Market Integration: Case Studies of Structural Change

The grain/oilseed industry is undergoing considerable structural change through mergers and new value-added businesses, which raises price-related questions. We analyze the level of price integration prior to and following a merger between two grain firms and the start-up of a producer-owned ethanol facility. This research utilizes error correction vector autoregression analysis to compute market integration structural change effects. We find evidence that market integration initially increases with the merger, but deteriorates with time following the merger. We find no significant localized change in the level of price integration for the case of a new value-added business.consolidation, structural change, price integration, Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,

Industrial structural geology : principles, techniques and integration : an introduction

The authors wish to acknowledge the generous financial support provided in association with this volume to the Geological Society and the Petroleum Group by Badley Geoscience Ltd, BP, CGG Robertson, Dana Petroleum Ltd, Getech Group plc, Maersk Oil North Sea UK Ltd, Midland Valley Exploration Ltd, Rock Deformation Research (Schlumberger) and Borehole Image & Core Specialists (Wildcat Geoscience, Walker Geoscience and Prolog Geoscience). We would like to thank the fine team at the Geological Society’s Publishing House for the excellent support and encouragement that they have provided to the editors and authors of this Special Publication.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Deterministic Versus Stochastic Seasonal Fractional Integration and structural breaks

This paper considers a general model which allows for both deterministic and stochastic forms of seasonality, including fractional (stationary and nonstationary) orders of integration, and also incorporating endogenously determined structural breaks. Monte Carlo analysis shows that the suggested procedure performs well even in small samples, accurately capturing the seasonal properties of the series, and correctly detecting the break date. As an illustration, the model is estimated for four different US series (output, consumption, imports and exports). The results suggest that the seasonal patterns of these variables have changed over time: specifically, in the second subsample the systematic component of seasonality becomes insignificant, whilst the degree of persistence increases

MARKET INTEGRATION: CASE STUDIES OF STRUCTURAL CHANGE

The grain/oilseed industry is undergoing considerable structural change in the form of mergers and the addition of new processing facilities to add value beyond commodity grade. The rapid structural changes in this industry call into question the relevance of previous research conducted in these areas. Focusing on two structural change events in northeast Missouri as case studies provides an incisive glimpse at the larger impact of structural change on the grain/oilseed industry. This study addresses the merger of Archer Daniels Midland and Quincy Grain, and the opening of a producer-owned ethanol plant in northeast Missouri to determine if these structural change events altered pricing patterns and linkages in Missouri grain/oilseed markets, and assess the need for re-specification of conventional economic models for price analysis in cases of potential structural change. This research utilizes a three-tier statistical analysis of cointegration tests, Flexible Least Squares analysis, and impulse response functions derived from Vector Autoregressive modeling to investigate the Law of One Price and price relationships among four Missouri grain/oilseed markets. The results are consistent with the Law of One Price, supporting the ideology that markets work, and implying that localized structural change may not significantly affect research shelf-life.Ethanol, Consolidation, Structural Change, Industrial Organization,

Regional Integration: Whither Arab Free Trade Area?

My inquiry will assess why, many decades after first attempts of economic integration, Arab countries have not been more successful in emulating the success of the European Union, a paradigm of successful economic integration. Specifically, I will explore obstacles to Arab economic integration and address the political and economic factors that play a role to achieve this goal. The central hypothesis of this paper is that there must be fundamental structural changes in Arab economic integration agreements

Multiple Regime Shifts: The Influence of ASEAN Politics on Financial Integration within South-East Asia

For the last two decades, a key policy objective of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), to which it claims much success, has been the supra-national integration among the region’s financial markets. This paper critically appraises this claim by locating and estimating multiple structural breaks in two equity market-based indicators and by employing a method to examine the effects of the ASEAN decision-making regime on variations in South-East Asian equity prices. The main findings of the paper are that the majority of identified structural breaks coincide with regime shifts in the ASEAN decision-making mechanism but that the politics of the regimes has had little influence on supra-national integration of the region’s financial markets.ASEAN, equity prices, financial markets, integration, politics, structural breaks

Emerging Asia’s growth and integration: how autonomous are business cycles?

Against the background of the rapid integration of emerging Asia into the global economy, this paper investigates the role of domestic and external factors in driving individual emerging economies in Asia. We estimate VAR models for ten countries over the period 1979Q1- 2003Q4, controlling for external factors, and use sign restrictions to identify structural domestic shocks. Variance decompositions indicate that Asian emerging economies are to a large part driven by external developments, and even more so employing a more recent sample. We analyse to what extent structural domestic shocks exhibit a regional dimension by comparing shocks across countries using correlation and principal component analysis. The extent of regional co-movement between structural shocks is relatively limited. While the principal components analysis indicates a moderate increase in co-movement over time, the correlation analysis finds a decline. This may reflect a broadening of regional integration at the expense of bilateral economic ties. JEL Classification: F15, F02, F41Economic integration, International Business Cycles, sign restrictions, structural shocks

The evaluation of educational service integration in integrated virtual courses

The effectiveness of an integrated virtual course is determined by factors such as the navigability of the system. We argue that in a virtual course, which offers different educational services for different learning activities, the integration of services is a good indicator for the effectiveness of a virtual course infrastructure. We develop a set of metrics to measure the degree of integration of a virtual course. We combine structural metrics and an analysis of the student usage of the system in order to measure integration

Integration in the European Retail Banking Sector : Evidence from Deposit and Lending Rates

This paper investigates the degree of integration in the retail-banking sector for 15 European Union member states between the period 1991 to March 2008. In view of consolidating and creating a single market in their financial services sector, the EU has launched and implemented major initiatives over the past years. The wholesale banking sector has been studied extensively but the retail market to a much lesser extent. The difficulty in analysing the integration process in the banking market is linked to the heterogeneity that exists across the European countries with regards to factors such as risk attitudes, cultural differences, and the home-bias criteria. As a result, it is argued that any convergence process in the banking sector, if present, should rather be perceived as a long-run relationship. Consequently, cointegration analysis, a technique used to capture such long-term relationships between sets of variables is used to analyse the integration process in the EU retail-banking sector. The starting point in the empirical analysis involves conducting multiple structural break analysis. Given that during the period under investigation, there have been significant milestones in the history of the European single market, the deposit and lending rates corresponding to this period are likely to exhibit structural change. Moreover, the timing and pattern of structural break occurrence should also act as an indicator of retail banking integration. The next steps in the empirical analysis look at stationarity tests for both time series data and panel data on data series that are also individually demeaned so as to account for structural breaks. Finally, bivariate time-series cointegration analysis on each of the EU countries and a weighted European average rate is performed. The cointegration analysis is performed on both level and demeaned data

Variety gains of trade integration in a heterogeneous firm model

The present paper studies the variety gains from trade integration. Applying a heterogenous firm model we simulate trade liberalisation in alternative integration scenarios, where per unit trade costs, fixed trade costs and both of them are reduced. The main innovation of our paper is that we estimate the structural parameters of the underlying heterogenous firm model econometrically based on a unique firm level panel data, which contains more than 250,000 observations for exporting firms. Our results suggest that the variety gains from trade integration are substantial. Reducing trade barriers by 15 percent induces variety growth, as a result of which the gains from trade integration are up to 17 percent higher than classical trade models would predict.Variety gains, extensive margin, structural estimation, trade integration, heterogenous firms.