This article reports on a symposium held at Fort Hare University in July 1998. Its objective was to assess the current state of knowledge on communal rangelands and identify issues important for policy making. This was done in the light of concerns about recent policy reform. Uncontrolled access to resources and the lack of services were identified as the main constraints on socio‐economic development in the communal rangelands, and inadequate forage during the dry season was recognised as a general constraint on livestock production, irrespective of mean annual rainfall. Government policies must recognise these issues and the social and ecological heterogeneity of communal rangelands in South Africa. The conclusion with the most far‐reaching implications, however, was that degradation has occurred in some, but not all, communal rangelands and is most likely to occur in arid areas. This finding is in direct contrast to the current base for agricultural policies in South Africa, which assumes that livestock have little impact on rangelands. 相似文献
The main object in the statistical analysis of high-frequency financial data are sums of functionals of increments of stochastic processes, and statistical inference is based on the asymptotic behaviour of these sums as the mesh of the observation times tends to zero. Inspired by the famous Hayashi–Yoshida estimator for the quadratic covariation based on two asynchronously observed stochastic processes, we investigate similar sums for general functionals. We find that our results differ from corresponding results for synchronous observations, a case which has been well studied in the literature, and we observe that the asymptotic behaviour in the setting of asynchronous observations is not only determined by the nature of the functional, but also depends crucially on the asymptotics of the observation scheme. Several examples are discussed, including the case of \(f(x_{1},x_{2}) = |x_{1}|^{p_{1}} |x_{2}|^{p_{2}}\) which has various applications in empirical finance.
The under-representation of women on boards is a heavily discussed topic—not only in Germany. Based on critical mass theory and with the help of a hand-collected panel dataset of 151 listed German firms for the years 2000–2005, we explore whether the link between gender diversity and firm performance follows a U-shape. Controlling for reversed causality, we find evidence for gender diversity to at first negatively affect firm performance and—only after a “critical mass” of about 30 % women has been reached—to be associated with higher firm performance than completely male boards. Given our sample firms, the critical mass of 30 % women translates into an absolute number of about three women on the board and hence supports recent studies on a corresponding “magic number” of women in the boardroom. 相似文献
Our purpose is to examine strategic delegation in nonlinear Cournot oligopoly. The findings generalize earlier results and show that managerial contracts reward sales under the condition of a fixed input price. Alternatively, under a variable input price, owners might punish sales even when goods are strategic substitutes. We conclude that optimal strategic motivation depends critically on the input price. For example, motivation that supports positive owner profit under a fixed input price nullifies owner-profit if an upstream monopolist with convex costs sets the input price. In a vertical relationship between a duopoly and an upstream monopolist, strategic delegation punishes sales. 相似文献
Market microstructure noise is a challenge to high-frequency based estimation of the integrated variance, because the noise
accumulates with the sampling frequency. This has led to widespread use of constructing the realized variance, a sum of squared
intraday returns, from sparsely sampled data, for example 5- or 15-minute returns. In this paper, we analyze the impact of
microstructure noise on the realized range-based variance and propose a bias correction to the range-statistic. The new estimator
is shown to be consistent for the integrated variance and asymptotically mixed Gaussian under simple forms of microstructure
noise. We can select an optimal partition of the high-frequency data in order to minimize its asymptotic conditional variance.
The finite sample properties of our estimator are studied with Monte Carlo simulations and we implement it using Microsoft
high-frequency data from TAQ. We find that a bias-corrected range-statistic often leads to much smaller confidence intervals
for the integrated variance, relative to the realized variance.
We should like to thank an anonymous referee and the associate editor for insightful comments on an earlier draft. Parts of
this paper were written while Kim Christensen was at the University of California, San Diego, whose hospitality is gratefully
acknowledged. Mark Podolskij received financial support from CREATES funded by the Danish National Research Foundation, and
Mathias Vetter was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft grant SFB 475 “Reduction of Complexity in Multivariate
Data Structures.” The code for this paper was written in the Ox programming language, due to Doornik (2002). All views expressed
here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Nordea. 相似文献
We show that an ad valorem tax is better than an equal-revenue unit tax when consumers spend some fixed proportion of income on taxed goods, when firms use constant mark-up pricing, and entry and exit drive per-firm profit to zero. These key assumptions implies that ad valorem taxes are superior in oligopoly as well as monopolistic competition, showing that earlier results on taxes in monopolistic competition (Schröder in J Econ 83(3):281–292, 2004) are not due to the mode of competition, but rather are due to the functional forms used. 相似文献
The standard model for the analysis of variance with random effects implies, for the case of two independent variables, that single effects must be tested not against the error, but against the interaction mean squares. This causes, in comparison with the fixed effects AV, a considerable loss of test power, particularly for the 2 × 2 table. An alternative modelling of the interaction effect is proposed which completely avoids the loss of power. 相似文献