The impact of an in-service professional development course on writing teacher attitudes and pedagogy

In education, it is commonly believed that the quality of teachers' learning experiences directly affects the quality of their students' learning experiences. Specifically, teachers' continuing learning may bring about positive effects on student learning. For the past ten years or so, research has emphasized the effects of professional development courses on teachers in hard science disciplines. Little attention has been paid to study the influences of those courses on teachers in the 'soft' sciences, such as English language, especially in the area of teaching of writing. Against this background, I undertook a study to investigate how an in-service professional development course influences the teaching attitudes of writing teachers who enrolled on the course and their teaching practice. I argue that the professional development course empowered the teachers with skills useful for the teaching of writing. I also argue that the course positively changed the attitudes of the teachers towards their practice in the teaching of writing. It is suggested that teachers need to engage in continuing professional development to improve the quality of their teaching

An Empirical Model of Daily Highs and Lows

We construct an empirical model for daily highs and daily lows of US stock indexes based on the intuition that highs and lows do not drift apart over time. Our empirical results show that daily highs and lows of three main US stock price indexes are cointegrated. Data on openings, closings, and trading volume are found to offer incremental explanatory power for variations in highs and lows within the VECM framework. With all these variables, the augmented VECM models explain 40% to 50% of variations in daily highs and lows. The generalized impulse response analysis shows that the responses of daily highs and daily lows to the shocks depend on whether data on openings, closings, and trading volume are included in the analysis.high, low open, close, trading volume, VECM model

Developing health-related quality-of-life instruments for use in Asia: the issues.

About half of the world's population live in Asia. Mandarin (the official language of China), Hindi and Japanese are among the ten languages spoken by the largest number of primary speakers. The numbers of Tamil and Malay speakers are expected to grow rapidly in the next few decades. Most health-related quality-of-life (HR-QOL) instruments currently used in Asia are translations and/or adaptations of instruments developed in North America and Western Europe. We illustrate and discuss several major issues in the development of HR-QOL instruments for use in Asia. We have seen insufficient quality in translation and semantic equivalence, which is not a uniquely Asian problem. This problem will be alleviated by putting recently proposed guidelines for translation and adaptation of patient-reported outcomes into practice and formally conducting equivalence studies. For copyright or other reasons it is rare to see major adaptations, such as exclusion of a domain in the original instrument or inclusion of a new domain, made to existing instruments. Evidence is limited and mixed as to whether there are differences in the concepts of HR-QOL between Asian and North American/Western European cultures that are important enough to justify such major adaptations, or the development of indigenous instruments, as opposed to the translation/adaptation of existing instruments. There are substantial cultural differences concerning what questions are appropriate to ask and answer. Many HR-QOL instruments are designed for self-completion. This mode of administration is often not feasible in Asia because of low literacy rates and the presence of many different regional languages. Alternative administration methods and analytic strategies that allow for pooling data collected by different modes are needed. The availability of HR-QOL instruments in various Asian countries seems to reflect the status of economic development of the countries rather than their disease burden. For instance, many important HR-QOL instruments are available in Japanese but not in Hindi or Tamil

Equity Price Dynamics Before and After the Introduction of the Euro

Daily data from the German and U.S. equity markets before and after the introduction of the Euro are used to study the effect of exchange rate regime choices on equity markets. It is found that, since the introduction of the Euro, the volatility and the persistence of the German stock index have fallen significantly relative to those of the U.S. index. However, the switch in exchange rate arrangement appears to have no significant implication for the causal relationships - both the mean and varianc causalities - between the two equity markets

Deviations from the Law of One Price in Japan

Using 25 years of monthly data on individual Japanese retail prices, we study the behavior of product-specific Law of One Price (LOP) deviations. Individual tradable products, compared with nontradables, are more likely to have different distributions of LOP deviations across cities. Their distributions are also more likely to change over time. Individual LOP deviation series are found to display considerable persistence and there is limited evidence that tradability enhances price convergence. In addition, deviations from the LOP are found to display nonlinear trends, and these trends are not linearly related to a product’s tradability. For individual products, LOP deviations are affected by their own inflation rates and, to a lesser extent, by aggregate inflation, output variations, and monetary variability. Interestingly, the trend behavior remains significant in the presence of these economic variables.price dispersion, tradability, asymmetric inflation effects, market integration

Speculative Attacks: A Laboratory Study in Continuous Time

We examine speculative attacks in a controlled laboratory environment featuring continuous time, size asymmetries, and varying amounts of public information. Attacks succeeded in 233 of 344 possible cases. When speculators have symmetric size and access to information: (a) weaker fundamentals increase the likelihood of successful speculative attacks and hasten their onset, and (b) contrary to some theory, success is enhanced by public access to information about either the net speculative position or the fundamentals. The presence of a larger speculator further enhances success, and experience with large speculators increases small speculators’ response to the public information. However, giving the large speculator increased size or better information does not significantly strengthen his impact.currency crisis, speculative attack, laboratory experiment, coordination game, pre-emption, large player

The Empirics of China's Outward Direct Investment

We investigate the empirical determinants of China’s outward direct investment (ODI). It is found that China’s investments in developed and developing countries are driven by different sets of factors. Subject to the differences between developed and developing countries, there is evidence that a) both market seeking and resources seeking motives drive China’s ODI, b) the Chinese exports to developing countries induce China’s ODI, c) China’s international reserves promote its ODI, and d) the Chinese capital tends to agglomerate among developed economies but diversify among developing economies. Similar results are obtained using alternative ODI data. We do not find substantial evidence that China invests in African and oil-producing countries mainly for their natural resources.market seeking, resources seeking, servicing exports, international reserves, agglomeration effect

Exchange Rate Misalingment Estimates - Sources of Differences

We study the differences of currency misalignment estimates obtained from alternative datasets derived from two International Comparison Program (ICP) surveys. A decomposition exercise reveals that the year 2005 misalignment estimates are substantially affected by the ICP price revision. Further, we find that differences in misalignment estimates are systematically affected by a country’s participation status in the ICP survey and its data quality – a finding that casts doubt on the economic and policy relevance of these misalignment estimates. The patterns of changes in the estimated degree of misalignment across individual countries, as illustrated by the BRIC economies, are quite variable.Penn Effect Regression, data revision, PPP-based data, measurement factors, economic factors

An Output Perspective on a Northeast Asia Currency Union

The prospect of creating a currency union consisting of China, Japan, and Korea is evaluated using output data. After a brief discussion on the interactions between the three countries, the study investigates whether these three countries have common synchronous business cycles, which are perceived as one of the preconditions of a currency union. Then, we assess the potential costs of giving up monetary policy autonomy to form a currency union. It is found that the three national output series tend to move together in the long run and share common business cycles. While the output loss estimates depend on assumptions used to generate shocks, they tend to be small. However, there are potential conflicts between these countries on the choice of the policy target of the common monetary authorities.common stochastic trend, business cycles, output losses, exchange rate regime, Asian economies