News-driven business cycles in small open economies

The focus of this paper is on news-driven business cycles in small open economies. We make two significant contributions. First, we develop a small open economy model where the presence of financial frictions permits the replication of business cycle co-movements in response to news shocks. Second, we use VAR analysis to identify news shocks using data on four advanced small open economies. We find that expected shocks about the future Total Factor Productivity generate business cycle co-movements in output, hours, consumption and investment. We also find that news shocks are associated with countercyclical current account dynamics. Our findings are robust across a number of alternative identification schemes

State dependence in labor market fluctuations

This paper documents state dependence in labor market uctuations. Using a Threshold Vector Autoregression model (TVAR), we establish that the unemployment rate, the job separation rate, and the job finding rate exhibit a larger response to productivity shocks during periods with low aggregate productivity. A Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model with endogenous job separation and on-the-job search replicates these empirical regularities well. We calibrate the model to match the standard deviation of the job-transition rates explained by productivity shocks in the TVAR, and show that the model explains 88 percent of the state dependence in the unemployment rate, 76 percent for the separation rate and 36 percent for the job finding rate. The key channel underpinning state dependence in both job separation and job finding rates is the interaction of the firm's reservation productivity level and the distribution of match-specific idiosyncratic productivity. Results are robust across several variations to the baseline model

A discussion on the appropriateness of the employment of the Complex Adaptive Systems theory for the research of Central Retail Locations

The aim of this conference paper is to explore the idea of researching, analysing, presenting, and most importantly understanding town-centres as a complex adaptive system (CAS). Numerous researchers, scholars and practitioners, have discussed and highlighted the anthropomorphic characteristics of town-centres; some making a linguistic transcendence and some others in their attempt to describe relationships that move beyond the traditional norms of organisations. Wrigley and Lambiri (2014, p.15) have stressed the emergence of “symbiotic relationships” between corporate retailers and local independent stores stating also the gap in the research that will assess this issue. In the same study they concluded (ibid) that town centres can be viewed as “highly complex ecosystems with myriad capacities to adjust to change”. Portas (2012, p.14) in her review on the future of the high-streets in a linguistic overrun she suggests that her vision is to “breathe life” back to the high-streets. The application of complexity theory in the organisational analysis is well-established however it has never been used to explore town-centre dynamics. This conceptual paper relates the fundamental ideas of complexity theory to town-centres and provides a framework for discussion of the systemic characteristics of stakeholders’ integration within them

CAC-TCP cross-layer interaction in a HAPS-satellite integrated scenario

The integration of a satellite system with a HAPS segment appears very suitable to provide communication services, including Internet access, for a large set of applications. In fact, the-satellite capability to provide wide coverage and broadband access can be enhanced by the use of cost-effective, mobile/portable and low-power consuming user terminals, when HAPS acts as an intermediate repeater. Moreover, also TCP-based applications, which suffer from long latency introduced by the satellite link and in general by errors, can get benefits in terms of end-to-end performance. In this frame, this paper deals with the introduction, on board the HAPS, of an efficient CAC scheme in order to guarantee an optimal utilization of the precious radio resources. In particular, we propose an innovative TCP driven CAC algorithm, which shall take into account not only the QoS requirements, but also TCP statistics obtained through a proxy installed on the HAPS. Results show that the overall system performance in terms of both average throughput and blocking probability is significantly improved

The impact of service quality on the patronage of pharmacies during economic crisis: evidence from a pilot study in Greece

This paper seeks to provide an initial account of the changes that happen in the Greek pharmacy sector since the proposed by the government deregulation of the sector. It further looks at the response of independent pharmacists to the changes that are in line to take place. Pharmacy retailing is defined by set of characteristics; scientific, vocational, and entrepreneurial; that makes it a very intriguing sector to research. The entrepreneurial shift of the pharmacists is identified as necessary and priorities for the transformation have been addressed. A qualitative research project was devised in order to collect data on the perceptions of the pharmacists on the deregulation of the sector and their response to the emerging landscape. The major finding of the project was the reported lack of entrepreneurial culture which stems from the absolute un-entrepreneurial business environment pharmacist developed and operated in the past and has a result the lack of confidence to make business decisions as they do not know how to analyse the environment and take advantage of the potential opportunities that emerge

Patronage patterns of the pharmacy consumers: A segmentation study in Greece

Pharmacy retailing is still being the only legal distribution channel for medicines in Greece however there is evidence that the deregulation of the distribution is imminent to happen and therefore knowledge on the how the consumers that use pharmacies are choosing among the already vastly congested competition. The density of the pharmacies in Greece is among the highest in the EU (Theodorakis, 2013) and this comes to an agreement with the reputation Greeks have to be very reliant to the healthcare providers. Never the less, the per capita expenditure on healthcare from 2009 to 2013 has decreased by a total of 21% (OECD, 2015) and this is reflected on the sales of pharmacies that declined that much that pharmacists struggle to keep them open (Karagiorgos, 2015). This paper considers what are the market segments in the market and what are the differences between the loyal and the random pharmacy consumers

Finding Good Attribute Subsets for Improved Decision Trees Using a Genetic Algorithm Wrapper; a Supervised Learning Application in the Food Business Sector for Wine Type Classification

This study aims to provide a method that will assist decision makers in managing large datasets, eliminating the decision risk and highlighting significant subsets of data with certain weight. Thus, binary decision tree (BDT) and genetic algorithm (GA) methods are combined using a wrapping technique. The BDT algorithm is used to classify data in a tree structure, while the GA is used to identify the best attribute combinations from a set of possible combinations, referred to as generations. The study seeks to address the problem of overfitting that may occur when classifying large datasets by reducing the number of attributes used in classification. Using the GA, the number of selected attributes is minimized, reducing the risk of overfitting. The algorithm produces many attribute sets that are classified using the BDT algorithm and are assigned a fitness number based on their accuracy. The fittest set of attributes, or chromosomes, as well as the BDTs, are then selected for further analysis. The training process uses the data of a chemical analysis of wines grown in the same region but derived from three different cultivars. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of this innovative approach in defining certain ingredients and weights of wine’s origin

The anatomy of small open economy productivity trends

We estimate a novel empirical (state-space) model to study the effects of international and domes- tic technology trend shocks on the UK economy. We jointly identify anticipated and unanticipated domestic and international technological innovations arising from changes in total factor productivity (TFP) and investment specific technology (IST). The long-run restrictions used to jointly identify the structural trends in the data are informed by a standard two-country structural model. Our results point to large and persistent swings in productivity. International non-stationary TFP and IST shocks explain about 30% and 24% of the variance of UK GDP, respectively. UK-specific TFP and IST shocks are somewhat less important, but still a relevant factor. Notably, it is the anticipated components of these international and domestic productivity shocks, rather than their unanticipated counterparts, which account for the bulk of the volatility in the data. We dissect the historical role of different shocks as drivers of UK labor productivity growth. We find that a decline in the contribution of international IST shocks, combined with weak domestic TFP growth, can explain the widely documented slowdown in UK labor productivity after the financial crisis. A standard two-country model implies widely-used restrictions on the relative price of investment which we find to be inconsistent with our empirical evidence that relies on a minimum of structure. We show that a two-sector version of this model with adjustment cost in investment and costly sectoral labor reallocation can capture the empirical dynamics