Value for money in energy efficiency retrofits in Ireland: grant provider and grant recipients

The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) administers the Better Energy Homes scheme to provide a financial incentive for home owners to engage in energy efficiency retrofits. This study analyses data from the scheme and Building Energy Rating data for participants to the scheme to examine the value for money achieved by households. In addition, this research identifies which retrofit combinations provide greatest value for money, in terms of energy efficiency gains, for the grant provider. We utilize an error-in-variables approach to model the variation in benefits accruing to households of varying characteristics. We find that household and grant provider surplus can be maximized in the short term by retrofitting less energy efficient and larger homes, timber or steel frame homes and houses rather and apartments. The types of retrofits leading to the greatest surplus for both household and grant provider include cavity wall insulation paired with either a boiler with heating controls or heating controls only retrofit.     

Has market concentration fostered on-time performance? A case study of seventy-two U.S. airports

The study compares a multivariate with a quantile regression model to determine whether utilized airport capacity, departure and airborne delays, departure and arrival demand, and market structure explained variations in on-time gate arrivals and arrival delays. In both models, airport departure delays, arrival and departure demand explained variations in the two response variables in prioritized and non-prioritized metroplexes, holding other variables constant. After 2008, the consolidation of the airline industry through mergers coincided with the implementation of NextGen programs, which may have contributed to improvements in on-time performance, especially at prioritized metroplexes where airspace was redesigned.     

Trends in stock-bond correlations

Previous studies document the existence of long-run trends in comovements in the stock and bond markets. Following these findings, this article examines possible trends in stock-bond return correlations. To this end, we introduce a trend component into a smooth transition regression (STR) model including the multiple transition variables of Aslanidis and Christiansen (2012). The results indicate the existence of significant decreasing trends in stock-bond correlations for many advanced safer countries. In addition, although stock market volatility continues to be an important factor in stock-bond correlations, the short rate and yield spread become only marginally significant once we introduce the trend component. Our out-of-sample analysis also demonstrates that the STR model, including the volatility index and time trend as the transition variables, dominates other models. Furthermore, we find a significant increase in stock-bond correlations for riskier euro countries around the beginning of the euro crisis. Our findings of decreasing and increasing trends in stock-bond correlations can be considered a consequence of the decreasing effects of diversification and more intensive flight-to-quality behaviour that have taken place in recent years and after the euro crisis.     

Financial stress,sovereign debt and economic activity in industrialized countries: Evidence from dynamic threshold regressions

We analyze how the impact of a change in the sovereign debt-to-GDP ratio on economic growth depends on the level of debt, the stress level on the financial market and the membership in a monetary union. A dynamic growth model is put forward demonstrating that debt affects macroeconomic activity in a non-linear manner due to amplifications from the financial sector. Employing dynamic country-specific and dynamic panel threshold regression methods, we study the non-linear relation between the growth rate and the debt-to-GDP ratio using quarterly data for sixteen industrialized countries for the period 1981Q1-2013Q2. We find that the debt-to-GDP ratio has impaired economic growth primarily during times of high financial stress and only for countries of the European Monetary Union and not for the stand-alone countries in our sample. A high debt-to-GDP ratio by itself does not seem to necessarily negatively affect growth if financial markets are calm.     

中国政府科技投入变化态势及与经济增长的关系

全面剖析了1953—2014年中国政府科技投入的规模和强度的变化态势,系统分析了政府科技投入与经济增长的弹性系数的变化情况。通过回归分析和协整检验,分析了1953—2014年中国政府的科技投入与经济增长的相关性。结果表明:1953—2014年中国政府科技投入的规模和强度不断加大,政府科技投入对经济增长的平均贡献率达到13.2%;政府科技投入与GDP增长之间存在较强的正相关关系和长期动态均衡关系。指出:为实施创新驱动发展战略、实现建设创新型国家的宏伟目标,应稳定增加政府科技投入、优化科技投入结构、完善和创新科技投入管理体制机制。     

Modelling tourism flows through gravity models: a quantile regression approach

Gravity models are widely used to study tourism flows. The peculiarities of the segmented international demand for agritourism in Italy are examined by means of a novel approach: a panel data quantile regression. We characterize the international demand for Italian agritourism with a large data set, by considering data of 33 countries of origin, from 1998 to 2010. Distance and income are the major determinants, but we also found that mutual agreements and high urbanization rates in countries of origin are associated with larger flows of incoming tourists.     

A quantile regression analysis of tourism market growth effect on the hotel industry

This study used the quantile regression method to investigate how inbound tourism market growth proxied by the growth rate of total foreign tourist arrivals (GTA) affects the growth rate of sales (GS) and financial performance of hotel firms in Taiwan. The ordinary least squares estimation results of panel regression test revealed that GTA significantly affects GS, but has no significant effect on financial performance (proxied by hotel equity return). However, quantile regression tests revealed new and interesting results. GTA has a significant effect on GS at the different quantiles of GS. In comparison, although hotel equity return was not significantly related to GTA at the median and high quantiles, the effect of GTA on hotel equity return was statistically significant at the low quantiles. These results suggest that the effect of GTA on hotel equity return is asymmetric and state-dependent, conditional on the distributions of hotel equity return. The study further identified that GTA has a significant influence only on equity returns of hotels with a small size.     

Reserves and cash flows under stochastic retirement

Uncertain time of retirement and uncertain structure of retirement benefits are risk factors for life insurance companies. Nevertheless, classical life insurance models assume these are deterministic. In this paper, we include the risk from stochastic time of retirement and stochastic benefit structure in a classical finite-state Markov model for a life insurance contract. We include discontinuities in the distribution of the retirement time. First, we derive formulas for appropriate scaling of the benefits according to the time of retirement and discuss the link between the scaling and the guarantees provided. Stochastic retirement creates a need to rethink the construction of disability products for high ages and ways to handle this are discussed. We show how to calculate market reserves and how to use modified transition probabilities to calculate expected cash flows without significantly more complexity than in the traditional model. At last, we demonstrate the impact of stochastic retirement on market reserves and expected cash flow in numerical examples.     

基于DPSIR-TOPSIS的城市绿色转型评价及实证——以太原市为例

基于DPSIR模型,构建了包括驱动力、压力、状态、影响和响应5个方面的城市绿色转型评价指标体系,并将熵权法与TOPSIS法相结合确定指标权重。基于该评价指标系统,对2006—2014年太原市的绿色转型状况进行了评价与分析。结果表明:虽然太原市的绿色转型水平逐渐提高,但是整体效果处于一般水平,转型状况不太理想。     

Merger and acquisitions in South African banking: A network DEA model

Banking in South Africa is known for its small number of companies that operate as an oligopoly. This paper presents a strategic fit assessment of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in South African banks. A network DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) approach is adopted to compute the impact of contextual variables on several types of efficiency scores of the resulting virtual merged banks: global (merger), technical (learning), harmony (scope), and scale (size) efficiencies. The impact of contextual variables related to the origin of the bank and its type is tested by means of a set of several robust regressions to handle dependent variables bounded in 0 and 1: Tobit, Simplex, and Beta. The results reveal that bank type and origin impact virtual efficiency levels. However, the findings also show that harmony and scale effects are negligible due to the oligopolistic structure of banking in South Africa.