MORE THAN A FEELING: CONFIDENCE,UNCERTAINTY, AND MACROECONOMIC FLUCTUATIONS

Economists, observers, and policy-makers often emphasize the role of sentiment as a potential driver of the business cycle. In this paper, we provide three contributions to this debate. First, we give an overview of the recent literature on the nexus between sentiment (considering both confidence and uncertainty) and economic activity. Second, we review existing empirical measures of sentiment, in particular consumer confidence, stock market volatility (SMV) and Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU), on monthly data for 27 countries, 1985–2016. Third, we identify some new stylized facts based on international evidence. While different measures are surprisingly lowly correlated on average in each country, they are typically highly positively correlated across countries, suggesting the existence of a global factor or sizeable international spillovers of sentiment. Consumer confidence has the closest co-movement with economic and financial variables, and most of the correlations are contemporaneous or forward-looking, consistent with the view that economic sentiment is indeed a driver of activity.     

Oil price shocks and economic growth: The volatility link

This paper shows that oil shocks impact economic growth primarily through the conditional variance of growth. Our comparison of models focuses on density forecasts. Over a range of dynamic models, oil shock measures and data, we find a robust link between oil shocks and the volatility of economic growth. We then develop a new measure of oil shocks and show that it is superior to existing measures; it indicates that the conditional variance of growth increases in response to an indicator of the local maximum oil price exceedance. The empirical results uncover a large pronounced asymmetric response of the growth volatility to oil price changes. The uncertainty about future growth is considerably lower than with a benchmark AR(1) model when no oil shocks are present.     

Risk,uncertainty, and leverage

Using mostly theoretical models and traditional risk/uncertainty measures (VIX index, panic, precaution, scary bad news, etc.), the current literature tries to clarify the risk/uncertainty-deleveraging pattern. The findings are not sufficient to explain the dynamic empirical relationship between modern risk/uncertainty indicators and leverage. We fill this gap in the literature by using US quarterly data, from 1985:1 to 2018:4, Granger causality tests, and a structural vector autoregression model. We find that commercial bank leverage rises when geopolitical risk and macroeconomic, policy, and equity uncertainty increase. Client-based business relationships of banks and high government borrowing from banks during crises periods are responsible for this relationship. We find that the leverage of broker-dealers and shadow banks declines when Chicago risk and macroeconomic, policy, financial, and equity uncertainty increase. We argue that the vulnerability of broker-dealers and shadow banks to the risk/uncertainty of the entire market system is responsible for this relationship.     

Influence of Ecuadorian Homosexual Subculture in Consumption Culture: Study about Information Consumption on Twitter

Abstract

This qualitative research examines the Ecuadorian homosexual subculture and determines how gender, images, texts, and objects are referred to consumption culture. The netnography method was used to collect data from Twitter conversations. Categorization and classification of the conversations showed how the information was created, the purpose of the message, and the target audience. Results reveal common subjects in relation to news, human rights, and gender equality. Subjects were conceptualized based on the consumption of information in social, cultural, and political environments. It was concluded that images, texts, and objects included in the conversations provide significant information about the homosexual subculture consumption behavior.     

混合型基金绩效评估及驱动因素分析——基于DEA-Tobit模型

将随机选出的混合型基金作为研究样本,采用DEA-Tobit二阶段模型进行研究.首先利用数据包络模型对样本进行绩效评估,在此基础上,利用Tobit模型研究相关指标对于基金绩效的影响机制.结果表明,基金本身所面临的风险收益因素以及基金经理团队稳定性对于基金绩效均具显著影响.最后结合实证结果就提升中国基金绩效提出相关的建议.     

Expanding airport capacity of cities under uncertainty: Strategies to mitigate congestion

Airport capacity constraints are increasingly challenging the growth of air traffic. At the same time, decision-making about airport capacity investments is extremely complex, involving trade-offs. This paper’s objective is to optimise a privately owned airport system’s capacity investment decision in a city under demand uncertainty. Next to the investment size, our real options model incorporates the timing of the investment, as well as the cost of congestion. The results reveal that the larger a city’s initial airport capacity, the smaller its investment will relatively be and the lower the occupancy rate threshold at which investment will take place. We also show that, in case of a higher demand growth combined with more demand uncertainty, the city will benefit from a significantly larger investment, but made later at a higher occupancy rate. In this case, cities with a small initial capacity will sometimes even more than double current capacity. Higher airport charges and an increase in non-aeronautical revenues both lead to a later investment in more capacity, due to the increased project attractiveness. An increase in congestion costs results in a larger investment made earlier, in order to eliminate delays. Airport operational cost and capacity holding cost increases both lead to smaller investments.     

Which factors hinder the adoption of open innovation in SMEs?

The literature on open innovation (OI) is characterised by studies based both on large companies and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Among all, one of the less explored issues in SMEs is what impedes them to adopt OI. Thus, this paper has the threefold objective to identify which factors hinder the adoption of OI in SMEs, to investigate if different behaviours exist among SMEs in relation to these factors, and to understand if the same factors effectively influence the level of adoption of OI. Based on a survey on 157 Italian SMEs, we identified four main barriers (namely, ‘knowledge’, ‘collaboration’, ‘organisational’, and ‘financial and strategic’) and three profiles of firms, different in terms of innovativeness of the industries they belong to (knowledge intensive, medium-innovative, and less innovative) and hampering factors perceived (‘knowledge’, ‘financial and strategic’, and ‘collaboration’ and ‘organisational’ barriers). Moreover, we found that some of these factors effectively impede the adoption of the paradigm.     

浅析影响食品饮料中糖分检测的因素

糖类是食品饮料中的重要组成部分。糖类物质是食品工业的主要原料和辅助材料。食品饮料中的糖分的高低不仅影响产品的口感、风味,而且会影响到产品的保质期。因此,食品生产企业必须严格控制食品饮料中的糖分的高低并且能够有效地检测出它的含量。本文从食品饮料中糖分的检测方法出发,主要论述了食品饮料中微量糖分检测的技术要领及其检验中的关键步骤,以实用性强,检测结果准确可靠为宗旨。特别是对于加工低糖、"无糖"食品及干型、半干型葡萄酒、黄酒、果酒的企业来说,提供一种检测技术以指导企业的生产。     

体育舞蹈教练员综合水平对运动员成才影响因素的分析

近年来,体育舞蹈运动在我国呈上升趋势迅速发展,该运动人才的培养方式、方法随着社会的进步不断创新的同时,其教练员的综合水平也在同步提高。本文分析了我国体育舞蹈教练员在培养运动员成才过程中自身所应具备的综合水平,并从专业技术、训练水平以及综合管理等方面进行了分析,为教练员的自身素质得以加强提供了指向性的目标,提高了教练员培养优秀选手的能力,为培养出更多优秀的运动员开辟了成才之路。     

Implementing efficient conservation portfolio design

Modern tools for cost-effective conservation reserve site planning require the planner to have information about spatial distributions of conservation costs and benefits. Climate change creates unprecedented uncertainty about future land values and species habitat ranges, such that conservation scientists cannot map costs and benefits with certainty anymore. This paper contributes to the literature on the economics of conservation in the face of climate change uncertainty. It advances a new method for using modern portfolio theory to choose lands to protect that yield total conservation returns with less uncertainty. It explores the implications for portfolio recommendations of variation in the correlations between ecological and land-value responses to climate change. It also tests the robustness of the method to shortcuts that might be taken to simplify analysis, identifying problems that arise if conservation costs are ignored in portfolio analysis and demonstrating when portfolio recommendations are sensitive to how ecological benefits are quantified.