Cointegration and US Regional gasoline prices: Testing market efficiency from the stationarity of price proportions

It is well known that oil price shocks are a major concern to the health of the global economy. Unstable oil prices have a significant negative impact on consumer confidence and business decision making. As a result economic recovery may be longer and more complicated. Controlling the global oil price may not be possible, but a main concern of this research relates to energy market efficiency and as to whether relative price differences respond in an appropriate way across the region of one country. Here, the different geographic areas of a country are analysed to see whether they belong to the same market and result in the relative prices being stationary. The gasoline market in different regions of the US is analyzed. It is believed that if the gasoline market is sufficiently active in the US, then as a result of arbitrage, long-run gasoline prices by region should follow each other. In an efficient market, a price shock in one region would be reflected in all other prices. This proposition is tested in an effective manner by a barrage of stationarity tests. This is pertinent as such tests have been applied in antitrust cases in Italy and the Netherlands to determine whether there might be market imperfections or in association with more heuristic information, possible collusion

Cities: Continuity, transformation and emergence

Book synopsis: This book applies ideas and methods from the complexity perspective to key concerns in the social sciences, exploring co-evolutionary processes that have not yet been addressed in the technical or popular literature on complexity. \ud \ud Authorities in a variety of fields – including evolutionary economics, innovation and regeneration studies, urban modelling and history – re-evaluate their disciplines within this framework. The book explores the complex dynamic processes that give rise to socio-economic change over space and time, with reference to empirical cases including the emergence of knowledge-intensive industries and decline of mature regions, the operation of innovative networks and the evolution of localities and cities. Sustainability is a persistent theme and the practicability of intervention is examined in the light of these perspectives. \ud \ud Specialists in disciplines that include economics, evolutionary theory, innovation, industrial manufacturing, technology change, and archaeology will find much to interest them in this book. In addition, the strong interdisciplinary emphasis of the book will attract a non-specialist audience interested in keeping abreast of current theoretical and methodological approaches through evidence-based and practical examples

Recent developments in monetary and financial integration in Asia.

Asia’s share of world trade has expanded constantly over the last two decades. This increase reflects, inter alia, the considerable strengthening of trade links between the countries of the region, fostered by the vertical specialisation of the Asian economies. In the 1980s, the most advanced economies in the region, e.g. Japan, relocated the most labour-intensive stages of their production processes to the newly-industrialised Asian economies like South Korea and Singapore and then, in the 1990s, to emerging Asia, i.e. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. The emergence of China has also given signifi cant impetus to regional trade integration. Surging intra-regional direct investment fl ows have accompanied and shored up trade fl ows, however, portfolio investment fl ows and cross-border bank loans have remained limited. Given that production processes within the region are complementary and that the final destination for exports is outside the region, the lack of a regional exchange rate arrangement in Asia does not appear to be a concern in the short term. Indeed, the regional integration initiatives adopted in Asia in the aftermath of the 1997-1998 financial crisis aim to build further resilience to fi nancial market turbulence. Firstly, deeper and more liquid local bond markets should make it possible to reduce the double financial mismatch, i.e. the currency mismatch and maturity mismatch, which largely sustained the crisis. In this regard, the ASEAN+3 Asian Bond Market Initiative examines the supply-side issues while the Asian Bond Funds initiative of the Executives’ Meeting of East Asia-Pacifi c Central Banks (EMEAP) deals with demand-side issues via the pooling of resources to buy bonds issued by member countries. Secondly, the Chiang Mai Initiative, which consists in a network of currency swap arrangements between the central banks of the ASEAN+3 member states, provides these countries with a regional fi nancial assistance mechanism in the event of a liquidity crisis. The Asian vertical model of production appears to have reached its limit and is evolving towards a more “horizontal” model in terms of both production (substitutability of production processes as a result of the shift towards higher value-added activities) and consumption (expansion of the regional market linked to the growth potential of domestic Chinese demand). Regional monetary co-operation could therefore aim in the future at curbing intra-regional exchange rate fl uctuations in order to promote trade and investment within the region.

Patient safety indicators for England from hospital administrative data: case-control analysis and comparison with US data

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The Healthcare Commission received a small grant from the Health and Social Care Information Centre to support the initial recoding work

The Effects of Air and Underwater Blast on Composite Sandwich Panels and Tubular Laminate Structures

The resistance of glass-fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) sandwich panels and laminate tubes to blast in air and underwater environments has been studied. Procedures for monitoring the structural response of such materials during blast events have been devised. High-speed photography was employed during the air-blast loading of GFRP sandwich panels, in conjunction with digital image correlation (DIC), to monitor the deformation of these structures under shock loading. Failure mechanisms have been revealed by using DIC and confirmed in post-test sectioning. Strain gauges were used to monitor the structural response of similar sandwich materials and GFRP tubular laminates during underwater shocks. The effect of the backing medium (air or water) of the target facing the shock has been identified during these studies. Mechanisms of failure have been established such as core crushing, skin/core cracking, delamination and fibre breakage. Strain gauge data supported the mechanisms for such damage. These studies were part of a research programme sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) investigating blast loading of composite naval structures. The full-scale experimental results presented here will aid and assist in the development of analytical and computational models. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of support and boundary conditions with regards to blast resistant design