Long‐run Effect of the Global Financial Crisis on Singapore's Tourism and the Economy

This study employs recent Singaporean tourism survey data, the updated Singaporean input–output tables and a computable general equilibrium model to gauge the long‐run effects of the 2008 global financial crisis and selected policy responses. The simulation results suggest that the global financial crisis has had mild negative long‐run effects on the overall development of Singapore's economy, and that the GST deduction policy ought to offset this negative effect.     

Co‐movements in commodity prices: a note based on network analysis

This article analyses co‐movements in a wide group of commodity prices during the time period 1992–2010. Our methodological approach is based on the correlation matrix and the networks inside. Through this approach we are able to summarize global interaction and interdependence, capturing the existing heterogeneity in the degrees of synchronization between commodity prices. Our results produce two main findings: (a) we do not observe a persistent increase in the degree of co‐movement of the commodity prices in our time sample, however from mid‐2008 to the end of 2009 co‐movements almost doubled when compared with the average correlation; (b) we observe three groups of commodities which have exhibited similar price dynamics (metals, oil and grains, and oilseeds) and which have increased their degree of co‐movement during the sampled period.     

THE EFFECT OF GOVERNMENT POLICY ON TOBACCO ADVERTISING STRATEGIES

This paper contributes to the very limited literature examining the factors determining tobacco companies' advertising strategies. The paper explores whether firms in the UK tobacco market significantly changed their advertising expenditure in the face of proposed changes to the UK and European Commission tobacco advertising legislation. The results suggest that changes in legislation have little impact on firms' advertising strategies for existing brands, but that legislative changes impact upon product launch dates. Our results also offer some information on the nature of firm interdependencies in the UK tobacco industry.     

原产地标记的战略管理模型——“文山三七”原产地标记个案分析

原产地标记用于指示一项产品来源于该地,且该产品的质量特性完全或主要取决于该地的地理环境、自然条件,人文背景等因素。它是一种稀缺智力资源,基于产业生态(共生、集聚等)共生的平台,围绕战略、文化、结构3个方面构建原产地标记企业战略管理模型。     

Are property rights enough?Re‐evaluating a big‐bang claim1

We investigate the claim made by proponents of the big‐bang strategy that the establishment of property rights in an economy in transition creates its own demand for the enforcement of laws to protect those rights. Our model contains a government engaging in activities to accomplish objectives that depend on public support for the enforcement of the rule of law and agents who interpret the level of activities of the government as indications of the government's intent to enforce the rule of law. Agents, using the level of government activities as an input to their decisions, choose whether to support the government's objectives. We establish conditions under which the level of activities chosen by the government maximizes its benefits, and simultaneously induces the constituency to support enforcement of the rule of law. These conditions provide a basis for the argument for the implementation of the big‐bang policy. When these conditions do not hold, however, we show that the level of activities that maximizes the government's benefits may have only a minor impact on support for the enforcement of the rule of law. Two characteristics play an important role in these conditions: the initial level of crime and the types of activities the government chooses to undertake. We present examples showing that the initial level of crime has the more dramatic effect on subsequent support for the rule of law.     

The Impact of a Disorderly Resolution of Global Imbalances on Global Wealth

Partly reflecting structural advantages such as liquidity and strong investor protection, foreigners have built up extremely large positions in US (as well as other dollar‐denominated) financial assets. This paper describes the impact on global wealth of an unanticipated shock to US financial markets. For every 10 per cent decline in the dollar, US equity markets, and US bond markets, total wealth losses to foreigners could amount to about 5 percentage points of foreign GDP. Four stylized facts emerge: (i) foreign countries, particularly emerging markets, are more exposed to US bonds than to US equities; (ii) over time US exposure has increased for most countries; (iii) on average, US asset holdings of developed countries and emerging markets (scaled by GDP) are very similar; and (iv) based on their reserves position alone, wealth losses of emerging market governments could on average amount to about 2¾ percentage points of their GDP.     

A Comparative Analysis of Auditor, Manager and Financial Analyst Interpretations of SFAS 5 Disclosure Guidelines

This study examines empirically whether financial analysts (users), as well as managers (preparers) and external auditors ascribe different interpretations to the SFAS 5 disclosure criteria. We find: (1) financial analysts are, on average, more conservative than managers and auditors in their numerical interpretations of both the 'remote' and 'probable' verbal phrases; (2) managers and auditors share very similar numerical interpretations of these verbal phrases; (3) audit partners' numerical interpretations of the 'remote' region are between those of managers and users, whereas audit managers align their numerical interpretations with those of managers. One danger is that preparers of financial statements may omit loss contingency information that users consider valuable.     

Evolution of forecast disagreement in a Bayesian learning model

We estimate a Bayesian learning model with heterogeneity aimed at explaining expert forecast disagreement and its evolution over horizons. Disagreement is postulated to have three components due to differences in: (i) the initial prior beliefs, (ii) the weights attached on priors, and (iii) interpreting public information. The fixed-target, multi-horizon, cross-country feature of the panel data allows us to estimate the relative importance of each component precisely. The first component explains nearly all to 30% of forecast disagreement as the horizon decreases from 24 months to 1 month. This finding firmly establishes the role of initial prior beliefs in generating expectation stickiness. We find the second component to have barely any effect on the evolution of forecast disagreement among experts. The importance of the third component increases from almost nothing to 70% as the horizon gets shorter via its interaction with the quality of the incoming news. We propose a new test of forecast efficiency in the context of Bayesian information processing and find significant heterogeneity in the nature of inefficiency across horizons and countries.     

Housing and the Macroeconomy: Inflation and the Financial Accelerator

Three themes connecting housing and the macroeconomy are discussed. First, evidence is presented for the property market as one of the drivers of U.S. consumer price inflation. Second, key drivers of house prices are explained to account for the remarkable diversity of international experience. Finally, three potential links between housing, credit, and the financial accelerator are discussed. These are the consumption channel, the investment channel, and feedback between bad loans and risk‐spreads via the financial system—and how institutional differences between countries can explain the presence, absence and magnitudes of these linkages.     

Time scale evaluation of economic forecasts

A maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform is used to obtain time scale decompositions of economic forecasts and their errors. The generated time scale components can be used in loss measures and tests for comparing forecast accuracy to evaluate whether the forecasts accurately capture the cyclical features of the data.