Brexit: How Will UK Agriculture Fare?

There is little doubt that Brexit would have significant implications for UK agriculture, a sector with strong trade links to the EU and strong reliance on CAP income support. This article reports preliminary results from employing a Computable General Equilibrium Model, a Partial Equilibrium Model and Farm Level Models to explore selected trade and domestic policy scenarios post‐Brexit. These allow for the estimation of changes in producer prices, production and farm incomes against a baseline scenario of continued EU membership. Under a Free Trade Agreement with the EU, agricultural impacts are relatively modest. By contrast, unilateral removal of import tariffs has significant negative impacts on prices, production and incomes. Adoption of the EU's WTO tariff schedule for all imports favours net importers (e.g. dairy) and harms net exporters (e.g. sheep). Given the strong dependence of most UK farms on direct payments, their removal worsens negative impacts of new trade arrangements and offsets positive impacts. Impacts vary across different types and sizes of farm, but also regionally. However, the period of adjustment to new trade and domestic policy conditions may prove very challenging for a large number of farm businesses.     

Significant Issues for the Future of Product Innovation

Product innovation management, by definition, requires that we become comfortable dealing with change. As this journal enters its eleventh year of publication, the editor-in-chief asked each member of the editorial board to reflect upon changes and opportunities that they see influencing our profession during the coming decade. In our first installment of these essays, George Day, Bela Gold and Thomas Kuczmarski discuss the value of managing ideas, embracing a longer-term view of development opportunities, and creating a senior executive position charged with developing such opportunities. Each of these short essays is designed to introduce new perspectives. It is not essential that you agree with the recommendations, but we hope that you are stimulated as you reflect on the issues they present.     

Crude oil price forecasting based on internet concern using an extreme learning machine

The growing internet concern (IC) over the crude oil market and related events influences market trading, thus creating further instability within the oil market itself. We propose a modeling framework for analyzing the effects of IC on the oil market and for predicting the price volatility of crude oil’s futures market. This novel approach decomposes the original time series into intrinsic modes at different time scales using bivariate empirical mode decomposition (BEMD). The relationship between the oil price volatility and IC at an individual frequency is investigated. By utilizing decomposed intrinsic modes as specified characteristics, we also construct extreme learning machine (ELM) models with variant forecasting schemes. The experimental results illustrate that ELM models that incorporate intrinsic modes and IC outperform the baseline ELM and other benchmarks at distinct horizons. Having the power to improve the accuracy of baseline models, internet searching is a practical way of quantifying investor attention, which can help to predict short-run price fluctuations in the oil market.     

Regulating,joint bargaining,and the demise of precedent

Recent decades have seen a fundamental shift in the nature of economic regulation in the United States. Unauthorized by congress, and largely unnoted in legal and academic circles, regulatory agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission have changed the regulatory process by linking otherwise unrelated regulatory issues. Examples include tying merger approval to firm commitments to engage in conceptually unrelated build‐outs and other projects of political importance. This linking of issues has several effects, the most prominent being (a) tying regulatory issues changes the outcomes obtained, plausibly in predictable ways; (b) tying in some circumstances allows regulators to extend their authority to issues for which they have little or no legal authority; and (c) tied regulatory bargaining fails to produce valid legal precedent for firm decision making. We provide an analysis of these conclusions by examining the increasing use of consent decrees, voluntary merger commitments, and merger conditions by the Federal Communications Commission, referencing our discussion with a simple model of joint bargaining applicable to regulatory practice.     

Performance analysis of the Gulf hotel industry: A Malmquist index with bias correction

This study uses the Malmquist index with bias correction to analyze the performance of hotel chains from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman. We show that Saudi Arabia hotel chains have the highest productivity growth, followed by the UAE and Omani hotel chains. A further decomposition of productivity indicates that a small number of hotel chains experienced an increase in revenues for lower occupancy rate, while most other hotel chains experienced an increase in occupancy rate for lower revenues. Related market discussions of the results are provided.     

Policy Determinants of School Outcomes under Model Uncertainty: Evidence from South Africa

In this paper, we assess the determinants of secondary school outcomes in South Africa. We use Bayesian model averaging techniques to account for uncertainty in the set of underlying factors that are chosen among a very large pool of explanatory variables in order to identify the subset of explanatory variables most strongly associated with the dependent variable. Our analysis indicates that the socio‐economic background of pupils, demographic characteristics such as population groups (Black and White), as well as geographical locations account for a significant variation in pupils’ achievement levels. We also find that the most robust policy determinants of pupils’ test scores are the availability of a library at school, the use of IT in the classroom as well as school climate.     

Technical Progress and Product Reliability under Competition and Monopoly

Technical progress lowers costs and prices but appears to have an ambiguous effect on product reliability. This paper presents a simple model which explains this observation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.