Reevaluating the prudence of economic forecasts in the EU: The role of instrument persistence

Christodoulakis and Mamatzakis (2009, Journal of Applied Econometrics 24, pp. 583–606) estimate the EU Commission loss preferences for selected economic forecasts of 12 EU Member States. They employ the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation procedure proposed by Elliott et al. (2005, Review of Economic Studies 72, pp. 1107–1125) and find the forecasts to be somewhat optimistic on average. However, this note shows the GMM estimator to possess nonstandard limiting distributions when some of the instruments are highly persistent, which is the case with one of the instruments employed by Christodoulakis and Mamatzakis. Standard distributions are recovered in some interesting particular cases which are relevant in practice. A reexamination of the EU Commission loss preferences using methods robust to persistence and a dataset extended to 2017 reveals that, while the conclusions of the original study are, by and large, still justified, the EU Commission loss preferences have become more symmetric over the whole studied period.     

A market-consistent framework for the fair evaluation of insurance contracts under Solvency II

Decisions in Economics and Finance - The entry into force of the Solvency II regulatory regime is pushing insurance companies in engaging into market consistence evaluation of their balance sheet,...     

EFFECT OF FED POLICY ACTIONS ON THE DEFAULT LIKELIHOOD OF COMMERCIAL BANKS

Using a measure of default likelihood based on an option pricing method, we provide evidence that Fed policy actions affect the financial distress of commercial banks. When the Fed increases (decreases) interest rates, the measure of default likelihood increases (decreases). We show that when the Fed uses a tight money policy, the increase in default likelihood is more pronounced for banks that have less capital, have greater financial leverage, are smaller, have fewer growth opportunities, and have lower asset quality. Additionally, the effects on bank default likelihood are more pronounced when the Fed's policy signals less concern about economic growth, as indicated by its bias toward further tightening, and when there is a market expectation of higher short‐term market rates in the future.     

我国银色市场开发现状分析及其营销建议

据中国老年协会分析，2000年我国60岁以上的老年人口已达到1.3亿，约占总人口的10.2%，世界新增加的老龄人口中有23%来自中国，这使我国提前进入了人口老龄化国家行列，统计表明，我国现有60岁以上的老年人每年以3%的速度增加，80岁以上的老年人以5%的速度增加，这意味着我国每年净增380多万60岁以上的老年人，50多万岁以上的老年人，这个快速增加的庞大老年群体，预示着在市场消费品需求中用于满足老年人的比重将不断增加，老年人所占市场消费份额的比例将越来越大，老年产品的消费总量将不断增加，在我国相对来说，老人在城市晨的比重普遍高于农村，而生活在城市里的老人大多数享有退休金，仅从这一点，有眼光的商家就可敏锐地感受到老年市场的庞大和潜力，同时随着社会经济的发展，老年人的收入普遍提高，以上海为列，退休金在351-600元的中等收入者占到62.4%，收入在600-900元乃至千元以上者占4.5%，180万的4.5%是多少？加上“老有所为”的再就业收入，老年人的购买实力是实实在在的存在的，我国老年人产品与服务的多种需求构成了一个十分丰富多彩的“银色市场”。     

新世纪毛泽东思想的探索与研究

新世纪研究毛泽东思想的现实意义是要坚持毛泽东思想与邓小平理论相结合;坚持毛泽东思想与创新精神相结合;坚持史与论相结合;坚持教学内容与教学对象相结合.毛泽东思想和毛泽东晚年的错误应区别开来.     

Hybrid approach with an expert system and a genetic algorithm to production management in the supply net

A new approach to solving production management problems in the supply net is proposed. An expert system designed to help companies in medium-term and short-term production planning is discussed. The proposed expert system considers alternative process plans for a job and outsourcing, when a bottleneck exists in the machine. The proposed hybrid system uses the output of the expert system as the input of the genetic algorithm. The output of the genetic algorithm is a near optimal schedule. The proposed method does not require any unrealistic assumptions. It can be used to solve highly complicated and non-linear functions of a realistic problem. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.