Taking the temperature – forecasting GDP growth for mainland China

We present a new composite leading indicator of economic activity in mainland China, es-timated using a dynamic factor model. Our leading indicator is constructed from three se-ries: exports, a real estate climate index, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange index. These series are found to share a common, unobservable element from which our indicator can be identified. This indicator is then incorporated into out-of-sample one-step-ahead forecasts of Chinese GDP growth. Recursive out-of-sample accuracy tests indicate that the small-scale factor model approach leads to a successful representation of the sample data and provides an appropriate tool for forecasting Chinese business conditions.forecasting; China; leading indicator; factor model; growth cycles

Drifting Together or Falling Apart? The Empirics of Regional Economic Growth in Post-Unification Germany

The objective of this paper is to address the question of convergence across German districts in the first decade after German unification by drawing out and emphasising some stylised facts of regional per capita income dynamics. We achieve this by employing non-parametric techniques which focus on the evolution of the entire cross-sectional income distribution. In particular, we follow a distributional approach to convergence based on kernel density estimation and implement a number of tests to establish the statistical significance of our findings. This paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal/bimodal distribution.regional economic growth, Germany, convergence clubs, density estimation, modality tests

Economic Growth across Space and Time: subprovincial Evidence from Mainland China

We present a new composite leading indicator of economic activity in mainland China, estimated using a dynamic factor model. Our leading indicator is constructed from three series: exports, a real estate climate index, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange index. These series are found to share a common, unobservable element from which our indicator can be identified. This indicator is then incorporated into out-of-sample one-step-ahead forecasts of Chinese GDP growth. Recursive out-of-sample accuracy tests indicate that the small scale factor model approach leads to successful representation of the sample data and provides an appropriate tool for forecasting Chinese business conditions.Regional Economic Growth, China

Making it work: Supporting contemporary artists in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Following the country’s political transition to democracy in the 1990s, a generation of Mongolian artists constructed an art movement rooted in the issues of the new society: transitional national identity, corrupt political and economic systems, and a growingly complex relationship with nature. The liberalization of the economy, however, hasn’t nurtured sustainable creative resources or helped artists reach domestic or international markets, pressuring them to find alternative ways to create livelihoods out of their craft. This study considers how emerging multidisciplinary artists sustain themselves through both formal and informal means, and the motivations behind their creative lifestyles. Central to the study are the following questions: How do emerging artists “make it work” in the transitional economy? How are contemporary artists received in Ulaanbaatar (the nation’s capital)? What are the barriers keeping Mongolian artists from gaining greater public recognition? The study involves 21 participants, including 15 working artists and three curators working in Ulaanbaatar, and three artists who’ve left Mongolia for Europe. They participated in open-ended interviews surrounding their motivations, and perceived support and barriers on a number of dimensions ranging from the government’s contributions to access to studio space to public perception of contemporary art. The artists work in mixed fields of contemporary art including painting, sculpture, video, and mixed media, and more conceptual forms including installation, performance, and land art. The study’s findings suggest that there are many intersections between the conditions of working artists in Ulaanbaatar and those in more emerged scenes in Europe and the United States given kindred conversations surrounding the demand for space, struggles to stay afloat financially, a lack of validation, and reliance on informal communities for sustenance. The struggle of working artists may be universal, but the conditions in Ulaanbaatar are very particular and require a nuanced look given the country’s recent emergence from seven decades under strict socialist rule, and the tensions of Ulaanbaatar’s shifting cultural and political landscape. This study is critical for two reasons: (1) Because many emerging contemporary artists work at the vanguard of culture, we can better understand an alternative view of the rapidly-changing city by speaking with those on the margins; and (2) By including artists from the post-colonial world [or post-socialist, in this case] in the popular canon of art history, we can assemble a deeper understanding of art’s historical narrative outside of established, Whitewashed art institutions

One Nation Under the Market: Mediated Narratives of the 2008 Crisis in America

This dissertation examines the construction of the 2008 economic crisis in American media through a comparative analysis of three case studies, each involving a different medium and each involving a distinct implied public. I have approached this subject from a rhetorically-inclined hermeneutical and phenomenological perspective that conceptualizes texts as manifestations of symbolic practices which reflect social reality as well as construct it, and I explore how the texts of each case study simultaneously reflect and conjure both the 2008 crisis and their imagined publics. In order to explore the some of the various ways the 2008 crisis has been constructed in American media, this research deploys three primary lines of investigation: the examination of radio broadcasts of speeches by American presidents during the crisis, the analysis of a selection of documentary and fictional films on or related to the crisis, and the evaluation of periodical articles from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. The findings of the research reveal that the three case studies examined offer particularly distinct and elastic depictions of the 2008 crisis. The presidential radio addresses depicted the crisis in a predominantly metaphorical manner as a painful event experienced by a national public through their rhetorical invocation of a particular and patriotic mytho-ideological imaginary of America and its history. The films portrayed the crisis primarily as the dramatic unfolding of a traumatic narrative, emphasizing the character-driven nature of this dramatic unfolding and frequently highlighting the moral ambiguity of agents and characters. The periodical articles largely constructed the crisis as principally related to matters of governance, finance and economics in both its precipitation and in its assuagement or resolution, conspicuously paying scant attention to the affective dimensions of its impact. Collectively, the case studies evidence that the multiform and dynamic character of the depictions of the 2008 crisis in American media are significantly shaped by the combinative overlap of the particularity of the crisis as a complex and ambiguous phenomena, the dominant modes of address and distinct properties of each media type, and the particular implied publics to which each body of texts corresponded