On the network topology of variance decompositions: Measuring the connectedness of financial firms

We propose several connectedness measures built from pieces of variance decompositions, and we argue that they provide natural and insightful measures of connectedness. We also show that variance decompositions define weighted, directed networks, so that our connectedness measures are intimately related to key measures of connectedness used in the network literature. Building on these insights, we track daily time-varying connectedness of major US financial institutions’ stock return volatilities in recent years, with emphasis on the financial crisis of 2007–2008.     

Geosite assessments: comparison of methods and results

Geotourism as a rapidly evolving and attractive tourism form expands into many regions. This ‘new’ tourism form brings new research issues to be solved including, e.g. geosite identification, geosite assessment, geopark establishment, (geo)tourist trail definitions. One of the biggest challenges of researchers not only in the field of geotourism is to set specific value of an individual locality. The aim of this paper is to compare selected assessment methods of geosites. Different quantitative methods were selected due to fact that it is possible to compare final score of assessments. The results show that using different assessment methods on selected localities gives different results and geosite rankings. Based on this fact, further research in the field of geosite assessment is needed for (geo)tourism planning and management as discussed in this paper.     

Poverty Dynamics in Turkey

This paper examines poverty dynamics in Turkey using a nationally representative panel data covering the 2005–08 period. The aim is to understand mobility in and out of poverty and its correlates. We find that almost a quarter of the poor are persistently poor. The conditional and unconditional exit rates that we estimate are within the range of values reported for developed countries in the literature. That the income events—but not transfers—dominate both poverty entries and exits is indicative of the major role labor markets play in the lives of the poor. In particular, we argue that given the characteristics of the poor and modest levels of social assistance, the reason for mobility rates close to European averages must be sought in the informal economy.     

Macroeconomic coordination failure under oligempory

Summary. Each sector of a multi-sector overlapping generations model is an oligempory with a given number of firms, oligopsonists in the sectoral (spatially differentiated) labour market and oligopolists in the sectoral (homogeneous) output market. When there is aggregate unemployment, and a firm raises wages beyond the local full employment level acquiring labour from neighbours, sectoral output supply becomes constant and the firm faces a flat output demand curve under constant returns to labour (upward sloping under decreasing returns). Multiple temporary equilibria and Pareto-ranked steady-state equilibria emerge; the associated sunspot equilibria exhibit counter-cyclical markups, inter alia. Received: February 28, 2000; revised version: March 16, 2001     

Writing Clearly: The ECB's Monetary Policy Communication

The article presents a novel methodology for measuring the clarity of central bank communication using content analysis, illustrating the methodology with the case of the European Central Bank (ECB). The analysis identifies the ECB's written communication as clear in about 85–95% of instances, which is comparable with, or better than, similar results available for other central banks. We also find that the additional information on risk to inflation and especially projection risk assessment contained in the ECB's Monthly Bulletins helps to improve communication clarity compared to ECB's press releases. In contrast, the bulletin's communication on monetary developments has a negative, albeit small, impact on clarity.     

Technological progress and scientific indicators: a panel data analysis

Total factor productivity (TFP) is generally interpreted to be a proxy for technological advancement. In this paper, we use stochastic frontier analysis to decompose the growth in TFP into three components: technological progress, scale effect and change in technical efficiency. Then, we conduct a comprehensive panel data analysis using the technological progress component of the TFP growth and several scientific and technological indicators using data from 160 countries over the period from 1960 to 2009. Our results generally show that the technological progress component of the TFP growth properly reflects certain dimensions of actual scientific and technological progress. However, we also find that this result is somewhat sensitive to different econometric specifications and assumptions.     

Derived factor demand under monopoly

Summary. We generalize the formula provided by Maurice and Ferguson (1973) for derived factor demand in a monopoly by extending it to cross-price effects and taking into account other variables which may, within an general-equilibrium framework, affect demand, such as income. Hopefully, both features increase the applicability of this formula in general-equilibrium analyses. Received: April 5, 2000; revised version: June 7, 2001     

Networks of common property resources

A tragedy of commons appears when the users of a common resource have incentives to exploit it more than the socially efficient level. We analyze the situation when the tragedy of commons is embedded in a network of users and sources. Users play a game of extractions, where they decide how much resource to draw from each source they are connected to. We show that the network structure matters. The exploitation at each source depends on the centrality of the links connecting the source to the users. The equilibrium is unique and we provide a formula which expresses the quantities at an equilibrium as a function of a network centrality measure. Next we characterize the efficient levels of extractions by users and outflows from sources. We provide a graph decomposition which divides the network into regions according to the availability of sources. Then the efficiency problem can be solved region by region.