Global Gains from Liberalising Trade in Telecommunications and Financial Services

This paper uses a general equilibrium model to assess the effects of liberalising trade in telecommunications and financial services for 19 regions of the world. Results suggest that economies gain from removing barriers to the establishment of new operations (domestic or foreign), and by liberalising the operations of existing operators. For the world as a whole, the one-off gains are estimated to be at least 0.2 per cent of combined GNP, or about US$50 billion.trade in services - telecommunications - finance - financial services - general agreement on trade in services - GATS - trade liberalisation - global

Distributional Effects of Changes in Australian Infrastructure Industries during the 1990s

During the 1990s, reforms and other developments improved productivity and reduced prices in Australian infrastructure services. These changes raised the average incomes of Australian households. Household incomes increased in every jurisdiction and in every decile of the income distribution. Changes in the electricity and telecommunications industries dominated distributional outcomes. The main sources of changes were productivity improvements and lower real prices. There was a mix of direct price effects, indirect price effects and income effects. Direct price effects - real prices paid by households for most infrastructure services declined. Low income households gained proportionately more from such declines than high income households. Indirect price effects - decreasing infrastructure prices lowered costs for industry and, consequently, output prices fell. This reduced households’ expenditure and the cost of Australia’s exports. Output increased in some industries. This increased the demand for other inputs which, in turn, led to wage increases in some occupations and increased returns to capital. This led to costs and prices rising, and output falling, in some industries. Income effects - wages increased most for occupations that are more heavily represented in high income households. High income households also receive a large proportion of returns to capital, which also increased. Low income households that do not rely on wage incomes were not affected directly by the changes in wages. Overall, the effect on household income distribution was small, slightly favouring more affluent households, because increases in factor incomes (wages and returns to capital) dominated. The views expressed in this paper are those of the staff involved and do not necessarily reflect those of the Productivity Commission.microeconomic reform; economic modelling; utilities; urban transport; telecommunications

Providing Duty-Free Access to Australian Markets for Least-Developed COuntries: a General Equilibrium Analysis

The Doha ministerial declaration commits industrialised countries to liberalising access for least-developed countries (LDCs) to their markets. Preferential trade policies have diverse impacts on the initiating country and its trading partners. These effects are of concern to scholars and policy makers. We use Australia as a case study to quantify the direct and indirect effects of providing preferential access to LDC imports entering Australian markets, using a global general equilibrium model of the world economy. LDCs are projected to benefit; Australia is predicted to lose, reflecting the dominance of trade diversion over trade creation effects and adverse terms of trade effects. However, the magnitude of the adverse effect on Australia is small. If one was to view this initiative as an exercise in foreign aid, it suggests that Australia can provide a significant benefit to the poorest nations with which it trades, at almost no cost to itself.economic development, numerical simulation, preferential trading arrangements, trade policy

Armington Parameter Estimation for a Computable General Equilibrium Model: A Database Consistent Approach

Substitution elasticities in policy-oriented computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are key parameters for model results since they determine behaviour in these models. As Dawkins et al. (2001) observe, the current situation with regard to the elasticities available for use in these models is poor. We focus on an important type of elasticity that is widely used in CGE models with international trade: the so-called ‘Armington’ elasticities (Armington, 1969). These elasticities are well known for their critical role in determining model results. We present an alternative approach to quantifying Armington elasticities which is consistent across historical databases. The approach is used to derive elasticities from successive databases of a commonly-used global CGE model, the GTAP model.Armington assumption, computable general equilibrium models, estimating Armington paprmeters

Combination of Multiple Bipartite Ranking for Web Content Quality Evaluation

Web content quality estimation is crucial to various web content processing applications. Our previous work applied Bagging + C4.5 to achive the best results on the ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge 2010, which is the comibination of many point-wise rankinig models. In this paper, we combine multiple pair-wise bipartite ranking learner to solve the multi-partite ranking problems for the web quality estimation. In encoding stage, we present the ternary encoding and the binary coding extending each rank value to $L - 1$ (L is the number of the different ranking value). For the decoding, we discuss the combination of multiple ranking results from multiple bipartite ranking models with the predefined weighting and the adaptive weighting. The experiments on ECML/PKDD 2010 Discovery Challenge datasets show that \textit{binary coding} + \textit{predefined weighting} yields the highest performance in all four combinations and furthermore it is better than the best results reported in ECML/PKDD 2010 Discovery Challenge competition.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

Influence of Reciprocal links in Social Networks

In this Letter, we empirically study the influence of reciprocal links, in order to understand its role in affecting the structure and function of directed social networks. Experimental results on two representative datesets, Sina Weibo and Douban, demonstrate that the reciprocal links indeed play a more important role than non-reciprocal ones in both spreading information and maintaining the network robustness. In particular, the information spreading process can be significantly enhanced by considering the reciprocal effect. In addition, reciprocal links are largely responsible for the connectivity and efficiency of directed networks. This work may shed some light on the in-depth understanding and application of the reciprocal effect in directed online social networks

A FRESH PERSPECTIVE ON U.S. MUTUAL FUNDS’ PERFORMANCE ATTRIBUTION, FACTOR MODEL AND QMJ

In this paper we evaluate the performance of the US mutual fund industry over the past 15 years, using a novel methodology developed by AQR Management’s Quality Minus Junk paper (2013). We augment the standard regression models of Fama-French used in the literatures with a new factor, the Quality Minus Junk factor, which is a quality-ranking factor developed by the AQR Management. (Quality Minus Junk) 2013 Previously, conflicting evidence was recorded with regard to the merits of the mutual fund industry, and we believe this could be a result of the preceding researches were constructed based on the Fama–French three-factor model (FFM) and its various variations. Despite the FFM’s prominent position in the asset-pricing field, it is subject to one critical limitation when it comes to evaluating active returns; no meaningful factor to directly quantify and evaluate the effects of active returns, as all existing factors are systematic in nature while active returns are idiosyncratic in nature largely. By incorporating the QMJ factor in the FFM framework, we hope to help investors better understanding their actively managed portfolios, as this unique factor is constructed based on four profoundly used fundamental metrics by the investment industry. We are still unable to use this factor to underpin the mutual industry as our results exhibit inconsistencies in the QMJ loadings despite QMJ’s strong statistic and theatrical supports. Adding the Market-Factor results in the QMJ factor insignificant 70% of the time, adding more of the standard-factors we see that only 50% of the time the QMJ loadings are significant, around 40% of the time the QMJ loadings are in the negative zone. Therefore, we believe this shows inconsistence in QMJ’s factor loadings. Furthermore, we identified consistent alphas (intercepts) in our regressions and we believe that combining Fama-French and QMJ factor still cannot explain all returns variations

The first Dirichlet eigenvalue of bicyclic graphs

summary:In this paper, we have investigated some properties of the first Dirichlet eigenvalue of a bicyclic graph with boundary condition. These results can be used to characterize the extremal bicyclic graphs with the smallest first Dirichlet eigenvalue among all the bicyclic graphs with a given graphic bicyclic degree sequence with minor conditions. Moreover, the extremal bicyclic graphs with the smallest first Dirichlet eigenvalue among all the bicycle graphs with fixed $k$ interior vertices of degree at least 3 are obtained