A Case study: discussion of factors and challenges for urban cultural tourism development

With both qualitative and quantitative approaches, this study examined the success factors of cultural tourism development. It discussed reasons why some cities may find it challenging to sustain cultural tourism development. The findings suggested that the lack of advantageous factors may be because all factors were highly related and that one factor's defect in marketing could easily affect the performance of all other factors. The challenge for cultural tourism development in a less competitive destination may be more related to elementary problems such as governmental leadership and funding rather than the important factors emphasized in theoretical models. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis on demand‐ and supply‐side responses during the expansion of health insurance coverage in Vietnam: Challenges and policy implications toward universal health coverage

This study examines how the demand and supply of healthcare services have responded to the expansion of health insurance coverage in Vietnam by using biyearly provincial panel data from 2006 to 2014. The results of our analysis indicate significant progress towards universal health coverage (UHC) in Vietnam, with the expansion of health insurance coverage being accompanied by increases in admissions and inpatient days. However, some concerns remain. Our findings show a positive response of supply capacity only in terms of doctors and nurses at higher‐level hospitals (provincial hospitals), and none in other relevant aspects. Moreover, we find no positive response of the number of outpatient visits. Another concern is the issue of financial protection. The decline in out‐of‐pocket payments is not significant throughout our observation period, suggesting that lowering the cost of healthcare is not straightforward and that the expansion of health insurance coverage alone cannot achieve this. We believe that the Vietnamese experience has valuable implications for other emerging and developing countries, considering that the expansion of health insurance coverage is likely to increase utilization of healthcare services significantly and that the supply side needs to be prepared for the increase.     

Japan’s output gap estimation and ℓ 1 trend filtering

This paper estimates Japan’s output gap using the recently developed ? ₁ trend filter, which is an alternative to the popular Hodrick–Prescott (HP) filter. This new filter provides a piecewise linear trend line, which means it possibly provides better output gap estimates than the HP filter does for an economy such as Japan that has experienced some structural breaks.     

Presentation Matters: Comparison of Cognitive Effects of DTC Prescription Drug Advergames,Websites, and Print Ads

Applying limited cognitive capacity theory, this study examined the cognitive effects of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advergames in comparison to those of print ads and websites. The results revealed consumers’ memories of the advertised drug brand and information about the drug and the disease it treats was the lowest in the advergame condition and highest in print. For the content elements that were centrally integrated into the advergame, however, consumer recall was the highest in the advergame condition. In addition, differential memory decay was found across media types. Memory decay was greater in the print ad condition than the other media conditions.     

Uniformly most accurate equivariant prediction limit

Summary Prediction limits are widely used for reliability problems and other related problems. The determination of prediction limits has been extensively investigated, but few optimal properties of these limits have been explored. This paper introduces a concept of uniform accuracy in order to compare equivariant prediction limits and show that the prediction limits used for the normal distribution and the exponential distribution are uniformly most accurate equivariant.     

Model Predictive Control for Optimal Pairs Trading Portfolio with Gross Exposure and Transaction Cost Constraints

Model predictive control (MPC) is a flexible yet tractable technique in control engineering that recently has gained much attention in the area of finance, particularly for its application to portfolio optimization. In this paper, we extend the MPC with linear feedback setting in Yamada and Primbs (in: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on decision and control, pp 5705–5710, 2012) by incorporating the following two important and practical issues: The first issue is gross exposure (GE), which is the total value of long and short positions invested in risky assets (or stocks) as a proportion of the wealth possessed by a hedge fund. This quantity measures the leverage of a hedge fund, and the fund manager may limit the amount of leverage by imposing an upper bound, i.e., a GE constraint. The second issue is related to transaction costs, where the MPC algorithm may require frequent trades of many stocks leading to large transaction costs in practice. Here we assume that the transaction cost is proportional to the change in the amount of money (i.e., the change of absolute values of long or short positions) invested in each stock. We formulate the MPC strategy based on a conditional mean-variance problem which we show reduces to a convex quadratic problem, even with gross exposure and proportional transaction cost constraints. Based on numerical experiments using Japanese stock data, we demonstrate that the incorporation of the transaction cost constraint improves the empirical performance of the wealth in terms of Sharpe ratio, which may be improved further by adding the GE constraint.     

An Explicit Finite Difference Approach to the Pricing Problems of Perpetual Bermudan Options

The pricing problem of options with an early exercise feature, such as American options, is one of the important topics in mathematical finance. Pricing formulas for options with the early exercise feature, however, are not easy to obtain and the numerical methods are thus frequently required to derive the price of these options. The value function of perpetual Bermudan options is characterized with the partial differential equation and this is solved by the finite difference method in this article.     

An Asymptotic Expansion for Forward–Backward SDEs: A Malliavin Calculus Approach

This paper proposes a new analytical approximation scheme for the representation of the forward–backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs) of Ma and Zhang (Ann Appl Probab, 2002). In particular, we obtain an error estimate for the scheme applying Malliavin calculus method for the forward SDEs combined with the Picard iteration scheme for the BSDEs. We also show numerical examples for pricing option with counterparty risk under local and stochastic volatility models, where the credit value adjustment is taken into account.