The new independent trade unionism in Hungary

This article describes the development of political and economic reform in Hungary since 1956 and considers the recent emergence of independent trade unionism, particularly the new Democratic Union of Scientific Workers (TDDSZ). The author assesses the prospects for independent trade unionism in general as well as the reform of the official trade union movement (SZOT) in a rapidly changing political climate.     

Land use change and environmental stress of wheat, rice and corn production in China

Grain self-sufficiency is one of the most important agricultural policy goals in China. With only modest imports, China has succeeded in feeding 22% of the world's population on only 7% of its land. However, a high price has been paid for this enormous achievement. Increase in grain yields, in particular in rice, as the main source of production growth, relied heavily on intensive use of physical inputs and increasing intensity of farming systems. Soil degradation, water scarcity, and severe pollution were among the consequences as well as declining efficiency of fertilizer application. Using county-level panel data from 1980 to 2003 and graphical (GIS-based) analysis, this paper first looks at the spatial change of the major grain production across regions over the past two decades, towards the northern and northeastern provinces. The analysis is complemented by using a random panel data model, which underscores the significant influence of land availability, degree of urbanization, and government policy on grain production. Finally, this analysis addresses environmental stress which includes both soil degradation and water shortage. The latter is already severe in many of the traditional grain producing areas, but will now become a bigger problem in the “new” grain producing areas, as these have traditionally much less water resources. Hence, while the economic rational of the “grain shift” towards the northern and northeastern regions is understandable, its sustainability is not guaranteed.     

Exploring the effect of geographic convenience on repeat visitation and tourist spending: the moderating role of novelty seeking

This article investigates the relationships among geographic convenience, tourists' visit frequency and travel spending as well as the moderating effect of novelty seeking. A curvilinear relationship between geographic convenience and visit frequency is first identified. The mediating role of visit frequency is then tested through path analysis, followed by an invariant model test that examines the moderating effect of novelty seeking. The findings reveal that frequency of visit fully mediates the relationship between geographic convenience and travel spending. The moderating effect of novelty seeking is also warranted in that the effect of geographic convenience is only significant for low-novelty seekers while the frequency-of-visit effect is more salient for high-novelty seekers.     

Does exposure to dogs (cows) increase the preference for Puma (the colour white)? Not always

Recently, Berger, & Fitzsimons (2008) showed that conceptual fluency effects could spread to concepts sharing a second-level relation (e.g., priming “dog” can activate “cat,” which can increase the evaluation of the brand Puma). In three laboratory studies we found weak evidence for the above priming effects on related concepts. However, in a population sample, we did find evidence that repeated exposure to a prime is associated with preference for related brands and products.     

Information Quality and the Expected Rate of Return: A Structural Equation Modelling Approach

Asia-Pacific Financial Markets - We use structural equation modelling for a robust test of the role information quality plays in explaining the cost of equity capital (CoE). SEM allows us to...     

A robust textual analysis of the dynamics of Hong Kong property market

Market sentiments influence the dynamics of Hong Kong’s macro-critical property market, but the unobservable nature of market sentiments makes it difficult to systemically assess this sentiment channel. Using text mining techniques, this paper sets up a news-based property market sentiment index and a Google Trends-based buyer incentive index for Hong Kong and studies the sentiment channel of transmission in the Hong Kong property market. The news-based property market sentiment index can reflect the change in sentiments in past key events, with the sentiments in the primary market tending to lead that of the secondary market during the low housing supply period. For the Google Buyer Incentive Index, we find that it has value-added in forecasting (or nowcasting) the official property price index. In mapping out the sentiment channel using a structural vector-autoregressive model, we find that an improvement in market sentiments could stimulate buyers’ incentives, which then together would affect property prices and transaction volumes.     

Steven Waldman,Sacred Liberty: America’s Long,Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom. New York: HarperOne, 2019. ix + 390 pages. USD 28.99 (hardback)

The Review of Austrian Economics -     

Deep empirical risk minimization in finance: Looking into the future

Many modern computational approaches to classical problems in quantitative finance are formulated as empirical loss minimization (ERM), allowing direct applications of classical results from statistical machine learning. These methods, designed to directly construct the optimal feedback representation of hedging or investment decisions, are analyzed in this framework demonstrating their effectiveness as well as their susceptibility to generalization error. Use of classical techniques shows that over-training renders trained investment decisions to become anticipative, and proves overlearning for large hypothesis spaces. On the other hand, nonasymptotic estimates based on Rademacher complexity show the convergence for sufficiently large training sets. These results emphasize the importance of synthetic data generation and the appropriate calibration of complex models to market data. A numerically studied stylized example illustrates these possibilities, including the importance of problem dimension in the degree of overlearning, and the effectiveness of this approach.