Do more ethnically and religiously diverse countries have lower democratization?

The effects of diversity on democratization are investigated here. Ethnic fractionalization and polarization do not seem to affect democratization significantly, whereas religious fractionalization and polarization do affect democratization; countries with higher religious diversity experienced more democratization in the 1990s.     

The role of endowments,technology and size in international trade: new evidence from product-level data

Using product-level trade data, we empirically investigate the export patterns of more than 150 countries in their exports to the USA, Brazil, India, and Japan. We document strong evidence that exporters specialize according to their relative factor endowments, technology, and economic size. More developed, capital abundant countries are found to export products of higher unit values and a wider range of products to developed, emerging and developing markets. More developed, economically larger, and technologically advanced countries are also the major exporters of new products, spanning a wide range of product categories with high unit values. Our findings provide important insights into the macro phenomenon that a large proportion of the global trade takes place among developed economies, and that the latter are also major exporters to developing markets.     

Malmquist indices of productivity growth for Islamic and conventional banks in Malaysia

This paper studies the total factor productivity （TFP） of banks in Malaysia with the emphasis on comparing the relative productivities of Islamic and Conventional banks. The Malmquist index approach is used to decompose productivity growth into technical efficiency and technological change. The productivity growth is measured and decomposed into technical change and efficiency change. The efficiency change is further decomposed into pure efficiency change and scale efficiency. It is found that Islamic banks＇ productivity growth is limited by its lack of technological change compared to its conventional counterparts. Nonetheless, both types of banks are operating at the correct level in terms of scale or size.     

Inflation Targeting and Inflation Uncertainty

This article empirically investigates the impact of inflation targeting on inflation uncertainty. We implement PARCH and GARCH methodologies to model conditional variance of inflation. We also investigate the relationship between level and volatility of inflation to analyze the validity of the Friedman hypothesis for IT countries. We find that most of the inflation targeting countries have significantly lower inflation variances after inflation targeting. In most of the IT countries, the relationship is consistent with the Friedman hypothesis.     

The demand for agricultural land and strategic bidding in auctions

A unique feature of land auctions is that the same land is auctioned twice; first the land is broken into tracts and each tract is auctioned individually. Then, the tracts are reassembled and auctioned as a whole parcel. After the two auctions are completed, the seller chooses the one that generates a higher revenue. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an explanation of why such an auction design is employed to sell farmland. We also show that this feature of land auctions leads to interesting interaction among the bidding strategies of the players in each of the two auction stages.     

The economic role of foreclosures

We consider the economic consequences of changing the foreclosure rules. By incorporating renegotiation into the analysis, we show that although renegotiation decreases the number of foreclosures it can make the effects of foreclosure more significant. Even when foreclosure does not actually occur, a change in foreclosure rules changes the threat points of lender and borrower in any renegotiation, and thus changes the effective interest rate that the lender receives. In the long run, stated interest rates on loans will adjust to compensate for any change in the effective interest rate. We also examine the impact of a change in foreclosure laws on the borrower's welfare.     

Determinants of dividend payout and dividend propensity in an emerging market,Iran: an application of the LASSO

Accurate prediction of dividends is important for market participants such as investors, firm managers, and monitoring authorities, as they can, respectively, invest, manage dividend decisions, and monitor dividend policies more effectively. We identify the most relevant variables for predicting the dividend payout of the firms in an emerging market, Iran, using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO). The advantages of the LASSO include: enhancing the prediction accuracy of the dividend model, improving interpretation of the results, and applicability to high-dimensional data. We obtain several results. First, some fundamental determinants of dividends in the industrialized economies such as market-to-book ratio and current ratio, do not play a role in deciding dividends in Iran. Second, LASSO-selected variables outperform the variables commonly used in the literature in terms of model fit and prediction accuracy. Third, business risk, leverage, return on assets and effective tax rate are the most important predictors of dividend propensity of the Iranian firms. Fourth, if the support vector machine algorithm, an often-used classification method, is combined with LASSO-selected variables, it can better discriminate between dividend-paying and dividend non-paying firms than other methods such as logistic regression and linear discriminant analysis.

Abbreviations: LASSO: Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator; TSE: Tehran Stock Exchange; RMSE: Root Mean Squared Errors; MAE: Mean Absolute Errors; ROC: Receiver Operating Characteristics; GMM: Generalized Method of Moments; MENA: Middle East and North Africa region; AIC: Akaike Information Criterion; BIC: Bayesian Information Criterion; LARS: Least Angel Regression; OLS: Ordinary Least Squares; AUC: Area Under Curve; BS: Brier Score ; OA: Overall Accuracy; LDA: Linear Discriminant Analysis; SVM: Support Vector Machine algorithm; LR: Logistic Regression.     

Heterogeneity in the determinants of length of stay across middle age and senior age groups in thermal tourism

ABSTRACT

Water has been seen as a healing source of life for centuries. Even the placebo effect of thermal therapies increases consumers’ well-being. Especially with easy traveling options demand for thermal therapies are on the rise. Users of thermal therapies are mostly composed of seniors. Even though age groups in the senior market have heterogeneous needs, managers assume them to be homogenous. Measuring thermal tourism demand by the length of stay, this study analyzed the determinants affecting the length of stay of older thermal tourists. The length of stay is predicted to have been affected by age, purchasing power, physical distance, and seasonal preferences. Even though all of the above have an effect on the length of stay, we find that age is the main determinant deciding the duration. These results may serve as a starting point for policymakers and tourism managers to tailor strategies to increase income streams associated with length of stay.