Public policy and promoting manufacturing under licensing

Licensing is widely acknowledged as having a key role to play in development of a manufacturing sector. Our article identifies several approaches that public agencies can use to encourage licensing activity among manufacturing firms. It uses data gathered from a mail questionnaire sent to New Brunswick manufacturers. The data show licensing as typically associated with superior firm performances and as a subject on which little awareness generally exists among manufacturers. Our findings indicate that public policy should focus on educating manufacturers about licensing and providing licensing information to specific groups of firms. We provide ten recommendations to achieve this objective.     

Equilibrium with investors using a diversity of deviation measures

It has been argued that investors who optimize their portfolios with attention paid only to mean and standard deviation will all end up choosing some multiple of a certain master fund portfolio. Justification for the capital asset pricing model of classical portfolio theory, which relates individual assets to such a master fund, has come from this direction in particular. Attempts have been made to provide solid mathematical support by showing that the imputed behavior of investors is a consequence of price equilibrium in a market in which assets are traded subject to budget constraints, and optimization is carried out with respect to utility functions that depend only on mean and standard deviation.     

LOUD AND CLEAR? CAN WE HEAR WHEN THE SARB SPEAKS?

Inflation targeting is a forward‐looking framework for monetary policy that has brought unprecedented transparency to the process of monetary policy. This paper aims to assess the degree to which the South African Reserve Bank's (SARB) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has, since the introduction of inflation targeting, successfully communicated to the public its policy analysis, and, in particular, the expected future policy changes. It follows international literature in constructing a numerical index that is used to reflect the information content of the SARB's communications, specifically the monetary policy statements that accompanied each of the MPC meetings since 2000. This method allows us to judge, systematically, the degree to which the MPC has communicated successfully, and the evolution of that success over the past nine years. We find evidence that the MPC has succeeded in signalling their likely future policy decision with consistency over this period.     

Testing the profitability of moving-average rules as a portfolio selection strategy

One of the main difficulties in evaluating the profits obtained using technical analysis is that performance of trading rules depends upon the judicious choice of rule parameters. In this paper, popular moving-average (or cross-over) rules are applied to a cross-section of Australian stocks and the signals from the rules are used to form portfolios. The performance of the trading rules across the full range of possible parameter values is evaluated by means of an aggregate test that does not depend on the parameters of the rules. The results indicate that for a wide range of parameters moving-average rules generate contrarian profits (profits from the moving-average rules are negative). In bootstrap simulations the return statistics are significant indicating that the moving-average rules pick up some form of systematic variation in returns that does not correlate with the standard risk factors.     

Comparative Analysis of Text Data in Successful Face-to-Face and Electronic Negotiations

Various combination of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning methods offer ample opportunities wherever texts are an important element of an application or a research area. Such methods discover patterns and regularities in the data, seek generalization and in effect learn new knowledge. We have employed such methods in learning from a large amount of textual data. Our application is electronic negotiations. The genre of texts found in electronic negotiations may seem limited. It is an important research question whether our methods and findings apply equally well to texts that come from face-to-face negotiations. In order to confirm such more general applicability, we have analyzed comparable collections of texts from electronic and face-to-face negotiations. We present our findings on the extent of similarity between these two related but distinct genres. In this study we have analyzed similarities in the text data of electronic and face-to-face negotiations. The results show that – in certain conditions – vocabulary richness, language complexity and text predictability are similar.This is an expanded version of a paper published in the Proceedings of FINEXIN 2005 (Workshop on the Analysis of Formal and Informal Information Exchange during Negotiations), 31–42, Ottawa, Canada, May 2005.     

Economics of an Integrated Manurial Biogas and Protein Recovery System for Beef Cattle

Fermentation of livestock manure for the production of biogas is not economically viable given current and prospective energy prices, as long as the residue from the fermentation process is used on agricultural land as a source of crop nutrients. An alternative use of the residue is to separate out the solid fraction for use as a source of protein and minerals for livestock. This alternative was evaluated for a commercial beef feedlot in Ontario, and was found to provide attractive returns using feed replacement values for the residue solids, even when a zero value was attributed to the biogas, and when real interest rates reached 7 percent. Economies of size were also found.     

对逃离“北上广”的思考

2010年伊始,随着＂国十一条＂等调控政策的正式实施,＂高烧＂不退的楼市终于开始降温。上海楼市1月成交量低迷,一手房成交面积为近6年来的倒数第二,冰冻指数堪比历年楼市最惨淡时期。但年轻人＂逃离北上广＂的暗潮却汹涌,他们与其在＂北上广＂当＂蚁族＂,不如退居二线城市发展。＂逃离北上广＂的潮流显示出：中国的未来已被房价所劫持。     

What makes a physician revenue cycle tick

Hospitals should boost the revenue cycle performance of acquired physician practices by: Effectively assimilating the physician practice into the overall organization. Standardizing revenue cycle processes, policies, and tools between the hospital and physician practice. Enhancing physician/patient scheduling policies and procedures. Regularly auditing physician documentation and periodically comparing hospital charges against practice charges. Improving procedures for responding to denials.