Interregional Fertility Differentials and Agglomeration

In this study, we construct an interregional trade model that includes endogenous fertility rates. The presented model shows that the agglomeration of manufacturing firms in a large region causes fertility rates to become lower than in a small region. We also find that a decrease in transportation costs results in the agglomeration of manufacturing firms, which lowers fertility rates in both large and small regions. In addition, comparing the competitive equilibrium with the optimal equilibrium, the fertility rates may be inefficiently small.     

A Method of Calculating the Downside Risk by Multivariate Nonnormal Distributions

A method of calculating the downside risk by fitting multivariate nonnormal distributions to financial data is proposed. Firstly, maximum likelihood method by using the random numbers of the Pearson distribution system are introduced. The rates of returns of the stock index are fitted to the multivariate nonnormal distributions by this method. Secondly, the cases of calculating the downside risk by the standard deviation, the percentile of historical simulation method and this method, are compared.     

A Simple Multi-Regional Input–Output Account for Waste Analysis

The present paper provides a simple multiregional input–output model for waste analysis with which to estimate intraregional and interregional effects of industrial wastes embodied in regional final consumptions. The empirical analyses using 1995 nine-regions input–output tables reveals the regional properties of the interregional linkage effects. The Kanto and Kinki regions remarkably control the industrial waste emissions and waste landfills within their own regions by importing waste-intensive intermediate goods and services from the other regions. The Chugoku and Shikoku regions greatly contributed to the production of the waste-intensive goods and services for the other regions, considering the waste emissions and waste landfills relative to the commodity production levels. We also find that the household consumption behaviour in other regions indirectly plays a more important role in waste emissions than the municipal waste disposal behaviour in the region in question at least in 1995.     

Efficiency results in N player games with imperfect private monitoring

We demonstrate that efficiency is achievable in a certain class of N player repeated games with private, almost perfect monitoring. Our equilibrium requires only one period memory and can be implemented by two state automata. Furthermore, we show that this efficiency result holds with any degree of accuracy of monitoring if private signals are hemiindependent. Whereas most existing research focuses on two player cases or only a special example of N player games, our results are applicable to a wide range of N player games of economic relevance, such as trading goods games and price-setting oligopolies.     

Predicting Japanese bank stock performance with a composite relative efficiency metric: A new investment tool

The paper's main objective is to predict bank stock performance one year ahead with a composite efficiency metric from relative contextual financial analysis. We bring together financial ratios, generalized data envelopment analysis and simulated annealing to rank Japanese banks on stock performance predicted from relative efficiency scores. An application of this ranking in a profitable investment strategy by designating long and short portfolios underscores the potential commercial value of the method. The method can also be used to monitor the effectiveness of ratios in forecasting stock performance and it is conducive to selecting predictive ratios when markets are changing rapidly.     

Human capital and FDI: Development process of the developing country in an overlapping generation model

We construct an overlapping generation model with human capital accumulation to analyze the effect of human capital level on foreign direct investment (FDI) in a small open developing country. In particular, we assume that manufactured goods have the human capital intensive technology and young agents choose whether to work or to educate themselves. When the human capital level in the developing country is sufficiently small, manufactured goods firms do not conduct FDI and the economy in the developing country is trapped in poverty. If the government of the developing country levies a tariff on the imports of manufactured goods, manufacturers conduct FDI, and the economy in the developing country can escape from the poverty trap.     

Integrating Smart Glasses with Question-Answering Module in Assistant Work Environment

Recently, smart glasses have been applied in the field of maintenance, with which a worker goes well during work by contacting a support operator from a remote location. The worker, however, cannot go well if the support operator is not there. To solve the issues, this paper discusses how a work system should be developed by integrating smart glasses with a question-answering module. We design the work knowledge acquired from skilled people and manuals as a workflow for when type of question, rule base for how, goal tree for why, domain ontologies, and its RDF data for what. Workers can receive answers from the question-answering module incorporated with multiple knowledge bases for four types of question. The authors conducted a demonstration experiment and found that workers could perform the work more autonomously by importing the system.     

Constant Rebalanced Portfolio Optimization Under Nonlinear Transaction Costs

We study the constant rebalancing strategy for multi-period portfolio optimization via conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) when there are nonlinear transaction costs. This problem is difficult to solve because of its nonconvexity. The nonlinear transaction costs and CVaR constraints make things worse; state-of-the-art nonlinear programming (NLP) solvers have trouble in reaching even locally optimal solutions. As a practical solution, we develop a local search algorithm in which linear approximation problems and nonlinear equations are iteratively solved. Computational results are presented, showing that the algorithm attains a good solution in a practical time. It is better than the revised version of an existing global optimization. We also assess the performance of the constant rebalancing strategy in comparison with the buy-and-hold strategy.