Structural Break or Asymmetry? An Empirical Study of the Stock Wealth Effect on Consumption

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the stock wealth effect of consumption exhibits structural change(s) or behaves asymmetrically over business cycles. We first perform a general test of linearity for the behavior of aggregate consumption in response to changes in stock wealth based on Hamilton's (2001) approach. When a nonlinear relation is discovered, we move on to investigate the source(s) of this nonlinearity. We consider two types of nonlinearity: structural break and asymmetry. It is of interest to policy makers whether the sensitivity of consumption to changes in households' financial wealth shows a significant shift over time due to institutional and policy changes, and whether consumption is likely to decline more due to stock wealth shrinkage when the economy is in a downturn, as has been found in investmeconsumption, stock wealth, asymmetric effect, structural change

In the Shadow of the United States: The International Transmission Effect of Asset Returns

We examine how the fluctuations in financial and housing markets in U.S. affect the asset returns and GDP in Hong Kong. In contrast to the results from linear specifications, which concludes that the U.S. and Hong Kong are virtually delinked in terms of the asset markets, our regime-switching models indicate that the unexpected shock of US stock returns, followed by the TED spread, has the most significant effect on HK asset returns and GDP, typically in the regime with high return and low volatility. For the in-sample one-step-ahead forecasting, US Term spread stands out to be the best predictor.currency board, fixed nominal exchange rate, international transmission mechanism, hierarchical Markov regime-switching model, vector autoregressive model

Monetary Policy, Term Structure and Asset Return: Comparing REIT, Housing and Stock

This paper confirms that a regime-switching model out-performs a linear VAR model in terms of understanding the system dynamics of asset returns. Impulse responses of REIT returns to either the federal funds rate or the interest rate spread are much larger initially but less persistent. Furthermore, the term structure acts as an amplifier of the impulse response for REIT return, a stabilizer for the housing counterpart under some regime, and, perhaps surprisingly, almost no role for the stock return. In contrast, GDP growth has very marginal effect in the impulse response for all assets.monetary policy; yield curve; REITs; house prices; Markov Regime Switching

Disappearing of traditional stores on Shanghai Street : how can/cannot the traditional stores survive?

published_or_final_versionMedia, Culture and Creative CitiesMasterMaster of Social Sciences in Media, Culture and Creative Citie

COMMUNICATION AND MUSEUMS: MUSEUMS AS A PLACE OF DISCOURSE

Museums are to communicate their meaning to societies through their discourse.  Through the discourse, museums are to convey certain values, ideas or truths to societies.  The discourse of a museum embraces a power which can generate or instill a common sense and reinforce or give new insight to museum visitors.  Up to a point, the discourse of a museum can be in agreement or in contradiction with the existing knowledge and beliefs of visitors.  To understand museums is to understand the discourse of museums.  No two museums are the same.  It is the discourse of a museum that makes museums different and meaningful to societies.  No discourse is neutral.  “Museums are invention of men….They exist for the things we put in them (Silver, cited in Weil, 1990, p. xiv).”  The discourse of museums is subjected to the arrangement of mankind.  This paper is to look into the way museums garnish their objects and functions with specific concepts and assumptions to impart into the understanding of museum visitors of the discourses of museums.  Museums as a place of discourse are to influence the visitors’ perception and understanding of the world at large

Programmable control of CRISPR-Cas9 systems by engineering sgRNA as toehold- switchable riboregulators

Robust control over gene expression is necessary for diverse applications in molecular biology, synthetic biology, and biotechnology. One of the most promising strategies to exert these types of control is the recently developed CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) and activation (CRISPRa) approach, which provides simple and highly effective RNA-based methods for targeted silencing and upregulation of transcription in bacterial and eukaryotic cells. While these current methods are capable of sequence-specific targeting Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract