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Oil is crucial for industrial development. This paper investigates the impacts of oil price changes on China's industrial growth and examines whether the impacts are asymmetric. The estimations can help determine how oil price shocks are transmitted throughout the economy.

This paper adopts West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price and industrial sector output and uses monthly data. The recently developed nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model is employed to illustrate the effects in both the short term and long term. Importantly, under NARDL framework, this paper examines whether the impacts are asymmetric by decomposing oil price shocks into their positive and negative partial sums.

The empirical results prove clear evidence of asymmetries in the short term, long term or both terms. Specifically, some sectors benefit from, rather than suffer from higher oil prices, even some energy-intensive sectors, i.e. C31 (Smelting and Pressing of Ferrous Metals) and C32 (Smelting and Pressing of Non-ferrous Metals). However, the effects on some other energy-intensive sectors appear insignificant. Additionally, the results prove significantly negative responses in some sectors in the long term, and most of these sectors are in the top half of the ranking by energy consumptions.

This paper studies the economic responses at a disaggregated level by employing industry-level data. NARDL method is used to decompose oil price changes into their increases and decreases and investigate the asymmetries in the impacts of oil price changes.

This study aims to apply unit root test to investigate the behavior of Chinese firms toward their leverage policy. The study is based on two influential and competing theories of capital structure.

This study applies unit root test to investigate the behavior of Chinese firms toward their leverage policy. The study is based on two influential and competing theories of capital structure. Trade off theory advocates that firms have a target level of leverage ratio and that firms try to achieve that optimal leverage ratio, whereas pecking order theory argues that firms have no target level of leverage and that they follow a specific pattern of leverage. For this purpose, this study applies a Fisher type unit root test to 12,808 firm level observations. The data are unbalanced and cover a period from 1991 to 2014.

The results reveal the presence of a stationary behavior across short-term, long-term and total leverage policies. For short-term leverage policy, 21 per cent firms show stationary behavior, while for long-term, 20 per cent show a targeting behavior; for the total leverage policy 17 per cent of firms are found to follow a tradeoff model. To make the findings more interesting sample was further classified into profit and loss making firms. The study finds that loss making firms do not follow a target level of leverage in China. Furthermore, unit root is applied to all firms before and after crises-2008. It is revealed that stationary behavior is more prevalent before crises-2008.

This study is highly important from the point of view that it quantifies firms into distinct categories of following specific model of capital structure. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the findings of this study add to current research knowledge about Chinese firms with respect to adjustment behavior toward a target capital structure.

This study first replicates, then perturbs, the centipede game as implemented by McKelvey and Palfrey (1992). It is thus both a replication study and an original research study. We use controlled laboratory experiments, with computer interfaces for each treatment, anonymous round-robin matching among the subjects across rounds, multiple (10) rounds within each treatment, and incremental changes between adjacent treatments allowing for an assessment of effects at the margin of different game configurations. We find unraveling to the subgame perfect equilibrium somewhat faster than did McKelvey and Palfrey (1992), when using their exact design. Perturbations to that design show that setting non-taker payoffs to zero induces earlier unraveling, as does the use of higher stakes (as in Murphy, Rapoport, and Parco (2006), and Rapoport, Stein, Parco, and Nicholas (2003), respectively). Other, subsequent perturbations show: that there is at most a subtle effect associated with using a 10-second timer with a default move, relative to untimed active moves; and that clock format versus tree format has a minimal effect in common information, unchanging payoff-parameterization environments. We verify the robustness of some key past findings in real-time games. We also explore in a common information environment, the effect of design features previously used in independent private values settings; here we find new evidence that features which might modulate information acquisition and/or processing in an independent private values setting may not restrict behavior in a common information setting.

The authors propose an Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for estimating a class of linear sum assignment problems (LSAP; the discrete case of the optimal transport problems). Prominent examples include multi-item auctions and mergers in industrial organizations. This contribution is to decompose the joint likelihood of the allocation and prices by exploiting the primal and dual linear programming formulation of the underlying LSAP. Our decomposition, coupled with the data augmentation technique, leads to an MCMC sampler without a repeated model-solving phase.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the fine wine market is efficient between homogeneous lots and heterogeneous lots.

Auction price data for homogeneous (or solid) lots of fine wines was analyzed to create price prediction models. Those models were used to predict the expected auction price for the bottles within heterogeneous lots. Lastly, models were created to explain and predict the differences between expected and realized prices for heterogenous wine lots.

The results show that large inefficiencies exist. The more complex and expensive the heterogeneous lot, the greater the discount relative to what would have been realized if the bottles had been sold individually. This discount can exceed 50% of the expected auction price.

Heterogeneous lots may arise as a practical requirement from the auction house. Restaurant buyers probably have little interest in such lots because of the inclusion of wines the restaurant will be unable to sell. Collectors may be uniquely positioned to benefit from this price discount.

These results are unique in the literature, because the price dynamics of heterogeneous (or mixed) lots of fine wines have not previously been studied.

The importance of the market for corporate control as a disciplining device has received considerable research interest in recent years. Since the advent of event study methodology pioneered by Fama, Fisher, Jensen and Roll (1969), and the availability of machine readable returns data from the Center of Research on Security Prices, the effects of various control related corporate events have been well documented. Jensen and Ruback (1983) in their review of the empirical literature on the market for corporate control report that the findings in general support the hypothesis that outside takeover mechanisms do act efficiently to limit managerial departures from the objective of maximising the economic well‐being of its shareholders. They further point out that studies using the event study methodology cannot distinguish between the different sources of gains in the takeover process, namely those due to synergies, or those due to lack of efficient management in the acquired firm.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a synthetic evaluation index system of new socialist countryside (NSC) development at county level in China, and by which to evaluate the level of NSC construction among different regions in China. Then, some problems of rural development can be found and corresponding measures can be proposed, which could provide references for policymaking.

First, from agricultural, rural and farmers' perspective, a preliminary index system which containing 44 indicators was put forward. Then, combining with a series of subjective and objective indicator screening methods, such as fuzzy synthetic evaluation, clustering analysis, correlation and variation coefficient analysis, the final index system containing 22 indicators was established. Third, combining with factor analysis, the final index system was used to evaluate the level of NSC construction in 28 counties of China in 2007. Finally, we calculated district factor scores by a model and gave an aggregate index ranking of different regions.

NSC construction at county level is not well developed in China and there are significant geographical differences among different districts. First, NSC construction in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou is relatively better. Second, NSC construction of East China is better than that of North China and Central China. Northeast of China is better than Southwest and Northwest. Third, NSC construction in municipalities is higher than non‐municipalities. Rural development in Western regions of China needs to be paid special attention.

A final evaluation index system including 22 indicators was designed. These indicators are complete, independent, weakly correlative and stable. The index system can be further applied to evaluate other regions' NSC development. The evaluation results can provide useful references for NSC reform in the whole nation.

THIS report gives a general solution of the problem of the calculation of the Glauert loading of wings with discontinuities of incidence. The three existing variations of the original theory, the Glauert solution, the Gates' least squares solution, and the Lotz' solution, are not entirely satisfactory and may involve a considerable amount of labour. The present solution divides the Fourier series representing the circulation into two parts: (a) a standard solution representing the discontinuities, which includes the slowly convergent part of the solution, and which is expressible as a precise infinite series dependent only upon the position of discontinuities along the span, and (b) a secondary solution due to plan form, aspect ratio, slope of section lift curve, and so on, which is the quickly convergent part of the solution and usually requires a terminated scries of only from four to six terms. Once the standard solution has been computed, the remaining work is little more than for the standard Glauert solution for a flat wing.

The aim of this case study is to review the in-depth (and successful) investigation carried out in 2016 by the Italian Competition Authority [Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM)] on a nation-wide (multi-lot) framework agreement for consulting services. We also critically assess the tender design and emphasize which dimensions may have facilitated the uncovered anticompetitive agreement.

The case study borrows from the official Antitrust Authorities’ findings and from the tender documents to paint a comprehensive picture of the cartel’s strategy.

The case study emphasizes that AGCM’s the “conjectured logic” of the cartel’s behaviour (endogenous evidence) did coincide with those pieces of evidence seized by police forces for criminal crimes at the cartel members’ premises (exogeneous evidence). This infrequent feature of bidding rings investigations underlines the importance of theoretical as well as practical analyses of cartels’ behaviour in public procurement markets.

As the antitrust investigation was triggered by a confidential report sent by the awarding authority (Consip, the Italian national central purchasing body), the case study also emphasizes the importance of informal as well as formal co-operation between awarding authorities, especially central purchasing bodies, and competition authorities.

The case study belongs to a small set of applied research papers attempting at building a bridge between public procurement design, particularly of sizeable framework agreements, and the mechanisms devised by cartels to “game” procurement procedures. All this is accomplished by looking at all design dimensions that were exploited by cartel’s members.

Libraries need to develop information processing systems for evaluation, budgeting, planning, and operations. Electronic spreadsheets lend themselves to a variety of applications, but are time‐consuming to create. A model template and macros that can be used in many different types of library data analysis have been developed here. The procedures demonstrated here can build an essential set of tools for meeting fundamental goals of administrative efficiency, effective use of library resources, staff motivation, and rational policy making.