Cointegration analysis of quarterly tourism demand by Hong Kong and Singapore for Australia

Hong Kong and Singapore are two of the most important and fastest growing markets for tourists to Australia. The purpose of this paper is to investigate movements in the long-run demand for tourist travel by these two origin countries for Australia. Some of the leading macroeconomic variables examined to explain tourism demand are incomes in Hong Kong and Singapore, tourism prices in Australia, and transportation costs and exchange rates between the two countries and Australia. Seasonally unadjusted quarterly data are used for Hong Kong for the period 1975(1)–1996(4), and for 1980(4)–1996(4) for Singapore. Several proxy variables are used for the incomes of tourists from Hong Kong and Singapore to explain quarterly tourist arrivals to Australia. The augmented Dickey-Fuller test for unit roots is examined in the univariate framework, and Johansen's maximum likelihood procedure is used to test for cointegration and to estimate the number of cointegrating vectors. Error correction models are estimated to explain quarterly tourism demand by Hong Kong and Singapore for Australia.     

A profitable trading and risk management strategy despite transaction costs

We present a new profitable trading and risk management strategy with transaction cost for an adaptive equally weighted portfolio. Moreover, we implement a rule-based expert system for the daily financial decision-making process using the power of spectral analysis. We use several key components such as principal component analysis, partitioning, memory in stock markets, percentile for relative standing, the first four normalized central moments, learning algorithm, and switching among several investment positions consisting of short stock market, long stock market and money market with real risk-free rates. We find that it is possible to beat the proxy for the equity market without short selling for 168 S&P 500-listed stocks during the 1998–2008 period and 213 Russell 2000-listed stocks during the 1995–2007 period. Our Monte Carlo simulation for both the various set of stocks and the interval of time confirms our findings.     

Unanticipated money,output, and prices in the small economy

A macroeconomic model for an open economy experiencing both domestic and international monetary disturbances is given. Expectations are assumed to be rational. Particular attention is focused on the reduced form coefficients for unanticipated domestic and foreign monetary disturbances under alternative exchange rate regimes.     

Nominal inertia and shock persistence in UK business cycles

A structural VAR methodology is used for UK data to identify and map out the effects of innovations in the money supply, employment, output, wages and prices. Moreover, bands of two standard errors are computed for the impulse response functions so that comment may be made on the significance of the dynamic responses of the variables to the simulated shocks. This allows conclusions to be drawn on the persistence of shocks. Results suggest that output variation is largely determined by aggregate demand shocks over the business cycle frequency. Importantly, evidence is also found of rigidities in the form of price inertia and nominal wage stickiness.     

Literature-related discovery (LRD): Lessons learned, and future research directions

Literature-related discovery (LRD) is the linking of two or more literature concepts that have heretofore not been linked (i.e., disjoint), in order to produce novel, interesting, plausible, and intelligible knowledge (i.e., potential discovery). The open discovery systems (ODS) component of LRD starts with a problem to be solved, and generates solutions to that problem through potential discovery. We have been using ODS LRD to identify potential treatments or preventative actions for challenging medical problems, among myriad other applications. The five immediately preceding papers in this Special Issue describe the application of ODS LRD to Raynaud's Phenomenon (RP), cataracts, Parkinson's Disease (PD), Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and Water Purification (WP). We describe the lessons learned from each application, and how the techniques can be improved further.Generation of much potential discovery using ODS LRD is possible when the conceptual roadblocks to discovery are removed. Some of these roadblocks include use of numerical filters that are unrelated to generating discovery, and excessive reliance on literatures directly related to the problem literature of interest. The issue of how to handle large amounts of potential discovery has not been addressed in the literature, since most ODS LRD researchers have tried to find a relatively few potential discovery items. We present a development strategy that capitalizes on the large amounts of potential discovery we have identified.     

Explaining Growth: A Contest Between Models

Recent contributions to the empirical growth literature show no tendency to convergence in specification, as researchers seek to identify new variables that can account for significant regional effects in earlier work. We conduct non-nested tests between the models of Barro (1997), Easterly and Levine (1997) and Sachs and Warner (1997). The data strongly prefer an encompassing model, but fail to reject any of the candidate models, implying that each model represents a partial truth. We identify a model that includes most (but not all) of the regressors in the candidate models and is robust to the inclusion of regional dummies.     

Retirements at risk: employees lack a comprehensive, realistic view of resources and needs

Employees who are following conventional retirement-planning advice will be in for a rude awakening as they approach retirement and discover that they can't afford to retire just yet or are likely to outlive their retirement funds. The article discusses how we have arrived at this point, what the implications are, and what both employers and employees can do to remedy the situation.