Competition and Participation in Religious Markets: Evidence from Victorian Scotland

In 1885, the largest churches in Scotland were engaged in a dispute about state funding. We use data generated in the course of that dispute to test two related hypotheses. First, as market size (proxied by population) increases, the competitiveness (or complexity) of the religious market structure will not decrease. Second, religious activity, as measured by giving per member, church income and participation, will not decrease as market competitiveness (or complexity) increases. Empirical evidence lends support to the first hypothesis, but casts doubt on the second, and the supply-side theories underpinning it, which posit a causal link between increased competitiveness (complexity) and higher levels of religious activity. In interpreting the results the importance of a rich understanding of institutional arrangements—particularly market structure, governance and financing—is underlined.     

An information-based adaptive strategy for resource exploitation in competitive scenarios

Given an exploitation problem, in which a number of agents compete for a limited renewable resource, the optimal harvesting strategy depends on the ratio between resource availability and exploitation effort. For scarce resource a purely competitive, greedy strategy outperforms a more collaborative approach based on the Collective Intelligence, while for more abundant resource the opposite holds. The rationale for this behaviour lies in the amount of information each strategy is able to provide and a combined strategy is possible according to which agents choose dynamically the most informative strategy according to a minimum entropy criterion. This approach, which provides best performance for both under and over-exploited scenarios, can be used to monitor the resource status for management purposes and is effective in both centralised and decentralised decision making.     

SEMIPARAMETRIC VECTOR MEM

Financial time series are often non‐negative‐valued (volumes, trades, durations, realized volatility, daily range) and exhibit clustering. When joint dynamics is of interest, the vector multiplicative error model (vMEM; the element‐by‐element product of a vector of conditionally autoregressive scale factors and a multivariate i.i.d. innovation process) is a suitable strategy. Its parameters can be estimated by generalized method of moments, bypassing the problem of specifying a multivariate distribution for the errors. Simulated results show the gains in efficiency relative to an equation‐by‐equation approach. A vMEM on several measures of volatility justifies a joint approach revealing full interdependence. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Numerical evaluation of the critical price and American options

An approximate solution to the American put value is proposed and implemented numerically. Relaxation techniques enable the critical price to be determined with high accuracy. The method uses a modification of the quadratic approximation of MacMillan and Barone-Adesi and Whaley which gives an expression for the critical price. Numerical experimentation and iterative methods quickly provide highly accurate solutions.     

Do international shocks affect small wholesalers and retailers?

Previous research has suggested that the smallest firms are those most vulnerable to international competition, as measured by exchange rate fluctuations and import shares. However, that work—and the overwhelming bulk of the empirical literature on determinants of exit or firm survival—dealt entirely with the manufacturing sector of the economy. This paper analyzes annual US data for 1989–2005 for about 50 wholesale and retail sectors to explain small firm exit rates in several employment size categories. The main result is that wholesalers respond negatively to a stronger currency in a manner similar to that of manufacturers, while retailers are generally unaffected.     

CAN INDONESIA DECENTRALISE SUCCESSFULLY? PLANS,PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS

Indonesia is engaged in an unprecedented social and economic experiment. Responsibility for much government expenditure is being decentralised, largely to local (district) rather than to provincial governments. If this process is successful, the world's most centralised large country could become one of its most decentralised. This paper considers the issues arising as preparations for decentralisation are finalised, and as the socialisation of its plans and practices is considered by the central government, the People's Representative Council, the decentralised units of government, and the public. These issues were identified partly through interviews with local government officials. They include policy and administrative matters yet to be resolved, such as local budgeting, financial management and auditing practices, personnel decentralisation, local taxation, borrowing by local governments, and the match between revenues and expenditures. A major theme is the importance of a continuing national and local discussion on the goals and processes of decentralisation.