Nexus of tourism,terrorism, and economic growth in Thailand: new evidence from asymmetric ARDL cointegration approach

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the asymmetric (nonlinear) relationship between tourism, terrorism, and economic growth of Thailand. The study employed an annual data set that ranges from 1990 to 2017 by using a novel co-integrating technique known as asymmetric ARDL cointegration approach advanced by Shin, Yu, and Greenwood-Nimmo. The outcome of the present study revealed significant differences in the reaction of the economic growth because of negative and positive changes in tourism and terrorism. The obtained asymmetric results can be helpful for more proficient policymaking and forecasting regarding the economy of Thailand. Ignoring intrinsic asymmetries may misrepresent implication.     

The Effect of a Complex Ownership Structure and Judicial Efficiency on Leverage: Evidence from Pakistani Listed Companies

We explore the impact of complex ownership structure and judicial efficiency on firm leverage at Pakistani pyramid firms. Ratio of controlling to ownership rights is much higher at Pakistani firms than in other economies, which motivates us to study its impact on leverage. Our results reveal that complex internal structure at Pakistani pyramid firms is positively related to leverage. We find that the presence of efficient courts weaken the impact of complex ownership structure on leverage at pyramid firms. Contrary to the literature, we find that the political connections of pyramid firms in Pakistan are not related to corporate leverage.     

CONTRADICTORY TRENDS IN GLOBAL INCOME INEQUALITY: A TALE OF TWO BIASES

Did global income inequality rise or fall over the last decades of the twentieth century? The answer depends on how cross‐country income comparisons are made. Exchange rate comparisons suggest that inequality rose whilst the purchasing power comparisons of the Penn World Table suggest it fell. We show that both measures of real incomes lead to biased international income comparisons. Exchange rate comparisons ignore the relative price of non‐tradables, whilst the fixed price method underlying the Penn World Table is subject to substitution bias. The contradictory trends are due to growing dissimilarity between national price structures increasing the degree of bias in each method. When we correct the income data to eliminate bias we find no compelling evidence of a significant change in world inequality.     

Applying economic methodology to the war on terrorism

The application of economic methodology to the problem of terrorism is discussed. Theoretical and empirical results are discussed with particular focus on the September 11 attack and the retaliatory response by the United States. Economists have relied on the rational agent model to derive testable hypotheses regarding the behavior of terrorists. The rational agent model postulates that terrorists respond to incentives, including media publicity, and the model predicts that when the net marginal benefit from one type of terrorist activity is diminished, terrorists will substitute into alternative modes of terrorism. Empirical results demonstrating that such substitutions indeed occur are discussed. Therefore, policy designed to reduce a particular form of terrorism, such as increased airport security to prevent airplane hijackings, may simply result in terrorists choosing alternative modes of terrorism. Empirical evidence demonstrating that terrorism is cyclical in nature is also discussed. Evidence on substitution and cycles suggests that following temporary reduction in terrorist activity after retaliation against terrorists and their infrastructure, terrorists are able to successfully regroup and attack using alternative means. Therefore, the current US focus on fighting terrorism on all fronts and over the long haul is the correct approach.     

Modeling and forecasting of stock index volatility with APARCH models under ordered restriction

This article examines volatility models for modeling and forecasting the Standard & Poor 500 (S&P 500) daily stock index returns, including the autoregressive moving average, the Taylor and Schwert generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH), the Glosten, Jagannathan and Runkle GARCH and asymmetric power ARCH (APARCH) with the following conditional distributions: normal, Student's t and skewed Student's t‐distributions. In addition, we undertake unit root (augmented Dickey–Fuller and Phillip–Perron) tests, co‐integration test and error correction model. We study the stationary APARCH (p) model with parameters, and the uniform convergence, strong consistency and asymptotic normality are prove under simple ordered restriction. In fitting these models to S&P 500 daily stock index return data over the period 1 January 2002 to 31 December 2012, we found that the APARCH model using a skewed Student's t‐distribution is the most effective and successful for modeling and forecasting the daily stock index returns series. The results of this study would be of great value to policy makers and investors in managing risk in stock markets trading.     

The association between privatisation and voluntary disclosure: Evidence from Jordan

This paper investigates the impact of privatisation on the extent of corporate voluntary disclosure in Jordan.We conduct a longitudinal examination using 243 annual reports of 27 privatised firms in Jordan over a period of nine years from 1996 to 2004. Employing univariate and pooled regression models our results show that privatisation is positively associated with voluntary disclosure. Specifically, we find that accounting regulation reforms and foreign investments accompanying privatisation have a significant impact on the levels of accounting disclosure in Jordan. Our study provides evidence on the role of privatisation in improving the disclosure culture as an important pre‐condition for the development of active capital markets.     

Price expectations of sheep and goats by producers and intermediaries in Quetta market,Pakistan

Analysis of producers' and intermediaries' livestock price expectations was used to describe the market in Quetta, the largest livestock market in the highlands of Balochistan Province, Pakistan, and to identify factors that determine price expectations of small ruminants. A total of 4800 expected prices for sheep and goats were collected from producers and market intermediaries at monthly intervals between January 1991 and December 1992. In addition to the expected price of the animal, liveweight, species, sex, breed, body condition (fatness), calendar day and month were recorded, and whether data were collected on a meat or meatless day. Monthly rainfall data were also collected. Models of goat and sheep price expectations were built to compare the similarity of the behaviour of producers and intermediaries. Results indicated that producers and intermediaries expected high prices from November to January and during religious holidays. They expected premiums and discounts related to animals' attributes. Liveweight and seasonality had the strongest effect on prices. Rainfall in the current and previous month was positively related to seller's expected prices suggesting that livestock are retained to take advantage of favourable grazing conditions. The models of price expectations showed that producers adjusted expected goat prices (P ≤ 0.10) for seasonality, liveweight, body condition, age, sex and breed, while they adjusted sheep prices for seasonality and liveweight only. High pay-offs could be expected if extension efforts focused on factors that determine sheep meat quality; however, the retail ceiling price of meat and the lack of grading are a disincentive to work in this direction. Seasonality of supply and demand is important in determining prices and this study provides baseline information for market scheduling; however, scheduling of sales of transhumant pastoralists may be difficult to achieve. Further investigation is justified to understand the gap in marketing knowledge between producers who sell in the villages and those who sell in Quetta.     

Does trade openness affect long run growth? Cointegration,causality and forecast error variance decomposition tests for Pakistan

The study investigates the impact of trade openness on economic growth in the long run. We apply the ARDL bounds testing approach to test for a long run relationship and the augmented production function by incorporating financial development as an additional determinant of economic growth using the framework of Mankiw et al. (1992). The results confirm cointegration among the series. In the long run, trade openness promotes economic growth. The growth-led-trade hypothesis is vindicated by VECM Granger causality test. The causality is also checked by using the innovative accounting approach (IAA).     

Treatment effect bounds: An application to Swan–Ganz catheterization

We reanalyze data from the observational study by Connors et al. (1996) on the impact of Swan–Ganz catheterization on mortality outcomes. The study by Connors et al. (1996) assumes that there are no unobserved differences between patients who are catheterized and patients who are not catheterized and finds that catheterization increases patient mortality. We instead allow for such differences between patients by implementing both the instrumental variable bounds of Manski (1990), which only exploits an instrumental variable, and the bounds of Shaikh and Vytlacil (2011), which exploit mild nonparametric, structural assumptions in addition to an instrumental variable. We propose and justify the use of indicators of weekday admission as an instrument for catheterization in this context. We find that in our application, the Manski (1990) bounds do not indicate whether catheterization increases or decreases mortality, where as the Shaikh and Vytlacil (2011) bounds reveal that at least for some diagnoses, Swan–Ganz catheterization reduces mortality at 7 days after catheterization. We show that the bounds of Shaikh and Vytlacil (2011) remain valid under even weaker assumptions than those described in Shaikh and Vytlacil (2011). We also extend the analysis to exploit a further nonparametric, structural assumption–that doctors catheterize individuals with systematically worse latent health–and find that this assumption further narrows these bounds and strengthens our conclusions. In our analysis, we construct confidence regions using the methodology developed in Romano and Shaikh (2008). We show in particular that the confidence regions are uniformly consistent in level over a large class of possible distributions for the observed data that include distributions where the instrument is arbitrarily “weak”.