China's Capital and Productivity Measurement Using Financial Resources

This paper constructs China's capital stock, which is used in conjunction with a labor variable to estimate a Cobb-Douglas production function for the Chinese economy. Two panels of data are used one for capital formation and one for sources of investment finance. Both national and provincial data are used for these two panels, thus giving a total of four capital-stock series. The Cobb-Douglas estimates show that China's total factor productivity was about 3.4 percent in the post-reform years. Productivity of coastal provinces is higher than inner provinces. Among the various sources of investment finance, foreign direct investment is more efficient than state-funded capital stock.China economic reform; provincial growth and productivity; financial resources

Identifying the Signs of Currency Speculation in Hong Kong's Linked exchange Rate

This paper identifies the ex ante factors of currency speculation based on the experience of Hong Kong’s three episodes in 1988, 1998 and 2007. The dynamic conditional correlation models are used to study the inter-temporal interactions among the Hang Seng Index, Hang Seng Index futures and exchange rate difference. The logistic model is applied to study the probability of currency speculation. The empirical results indicate that unusual movements in the exchange rate difference, Hang Seng Index premium and open interest of futures contracts can be found in the period prior to and during currency speculations. In addition, the conditional correlation between stock market and exchange rate market declined sharply during the periods of currency speculation. The paper traces the disposition of the speculators.Currency speculation, linked exchange rate, Hong Kong

The Optimal Level and Impact of Internal Factors on Growth

This paper empirically uses data from the world economy to show that performance of domestic factors are equally important to external factors when comes to growth. Various external and domestic factors are used to construct two separate indices and the principal component method is applied in the analysis. The empirical results show that given a different level of performance in the economy’s external factors, a higher performance in the internal factors will produce a higher growth rate. When the performance of an economy’s internal factors is extremely low, it would be appropriate for that economy first to improve its internal factors.Growth, external factors, domestic factors

Analyzing the Kuznets Relationship using Nonparametric and Semiparametric Methods

This paper studies the income inequality and economic development relationship by using unbalanced panel data of OECD and non-OECD countries for the period 1962 - 2003. The nonparametric estimation results show that income inequality in OECD countries are almost on the backside of the inverted-U relationship, while non-OECD countries are approximately on the foreside, except that the relationship in both country groups shows an upturn at a high level of development. Development has an indirect effect on inequality through control variables, but the modes are different in the two country groups. The model specification tests show that the relationship is not necessarily captured by the conventional quadratic function. The cubic and fourth-degree polynomials, respectively, fit the OECD and non-OECD country groups best. The finding is robust regardless whether the specification uses control variables. Development plays a dominant role in mitigating inequality.Kuznets inverted-U; Nonparametric and semiparametric models; Unbalanced panel data

A histogram-free multicanonical Monte Carlo algorithm for the basis expansion of density of states

We report a new multicanonical Monte Carlo (MC) algorithm to obtain the density of states (DOS) for physical systems with continuous state variables in statistical mechanics. Our algorithm is able to obtain an analytical form for the DOS expressed in a chosen basis set, instead of a numerical array of finite resolution as in previous variants of this class of MC methods such as the multicanonical (MUCA) sampling and Wang-Landau (WL) sampling. This is enabled by storing the visited states directly in a data set and avoiding the explicit collection of a histogram. This practice also has the advantage of avoiding undesirable artificial errors caused by the discretization and binning of continuous state variables. Our results show that this scheme is capable of obtaining converged results with a much reduced number of Monte Carlo steps, leading to a significant speedup over existing algorithms.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Paper accepted in the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference (PASC '17), June 26 to 28, 2017, Lugano, Switzerlan

A Unified Model for Opinion Target Extraction and Target Sentiment Prediction

Target-based sentiment analysis involves opinion target extraction and target sentiment classification. However, most of the existing works usually studied one of these two sub-tasks alone, which hinders their practical use. This paper aims to solve the complete task of target-based sentiment analysis in an end-to-end fashion, and presents a novel unified model which applies a unified tagging scheme. Our framework involves two stacked recurrent neural networks: The upper one predicts the unified tags to produce the final output results of the primary target-based sentiment analysis; The lower one performs an auxiliary target boundary prediction aiming at guiding the upper network to improve the performance of the primary task. To explore the inter-task dependency, we propose to explicitly model the constrained transitions from target boundaries to target sentiment polarities. We also propose to maintain the sentiment consistency within an opinion target via a gate mechanism which models the relation between the features for the current word and the previous word. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and our framework achieves consistently superior results.Comment: AAAI 201

The Changing Trade and Revealed Comparative Advantages of Asian and Latin American Manufacture Exports

Changes in comparative advantage should reflect changes in factor endowment, but increasingly, changes in trade policies also affect a region's trade performance. Based on the arguments in Balassa's stages of comparative advantage thesis, this paper looks at the performance of manufacture exports in a number of Asian and Latin American economies over the period 1981-1997 and examines the revealed comparative advantage indices between economies in East Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Although the RCA measurement may not distinguish between the factor endowment effects from the trade policy effect, we argue that RCA measures provide indication on the movement in a region's comparative advantage. The evidence strongly suggests that despite the strong export performance experienced by East Asian economies, they are losing their comparative advantage to the lower-tier economies in Southeast Asia and Latin America.International Trade; Revealed Comparative Advantage; Manufacture Exports

The Commutative Effect and Casuality of Openness and Indigenous Factors Among World Economies

The paper studies the commutative and causality relationship between economic openness and indigenous factors. The construction of the Openness Index and the Indigenous Index provides a measure on the extent of openness and indigenous development among world economies. The two indices are used to study their commutative effect and causality. The empirical findings show that there is a positive and significant static effect of openness on indigenous factors and vice versa; however the latter is larger. There are bi-directional dynamic causality relationships between openness and indigenous factors. Indigenous factors help to forecast openness factors and vice versa.Openness, indigeneity, panel data model, commutative effect, causality

Productivity and Manufacture Export Causality among World Regions: 1989-1999

This paper examines the causality relationships between manufacturing exports and productivity for five industry groups and six world regions for the period 1989-1999. Productivity is estimated by using value-added figures, and manufacture export data are adjusted by the revealed comparative advantage index. The causality tests between export and factor productivity concluded that the more industrialized European economies are more export-driven than productivity-driven than the other less industrialized European economies. East Asia economies showed improvements in both export and productivity, and the United States had an advantage in productivity and a balance growth in trade. The export performance of countries in South Asia and South East Asia were average, though their productivity has improved. Latin American countries are still in the exporting stage.Total factor productivity, revealed comparative advantage, causality