates, durable capital, high switching costs, and/or high barriers entry. The results of the simulation allowed us to corroborate a number of intuitions from economics, while drawing attention to less obvious relationships, suggesting possible lines of empirical research to confirm and expand on the insights presented herein.     

Codes of Ethics: Bricks without Straw

'Ethical codes of conduct are superficial and distracting answers to the question of how to promote ethical behaviour in corporate life.'The author is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Business Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.     

An option pricing approach to the valuation of rubber and palm oil producers

Advances in the option pricing literature have important implications for more basic valuation problems. An option pricing approach to the valuation of risky firms can accommodate uncertainty about product market conditions and managerial decisions more readily than a discounted cash flow approach. This paper adapts the stock option pricing approach of Black and Scholes (1973) to the valuation of shares of rubber and palm oil producers. A case study assesses the power of an option-based model to predict market share prices of a rubber and palm oil producer listed on the Stock Exchange of Singapore.     

What's in a change in an industrial bond rating?

Bond quality rating changes (BQRC) for industrial bonds are analyzed using both univariate statistical methods and discriminant analysis to find significant variables and their relationship with the changes. The single most important explanatory variable is found to be the rate of return on assets (ROA), followed by the trend in the return on assets (ROATREND). The univariate analysis found six of the seven proposed explanatory variables significant beyond the 0.01 level. The two-group discriminant analysis model achieved a correct classification rate of over 77%. The paper shows how the results of the two-group discriminant analysis can be used for a three-way prediction (upgrade, downgrade, or no change of bond ratings). The results of this study show that models based on financial statement data can predict rating changes with good accuracy and therefore may be a useful tool for rating agencies, at least as an initial screening device.