Forecasting US real house price returns over 1831–2013: evidence from copula models

Given the existence of nonnormality and nonlinearity in the data generating process of real house price returns over the period of 1831–2013, this article compares the ability of various univariate copula models, relative to standard benchmarks (naive and autoregressive models) in forecasting real US house price over the annual out-of-sample period of 1874–2013, based on an in-sample of 1831–1873. Overall, our results provide overwhelming evidence in favour of the copula models (Normal, Student’s t, Clayton, Frank, Gumbel, Joe and Ali-Mikhail-Huq) relative to linear benchmarks, and especially for the Student’s t-copula, which outperforms all other models both in terms of in-sample and out-of-sample predictability results. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for nonnormality and nonlinearity in the data generating process of real house price returns for the US economy for nearly two centuries of data.     

Stock market interdependence between Australia and its trading partners: does trade intensity matter?

We investigate the extent and manner of stock market interdependence between Australia and its trading partners and examine whether this is affected by trade intensity. Based on trade intensity, we classify Australia’s trading partners into major, medium and minor partners. We hypothesize that markets with greater (lower) trade intensity will be more (less) interdependent with Australia. We perform correlation (unconditional and conditional) analyses between Australia and its trading partners. Our results indicate that most of the markets that are highly correlated with Australia are its major trading partners. We conduct panel regression analysis to investigate whether trade intensity has any impact on the stock market correlations between Australia and its trading partners. The results show that trade intensity significantly and positively affect the correlations of Australia with its major trading partners. Thus, the results confirm our hypothesis that trade intensity drives stock market interdependence between Australia and its trading partners.     

Nominal vs real adjustment in demand for money functions

Recently, Fair (1987) has addressd an interesting question in the areas of demand for money, namely, whether the adjustment of actual to desired demand for money is in nominal or real terms. His conclusion, based on time-seies analysis for twenty-seven countries, including a few developing countries, was that the evidence was overwhelmingly in favour of the nominal hypothesis.

The aim of this paper is to address the same issue for eleven Asian countries. In the process, a reformulation of the test procedure used by Fair is suggested. In addition, the question is also examined within the framework of the error correction model. The models are also tested for structural stability.

The scheme of the paper is as follows. The models and the tests are specified in Section I. The data and the estimation issues are dealt with in Section II. Section III presents the results. The paper is concluded with a brief summary of the major findings.     

Marketing and r&d strategies for biotechnology firms in the usa

This pape reports on a survey of 64 biotechnology firms in the USA about their R&D strategy, marketing focud and sources of technology. The survey explored the interrelationships among the strategic issues and how they were related with the means of appropriating R&D results. Three stralegic clusters for technology acquisitin emerged from the data: (i) internal developer, (ii) joint developer, and (iii) cooperative financed. Three marketing clusters were: (i) market penetartor, (ii) innovative marketer, and (iii) market developer. The R&D clusters were: (i) defensive strategy, (ii) aggressive strategy, and (iii) research-intensive strategy. External sources of technology appeared to be predominant among thje various firms and apparently marketing strategy and source of technology had no significant relationship. Most of the firms were involved with commercial innovation in their R&D strategy and few were research specialists. Innovative firms were inclined to depend on external sources sources of technology. Issues related to appropriability of R&D results for the different groups have been examined for their implications for public policy.     

The effectiveness of government spending on education and health care in developing and transition economies

Recent studies show that corruption is associated with higher military spending [Eur. J. Polit. Econ. 17 (2001) 794] and lower government spending on education and health care [J. Publ. Econ. 69 (1998) 263]. This suggests that policies aimed at reducing corruption may lead to changes in the composition of government outlays toward more productive spending. However, little empirical evidence has been presented to support the claim that public spending improves education and health indicators in developing and transition countries. This paper uses cross-sectional data for 50 such countries to show that increased public expenditure on education and health care is associated with improvements in both access to and attainment in schools, and reduces mortality rates for infants and children. The education regressions are robust to different specifications, but the relationship between health care spending and mortality rates is weaker.     

Do Countries Matter More in Determining the Relationship Between Employee Welfare and Financial Performance?

Extant literature suggests that employee‐friendly practices influence corporate decision‐making. Using a bargaining framework, we examine the role of country‐level determinants in influencing employee‐friendly practices and their impact on value creation. Utilizing a comprehensive sample of 25,483 firm‐year observations from 56 countries, we find that firms domiciled in countries with weak employment protection and regulations can potentially benefit by voluntarily undertaking employee‐friendly practices. Also, in countries with flexible labor market conditions, firm value is enhanced by undertaking employee‐friendly practices. Furthermore, the importance of employee‐friendly practices in value creation is observed strongly in countries that provide better infrastructure, productivity, and incentives.     

Let the evidence speak again! Financial incentives are more effective than we thought

In this essay, the authors rejoin the debate about financial incentive effectiveness. They (a) briefly review the state of the literature in 1998, (b) highlight new meta‐analytic findings and update conclusions regarding the financial incentives–performance relationship, (c) address the myth that financial incentives erode intrinsic motivation, (d) provide explanations for the presumed failure of financial incentives and (e) offer some concluding thoughts and suggestions for future research.     

Speeding Up the Pace of New Product Development

This study empirically investigates a wide array of factors that have been argued to differentiate fast from slow innovation processes from the perspective of the research and development organization. We test the effects of strategic orientation (criteria- and scope-related variables) and organizational capability (staffing- and structuring-related variables) on the speed of 75 new product development projects from ten large firms in several industries. Backward-elimination regression analysis revealed that (a) clear time-goals, longer tenure among team members, and parallel development increased speed, whereas (b) design for manufacturability, frequent product testing, and computer-aided design systems decreased speed. However, when projects were sorted by magnitude of change, different factors were found to influence the speed of radical and incremental projects. Moreover, some factors that sped up radical innovation (e.g., concept clarity, champion presence, co-location) were found to slow down incremental innovation. Together, the radical and incremental models explain differences in speed better than the general model. This suggests a contingency approach to speeding up innovation. Implications for researchers and managers are discussed.     

The synergistic effect of insurance and banking sector activities on economic growth in Africa

It is widely understood that the insurance and banking sectors of every economy perform some functions in driving economic growth. What is not yet well documented is whether their roles are complimentary or substitutive. With the aid of the dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique, this paper evaluates the synergistic effect of both sectors on economic growth in a panel of 10 African countries that are responsible for most of the activities in the continent’s financial sector. The insurance-banking-growth nexus was also examined through bootstrap panel causality tests. The results show that the life insurance market and the banking sector, as well as the non-life insurance market and the banking sector, are complimentary. We find that, overall, the relationship between the insurance and banking sectors in Africa is a complimentary one and that their synergistic impact on economic growth is positive. The feedback hypothesis was also confirmed in the relationship between the insurance sector and economic growth and between the banking sector and economic growth.     

An intelligent and secure system for predicting and preventing Zika virus outbreak using Fog computing

Zika virus is a mosquito-borne disease that spreads very quickly in different parts of the world. In this article, we proposed a system to prevent and control the spread of Zika virus disease using integration of Fog computing, cloud computing, mobile phones and the Internet of things (IoT)-based sensor devices. Fog computing is used as an intermediary layer between the cloud and end users to reduce the latency time and extra communication cost that is usually found high in cloud-based systems. A fuzzy k-nearest neighbour is used to diagnose the possibly infected users, and Google map web service is used to provide the geographic positioning system (GPS)-based risk assessment to prevent the outbreak. It is used to represent each Zika virus (ZikaV)-infected user, mosquito-dense sites and breeding sites on the Google map that help the government healthcare authorities to control such risk-prone areas effectively and efficiently. The proposed system is deployed on Amazon EC2 cloud to evaluate its performance and accuracy using data set for 2 million users. Our system provides high accuracy of 94.5% for initial diagnosis of different users according to their symptoms and appropriate GPS-based risk assessment.