A Qualitative Analysis to Determine the Domains and Skills Necessary to Lead in Public Health

Leadership programs in public health have been declining in numbers since 2012. The decline in training programs could be due to the lack of outcome‐based results and the lack of a manageable set of standardized skills needed for public health leadership. A comprehensive study was completed in two phases to determine if the current model of public health leadership institutes is effective at generating outcome‐based results. The following paper will focus on the first phase of the study. The first phase included a qualitative analysis to determine the domains, definitions, and skills needed to lead. An analysis of the skills, domains, definitions, and traits included in five established and commonly used leadership models/theories in public health leadership development (Transformational, Servant, Appreciative, Collaborative, and Emotional Intelligence leadership) plus the National Public Health Leadership Development Network (NLN) Leadership for Community Health, Safety & Resilience Competency Framework was completed. Of the 161 different skills, definitions, traits, and/or competencies from the five leadership models and the NLN competency framework, 123 were determined to be related to one of six domains needed for leadership and were defined into 21 skills. The findings could lead to more uniformity in public health leadership development and evaluation.     

Focused Information Criterion for Series Estimation in Partially Linear Models

This paper proposes a focused information criterion for variable selection in partially linear models. Our criterion is designed to select an optimal model for estimating a focus parameter, which is a parameter of interest. We estimate the model using the series method and jointly select the variables in the linear part and the series length in the nonparametric part. A Monte Carlo simulation shows that the proposed focused information criterion successfully selects the model that has a relatively small mean squared error of the estimator for the focus parameter.     

ANALYSIS OF AN OPTION MARKET DYNAMICS BASED ON A HETEROGENEOUS AGENT MODEL

We propose a two‐market model in which an option market and its underlying market interact. Many artificial markets representing stock markets have been developed, and these models have been actively used to investigate the effects of market rules. However, no artificial market model for derivatives has been intensively studied, even though derivative markets are increasingly important. We tested stylized facts that can be observed in an option market and our model can replicate fat‐tailed distributions, positive skew of the return and positive autocorrelation of the square of return of implied volatility. We found that the speed of volatility mean reversion for fundamentalists and the existence of chartists are important factors for replicating the positive skew of an option market. The value of fat‐tailed distributions and positive skewness of the return get closer to the real value by coupling an option market and an underlying market. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Advancing consumer neuroscience

In the first decade of consumer neuroscience, strong progress has been made in understanding how neuroscience can inform consumer decision making. Here, we sketch the development of this discipline and compare it to that of the adjacent field of neuroeconomics. We describe three new frontiers for ongoing progress at both theoretical and applied levels. First, the field will broaden its boundaries to include genetics and molecular neuroscience, each of which will provide important new insights into individual differences in decision making. Second, recent advances in computational methods will improve the accuracy and out-of-sample generalizability of predicting decisions from brain activity. Third, sophisticated meta-analyses will help consumer neuroscientists to synthesize the growing body of knowledge, providing evidence for consistency and specificity of brain activations and their reliability as measurements of consumer behavior.     

Restructuring East Asian exchange rate regimes

This paper investigated the degree of misalignment of the East Asian currencies against the U.S. dollar and against the Japanese yen under a de facto dollar-pegged exchange rate regime (January 1995 to May 1997). We found that overvaluation against the yen started in the Malaysian ringgit and the Philippine peso from January 1996 and the Thai baht from June 1996. Although the Indonesian rupiah and the Korean won against the yen were still undervalued in May 1997, degree of misalignment of both currencies narrowed from April 1995. Large withdrawal of Japanese claims after the financial crisis reduced Japanese bank lendings from $123.8 billion to $85.9 billion in end-June 1998. In 1998, Japanese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to East Asia fell as much as 44% from the previous year. In conclusion the paper stresses the importance of the stability in yen/dollar exchange rate to avoid large volatility in Japanese capital flow.     

The Economic Incentives Underlying Resource and Environmental Depletion

Environmental and Resource Economics - We discuss the current global economic crisis as an analog of short-term harvesting of a biological resource, in which motives of short-term profit over-ride...     

Effects of Price Regulations and Dark Pools on Financial Market Stability: An Investigation by Multiagent Simulations

We built an artificial market model and investigated the impact of large erroneous orders on financial market price formations. Comparing the case of consented large erroneous orders in the short term with that of continuous small erroneous orders in the long term, if amounts of orders are the same, we found that the orders induced almost the same price fall range. We also analysed effects of price variation limits for erroneous orders and found that price variation limits that employ a limitation term shorter than the time erroneous orders exist effectively prevent large price fluctuations. We also investigated effects of up-tick rules, adopting the trigger method that the Japan Financial Services Agency adopted in November 2013. We also investigated whether dark pools that never provide any order books stabilize markets or not using the model including one lit market, which provides all order books to investors, and one dark pool. We found that markets become more stable as the dark pool is increasingly used. We also found that using the dark pool more reduces the market impacts. However, if other investors’ usage rates of dark pools become too large, investors must use the dark pool more than other investors to avoid market impacts. When a tick size of a lit market is larger, dark pools are more useful to avoid market impacts. These results suggest that dark pools stabilize markets when the usage rate is under some threshold and negatively affect the market when the usage rate is over that threshold. Our simulation results suggest the threshold might be much larger than the usage rate in present real financial markets. This study is the first to discuss whether or not several concrete and actually adoptable regulations, including those that have never been employed (e.g. price variation limits with various parameters), could prevent large fluctuations of market prices, including those beyond our experience, using artificial market simulations, and to discuss quantitatively how spreading of dark pools beyond our experience could affect market price formations using the artificial market simulations. In short, this study is the first study to comprehensively discuss how regulations and financial systems beyond our experience could affect price formations using the artificial market simulations. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE KOREAN WAR AS AN EPOCH OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

The Korean War marks an epoch in the development of modern history after World War II, For Japan in particular the war had a great significance. Not only did the Korean War play a great role in the process which set out from the destruction accompanying Japan's defeat and led up to the present state of economic development, hut the fact that Japan today possesses military forces, after having renounced rearmament under Article 9 of her Constitution, is also due to the occurrence of the Korean War. Establishing the significance of the Korean War provides a key for the evaluation of post-war Japanese history.