The use and development of indicators for the commercialisation of university research in a national support programme

Governments in most countries have set up specialised programmes to support the commercialisation of academic research. A key challenge is to develop indicators that are able to measure operation and impact. This study shows how different indicators are used to satisfy different stakeholders of a Norwegian support programme. Policy intervention is supposed to lead to additionality related to input, behaviour and output. While the support programme uses input and behavioural measures as strategic tools for its operation, policy makers are mostly preoccupied with output measures. This study illustrates how indicators develop over time, partly co-evolving with the development of the programme and the national commercialisation infrastructure. Indicators serve as incentives for the agents involved, but they may also influence the strategies of the programme that established them. The external signalling effect of indicators remains central, while its use in daily operations becomes less important with time and experience.     

Systemic event prediction by an aggregate early warning system: An application to the Czech Republic

This work develops an early warning framework for assessing systemic risks and predicting systemic events over a short horizon of six quarters and a long horizon of 12 quarters on a panel of 14 countries, both advanced and developing. First, we build a financial stress index to identify the starting dates of systemic financial crises for each country in the panel. Second, early warning indicators for the assessment and prediction of systemic risk are selected in a two-step approach; we find relevant prediction horizons for each indicator by a univariate logit model followed by the application of Bayesian model averaging to identify the most useful indicators. Finally, we observe the performance of the constructed EWS over both horizons on the Czech data and find that the model over the long horizon outperforms the EWS over the short horizon. For both horizons, out-of-sample probability estimates do not deviate substantially from their in-sample estimates, indicating a good out-of-sample performance for the Czech Republic.     

税收风险管理关键绩效指标评价体系的构建及应用

税收风险管理绩效评价贯穿于税收风险管理工作的全过程,能确保税收风险管理制度得到有效执行,并能不断完善税收风险管理的工作流程。将关键绩效指标法应用于税收风险管理绩效评价工作,对税收风险管理进行全流程、全方位的评价,构建税收风险管理关键绩效指标评价体系,有助于提高税收风险管理能力和水平,全面实现以风险管理为导向的现代化税收征管体系。     

Measuring the immeasurable — A survey of sustainability indices

Sustainability indices for countries provide a one-dimensional metric to valuate country-specific information on the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, environmental, and social conditions. At the policy level, they suggest an unambiguous yardstick against which a country's development can be measured and even a cross-country comparison can be performed. This article reviews the explanatory power of various sustainability indices applied in policy practice. We show that these indices fail to fulfill fundamental scientific requirements making them rather useless if not misleading with respect to policy advice.     

I (Could Have) Told You! Early warning indicators and crisis performance of the 12 “old” Euro-countries under the economic crisis 2008–09

The impact of the economic crisis 2008-09 was remarkably different in the 12 “old” member states in the Euro-zone. Five of them were hit especially badly; four of them even had to be bailed out by the rest in one way or another. This paper asks if one could have foretold, based solely on information available prior to 1999, which of the countries then about to enter the Euro-zone would run into economic trouble once a serious economic crisis occurred. The focus is on the (post)predictive power of three kinds of leading indicators: economic indicators, political indicators (indicating quality of governance), and indicators derived from the theory of optimal currency areas (OCA). Since there are more indicators than cases, PLS-regression is used to gauge the (post)predictive strength of the indicators examined. The results show that political indicators have quite some (post)predictive power in this case, whereas indicators derived from OCA-theory do not do too well. Economic indicators perform better than indicators derived from OCA-theory, but generally less well than the political indicators. Thus, the experience from the latest economic crisis in the Euro-zone suggests that more emphasis should be placed on the quality of governance record of a country when deciding if it should be deemed fit to become a member.     

Momentum in the Chinese Stock Market: Evidence from Stochastic Oscillator Indicators

ABSTRACT

We explore whether investors earn profits through the use of stochastic oscillator indicators (SOI) for trading stocks. The results reveal that investors might use momentum strategies when trading constituent stocks of SSE 50 as the overbought trading signals emitted by SOI. We infer that the results might be caused by herding behaviors of Chinese investors since overoptimistic moods are likely to exist as evidenced by the 80 percent trading volume traded by individual investors in the Chinese stock market.     

Impact of International Financial Reporting Standards （IFRS） Adoption on Key Financial Ratios＂ The Case of the Czech Republic

This contribution analyzes the impact of new International Financial Reporting Standards （IFRS） reporting rules on financial ratios prepared in the Czech companies. Using a sample of 16 Czech firms, we attempt to measure the scope and size of the differences in the selected set of financial ratios as calculated with data reported according to the traditional Czech accounting standards （CAS） and under the IFRS provisions. Our study discovers that there are important differences resulting from the two reporting formats. Our research comes to a conclusion that translation of Czech statements to IFRS may cause changes in the values of financial indicators without relationship to the real change in the firms＇ value, performance, and stability. Even though the findings were not statistically significant, the indicative results of our measurements disclosed an important fact that the transition to IFRS could cause deterioration of key indicators and thereby could impact on the overall rating of companies. One needs to be cautious with generalization due to the small sample size.     

超临界350MW电厂四大管道国产化应用分析

目前超临界机组四大管道采用进口产品带来的一系列问题,如价格昂贵,采购周期长,管道制造过程质量无法监督控制,造成电厂基建费用增加,建设周期长,现场安装前检验发现诸多质量缺陷等。通过对国内钢厂所生产的四大管道化学成分、性能指标分析及调研已应用国产化四大管道情况,为某350MW电厂机组四大管道国产化提出建议。     

检视都市永续发展指针的发展历程与内涵:从指针系统建构到政策评估

本文回顾国际上相关的都市永续发展指针系统,探讨指针系统架构与内涵之间的差异,进而说明永续台湾评量系统中"都市台湾"指针系统的重要特色,以及指针项目选定的理论基础.藉由永续台湾评量系统中22个范畴的型态辨识,本文分析了都市在台湾永续发展中所扮演的角色,确认都市生产与生活型态对于整体永续发展的重要性,也验证了生态系统观点中都市对于环境的依存与影响.考量都市发展决策过程需要永续性的评量机制,本文利用都市永续发展指针作为政策评估的重要变量,应用交互式计算机软件<感受性系统模型(Sensitivitv Model Tools)>以系统性观点进行都市发展政策永续性的评析.透过系统软件功能掌握变量结构的完整性以及系统变量之间的相互影响关系,并藉助于团体咨询与讨论的沟通方式建构半量化的(semi-quantitative)系统变量,配合概念化及模糊化的方式界定变量水准以及函数关系进行系统仿真工作.籍由系统仿真了解变量之间的互动关系,而政策评估案例分析显示台北市硬件建设政策较空间调整政策发挥较大的效果.永续指针与系统工具的结合整体而言提供了都市政策永续性评估的沟通与预测接口.     

Potential improvements approach in composite indicators construction: The Multi-directional Benefit of the Doubt model

The aim of the present paper is to propose an innovative method to construct composite indicators, starting from an attractive frontier approach called Multi-directional Efficiency Analysis (MEA), and making it suitable to aggregate simple indicators. The main advantage of this method is the separation of the benchmark selection issue from that of efficiency measurement. The novel method, called Multi-directional Benefit of the Doubt, combines the MEA with the Benefit of the Doubt approach adding some valuable properties to the obtained composite indicator. The proposed method is tested on simulated data for illustrative purposes, and then, an empirical application on OECD ”Better life index” is provided. Results suggest that the method could be a good tool for local policy makers alongside the OECD BLI to investigate and improve some non-performing well-being dimensions.