Canadian beef and dairy farmers’ attitudes towards animal vaccines

The willingness to pay (WTP) approach is increasingly being used in different disciplines to assess peoples’ readiness to accept change. This paper assesses the potential for two subunit vaccines for the prevention and control of bovine tuberculosis and paratuberculosis in cattle. A survey of beef and dairy farmers was conducted across Canada to identify factors that influence their WTP for subunit vaccines. Estimated results of the interval‐data model indicate that the size of a farmer’s cattle herd, neighbourhood effect, and buyer recommendations for vaccination significantly influence farmers’ WTP while veterinarians appear to be the most critical pathway for farmers to source information on new vaccine options. The mean willingness to pay amounts for both vaccines reveals that farmers are likely to use the vaccines if the costs are kept at reasonable level.     

An Instructional Case Comparing the Accounting Policies and Financial Results of Online Retailers

In the role of financial analyst for a venture capital firm, you are assigned the responsibility of evaluating two online retailers who have applied for financing to build a distribution center in western Canada. Based on your developing knowledge of Canadian accounting standards for private enterprises (ASPE), you evaluate the financial reporting policies and financial results of the two companies to identify the company that is best suited for your firm's support. Through this case, you will refine your understanding of ASPE and you will exercise your reasoning and analytical skills.     

Long memory and long run variation

A commonly used defining property of long memory time series is the power law decay of the autocovariance function. Some alternative methods of deriving this property are considered, working from the alternate definition in terms of a fractional pole in the spectrum at the origin. The methods considered involve the use of (i) Fourier transforms of generalized functions, (ii) asymptotic expansions of Fourier integrals with singularities, (iii) direct evaluation using hypergeometric function algebra, and (iv) conversion to a simple gamma integral. The paper is largely pedagogical but some novel methods and results involving complete asymptotic series representations are presented. The formulae are useful in many ways, including the calculation of long run variation matrices for multivariate time series with long memory and the econometric estimation of such models.     

Dynamic effects of changes to Japanese immigration policy

This paper uses a single-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous households to analyse Japanese immigration policy. We examine the effects on output, consumption, factor prices, and utility. We do this for both steady states and transition paths. We find that: (a) aggregate output, investment, and consumption in Japan are likely to rise with any sort of loosening of immigration restrictions; (b) allowing more skilled immigration generates greater aggregate changes; (c) raising skilled immigration relative to unskilled immigration drives down skilled workers’ wages, consumption, and utility, while cutting the skilled to unskilled immigration share has the opposite effects; and (d) such immigration policy changes have small effects compared to those that occur naturally due to business cycle fluctuations     

Detecting Financial Collapse and Ballooning Sovereign Risk

This paper proposes a new model for capturing discontinuities in the underlying financial environment that can lead to abrupt falls, but not necessarily sustained monotonic falls, in asset prices. This notion of price dynamics is consistent with existing understanding of market crashes, which allows for a mix of market responses that are not universally negative. The model may be interpreted as a martingale composed with a randomized drift process that is designed to capture various asymmetric drivers of market sentiment. In particular, the model is capable of generating realistic patterns of price meltdowns and bond yield inflations that constitute major market reversals while not necessarily being always monotonic in form. The recursive and moving window methods developed in Phillips, Shi and Yu (2015a,b; PSY), which were designed to detect exuberance in financial and economic data, are shown to have detective capacity for such meltdowns and expansions. This characteristic of the PSY tests has been noted in earlier empirical studies by the present authors and other researchers but no analytic reasoning has yet been given to explain why methods intended to capture the expansionary phase of a bubble may also detect abrupt and broadly sustained collapses. The model and asymptotic theory developed in the present paper together explain this property of the PSY procedures. The methods are applied to analyse S&P 500 stock prices and sovereign risk in European Union countries over 2001–16 using government bond yields and credit default swap (CDS) premia. A pseudo real‐time empirical analysis of these data shows the effectiveness of the monitoring strategy in capturing key events and turning points in market risk assessment.     

Examining Social Networking Sites as a Survey Distribution Channel for Hospitality and Tourism Research

As businesses use social networking sites (SNS) to connect with consumers, SNS can be viewed as another way to collect users’ information. Since many consumers spend significant amounts of time connecting with others on SNS, it would be a suitable channel to gather information from the captured audience. This study compares survey responses from the traditional paper-and-pencil survey and online survey collected through an SNS recruitment method. The test results showed that there are no statistically significant differences in model fits from the two data collection methods. Thus, this study concludes that SNS holds great potential to serve as a survey distribution channel for collecting meaningful data. More in-depth empirical studies are needed to validate the method before using it for a wider range of research.