Sea turtle interactions with Hawaii's longline fishery: an extended multi-objective programming model incorporating spatial and seasonal dimensions

The numerous discussions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of Turkey's becoming a member of the Customs Union has been inconclusive. The empirical analysis that mostly focus on the changes in the volume of trade without much regard to the conjectural changes have also been insufficient. This study attempts to shed light on this issue in a formal analysis of Turkey's international trade by empirically accounting for the changes before and after the Customs Union Agreement (CUA). In doing so, we explicitly account for the concurrent changes in the macroeconomic environment that may have affected Turkey's trade with the rest of the world. Our empirical findings indicate that CUA has not only positively impacted on Turkey's trade, but also led to changes in the behaviour of both exports and imports with regards to their responsiveness to underlying variables.     

Parametric characterizations of risk aversion and prudence

Summary. Our first main result says that whether one decision maker is more risk averse than another can be determined from their attitudes toward a given two-parameter family of risks. When all risks belong to this family, risk aversion can be compared even when initial wealth is random. Our second main result solves a long-standing problem in mean-variance analysis: what is the interpretation of the concavity of utility as a function of mean and variance? We show that in the case of normal distributions, this utility function is concave if and only if the agent has decreasing prudence. Received: July 29, 1996; revised: October 2, 1998     

Corporate Environmental Citizenship Variation in Developing Countries: An Institutional Framework

This study focuses on why some companies in developing countries go beyond environmental regulations when implementing their corporate environmental social responsibilities or citizenship behavior. Drawing mainly upon the new institutional theory, this study develops a conceptual framework to explain three institutional factors: companies’ market orientations, industrial characteristics, and corporate identities. Accordingly, we suggest that companies from developing countries that are oriented to markets in developed countries, operate in highly concentrated industries, and have missionary identities adopt corporate environmental citizenship behavior by going beyond environmental regulations. The study also discusses the theoretical, policy, and managerial implications of the conceptual framework.     

Validity of unbalanced growth theory and sectoral investment priorities in Indonesia: Application of feature ranking methods

This study develops a new approach for testing the validity of unbalanced growth theory as well as determining the sectoral priorities for investment in Indonesia over the period 1995–2015. To this end, the high linkage sector(s) is identified through the input–output framework. Afterward, two different approaches, multiple linear regression and multi-layered perceptron (MLP) artificial neural network, are applied to capture the linear and nonlinear relationships between the extracted engine sectors and gross domestic product growth. Given that the detection of sector ranking is crucial for preparing a proper development plan, in the same vein we apply two types of feature-ranking methods (namely, stepwise regression and ant colony optimization (ACO-MLP based). The findings suggest a consistent relationship between the theory and economic growth in both linear and nonlinear models. However, the nonlinear model outperforms its competitor. In general, we find that the manufacturing sector is the most strategic sector in Indonesia, as it has been ranked first in both linear and nonlinear forms. Hence, its development path could be reinforced by more investment in this leading sector and then followed by investment in construction, hotels and restaurants, and agriculture.     

A comparative study of two models SV with MCMC algorithm

This paper examines two asymmetric stochastic volatility models used to describe the volatility dependencies found in most financial returns. The first is the autoregressive stochastic volatility model with Student??s t-distribution (ARSV-t), and the second is the basic SVOL of Jacquier et al. (J Bus Econ Stat 14:429?C434, 1994). In order to estimate these models, our analysis is based on the Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) method. Therefore, the technique used is a Metropolishastings (Hastings in Biometrika 57:97?C109, 1970), and the Gibbs sampler (Casella and George in The Am Stat 46:167?C174, 1992; Gelfand and smith in J Am Stat Assoc 85:398?C409, 1990; Gilks and Wild in 41:337?C348, 1992). The empirical results concerned on the Standard and Poor??s 500 composite Index (S&P), CAC40, Nasdaq, Nikkei and DowJones stock price indexes reveal that the ARSV-t model provides a better performance than the SVOL model on the MSE and the maximum Likelihood function.     

Stochastic optimization models for the airport gate assignment problem

Uncertainties inherent in the airport traffic may lead to the unavailability of gates for accommodating scheduled flights. Incorporating random disruptions is crucial in constructing effective flight-gate assignments. We consider the gate assignment problem under uncertainty in flight arrival and departure times and develop stochastic programming models incorporating robustness measures based on the number of conflicting flights, idle and buffer times. The proposed models are formulated as large-scale mixed-integer programming problems and tabu search algorithms are implemented to obtain assignments of reasonable quality. We conduct a computational study to analyze the proposed alternate models and show the effectiveness of the solution methods.     

Subjective well-being in China: direct and indirect effects of rural-to-urban migrant status

The purpose of this article is to provide a recent investigation on the determinants of subjective well-being among Chinese adults, with particular emphasis on internal migrants who hold a rural hukou and have settled in cities. Based on a sample of 7846 adults stemming from the 2011 wave of CHNS survey, we estimate different happiness functions using ordered probit regressions. We first confirm the influence of traditional demographic and socioeconomic characteristics (i.e. age, marital status, gender, illness/injury, income, and education). Second, our results emphasize the importance of taking into account regional differences, but also the positive impact of leisure time and social connections. Finally, our results highlight that being a rural-to-urban migrant is significantly associated with a decrease in the probability of reporting good or very good life satisfaction. We show that this relationship seems to be shaped by direct and indirect effects, and we identify the mediating role of regional patterns and social relations.     

A Kuznets Curve in Environmental Efficiency: An Application on OECD Countries

The role of the environment is an important issue in policy making andthe accurate assessment of the environmental conditions is vital. Inthis paper, using nonparametric techniques, an environmental efficiencyindex is developed for each of the OECD countries. These indexes allowone both to do cross section comparisons on the state of each country'sproduction process in its treatment of undesirable outputs and also totrace each country's modification of their production processesovertime. Furthermore in this study we investigate the factorsunderlying societies' environmental concerns that eventually lead tochanges in the environmental efficiency. The results provide furtherempirical evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis.     

Financial liberalisation: from segmented to integrated economies

Capital market liberalisation transforms segmented stock markets into integrated ones. Further impact should be expected on the dynamics of the rest of the domestic economy. This study presents evidence to that effect. A significant change after liberalisation is the emergence of world returns as an influential factor on other economic fundamentals. The information content of world returns influences emerging market returns prior to capital market liberalisation and this relation continues after capital market liberalisation. What is new after liberalisation is the influence of world returns on the dynamics of the domestic economy as a whole and its relation to stock returns.