Fuelled Power: Oil,Financiers and Central Bank Policy in Nigeria

While the literature on business power and global finance has illuminated the ways in which financial institutions limit the policy autonomy of states in developing countries, we know much less about the circumstances under which the power of financiers is undermined. In this article, I advance explanations of these circumstances by arguing that state access to natural resource revenues reduces the power of financial institutions and enhances the capacity of the state to pursue central bank policies which violate the interests of major financiers. I employ a case study of central bank policy in Nigeria to probe this argument and find evidence that supports the claim that whenever the Nigerian government's access to resource revenues increased, the state's capacity to diverge from financiers’ preferred central bank policies and to advance its own preferences increased as well. The analysis provides the basis for broader propositions about the policy space of developing countries vis-à-vis financial institutions and the variability of structural power.     

Objective methods for graphical structural learning

Graphical models are used for expressing conditional independence relationships among variables by the means of graphs, whose structure is typically unknown and must be inferred by the data at hand. We propose a theoretically sound Objective Bayes procedure for graphical model selection. Our method is based on the Expected-Posterior Prior and on the Power-Expected-Posterior Prior. We use as input of the proposed methodology a default improper prior and suggest computationally efficient approximations of Bayes factors and posterior odds. In a variety of simulated scenarios with varying number of nodes and sample sizes, we show that our method is highly competitive with, or better than, current benchmarks. We also discuss an application to protein-signaling data, which wieldy confirms existing results in the scientific literature.     

Price connectedness between green bond and financial markets

We study price connectedness between the green bond and financial markets using a structural vector autoregressive (VAR) model that captures direct and indirect transmission of financial shocks across markets. Using heteroskedasticity to identify the structural VAR model parameters, our empirical findings reveal that the green bond market is closely linked to the fixed-income and currency markets, receiving sizeable price spillovers from those markets and transmitting negligible reverse effects. We also show that, in contrast, the green bond market is weakly tied to the stock, energy and high-yield corporate bond markets. These findings have implications in terms of portfolio and risk management decisions for environmentally aware investors holding positions in green bonds.     

Structural holes and hedge fund return comovement: evidence from network-connected stock hedge funds in China

Using data from a new hedge fund database, we examine the impact of social networks on the return comovement of stock hedge funds in China. We use structural holes in the college alumni networks of managers to measure the managers’ social network positions. We perform an empirical analysis on a sample of 3,012 hedge fund products in China from 2010 to 2017. We find that greater structural holes are associated with higher return comovement. The positive impact of the structural holes on return comovement is not affected by market cycles, a manager's major in college, or his or her abilities.     

Structural transformation and productivity growth in India during 1960–2010

In this paper, we examine the role of structural change and sectoral productivity growth in explaining the aggregate productivity of India relative to the United Sates during 1960–2010. We set up a simple two sector general equilibrium model and calibrate it to fit the structural transformation of United States. Our calibrated model for India highlights the relative importance of agricultural productivity growth in explaining its slow process of catching up in terms of aggregate productivity. We show that India could have progressed at a much faster rate and closed a substantial part of its aggregate productivity gap if its agricultural sector had grown at a rate at par with the United States. It is India's relative productivity growth in the non-agricultural sector that explains all the recent success in its closing the aggregate productivity gap with the United States. We also found that an elimination of relative distortion in agriculture in India could result into a modest improvement in the aggregate labour productivity.     

The effect of controversial global sourcing practices on the ethical judgments and intentions of U.S. consumers

Global sourcing has led to lower cost and more effective supply chains for many companies. However, when the cost-driven practices of many suppliers in these chains come to light there is often considerable debate over the ethics of these practices. This research uses the well-known Hunt–Vitell framework as the theoretical foundation for a structural equation model of the deontological and teleological evaluations used by consumers when making ethical judgments of a firm's controversial cost-driven global sourcing practices. Data from a large-scale U.S. consumer survey show the importance of deontological and teleological evaluations in forming consumers’ ethical judgments of global sourcing practices, and establish a strong relationship between ethical judgment and the intention of consumers to alter consumption of a firm's products. Extensions to the framework and demographic analyses for age, gender, and income provide insights as to how perceptions of these practices affect consumer evaluations of a company involved in global sourcing and how consumers actualize their resultant intentions.     

The long-run Phillips curve: A structural VAR investigation

Both cointegration methods, and non-cointegrated structural VARs identified based on either long-run restrictions, or a combination of long-run and sign restrictions, are used in order to explore the long-run trade-off between inflation and the unemployment rate in the post-WWII U.S., U.K., Euro area, Canada, and Australia. Overall, neither approach produces clear evidence of a non-vertical trade-off. The extent of uncertainty surrounding the estimates is however substantial, thus implying that a researcher holding alternative priors about what a reasonable slope of the long-run trade-off might be will likely not see her views falsified.     

Business Cycles Synchronisation and Symmetries in the Transition to East African Monetary Union

Our paper explores the prospects for the proposed East African Monetary Union (EAMU) by employing rigorous empirical tools to analyse business cycles synchronisation, structural cross-correlations, spectral decomposition and regional clusters to identify different cyclical episodes, periodicities and characterise the economic cycles of East African countries. We find that cyclical movements reflect various idiosyncratic, common, historical and external shocks in the region. Secondly, all countries appear to be structurally correlated with each other except for South Sudan and Burundi. Our results also observe that the contemporaneous co-movements of East African Community (EAC) cycles with those of Kenya and Tanzaniaare procyclical with coincidental path shift, while the same EAC cycles appear to be acyclical with those of Burundi. Additionally, from the spectral decomposition, Kenyan cycles take 10 years to complete, while those of Tanzania and Rwanda take 8 years. Ugandan and Burundian cycles take approximately 5 years, while the cyclical frequency for South Sudan corresponds to 3.3 years. Finally, the cluster characterisation of countries reveals that South Sudan, Burundi and Rwanda form a group, while Kenya and Tanzania from a group distinct from the rest. We urge the member countries to prioritise policies on regional risk-sharing and adjustment mechanisms, in addition to establishing credible institutional infrastructure that ensures surveillance and enforcement of convergence conditions adopted in EAMU protocol.     

发明人角色识别及二元创新能力差异分析——社会资本视角的解释

发明人的创新活动嵌入在合作创新网络中。基于社会资本视角，从结构资本和认知资本两个维度辨识并定义4类发明人角色，包括“明星”、“纽带”、“平庸”和“活跃”发明人。以人工智能领域在德温特专利数据库（DII）授权的专利数据为样本，运用负二项模型，对4类发明人的二元创新能力进行实证对比分析。结果表明，不同角色发明人的二元创新能力显著不同。其中，“明星”发明人的二元创新能力最高，“平庸”发明人的二元创新能力最低，“活跃”发明人的二元创新能力高于“纽带”发明人，即认知资本对二元创新的影响大于结构资本。结论对提升发明人二元创新能力具有重要参考价值。     

Forecast on silver futures linked with structural breaks and day-of-the-week effect

Silver future is crucial to global financial markets. However, the existing literature rarely considers the impacts of structural breaks and day-of-the-week effect simultaneously on the volatility of silver future price. Based on heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) theory, we establish six new type heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) models by incorporating structural breaks and day-of-the-week effect to forecast the volatility. The empirical results indicate that new models’ accuracy is better than the original HAR model. We find that structural breaks and the day-of-the-week effect contain much forecasting information on silver forecasting. In addition, structural breaks have a positive effect on the silver futures’ volatility. Day-of-the-week effect has a significantly negative influence on silver futures’ price volatility, especially in the mid-term and the long-term. Our works is the first to combine the structural breaks and day-of-the-week effect to identify more market information. This paper provides a better forecasting method to predict silver future volatility.