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Book part
Publication date: 30 August 2019

Joshua C. C. Chan, Liana Jacobi and Dan Zhu

Vector autoregressions (VAR) combined with Minnesota-type priors are widely used for macroeconomic forecasting. The fact that strong but sensible priors can substantially improve…

Abstract

Vector autoregressions (VAR) combined with Minnesota-type priors are widely used for macroeconomic forecasting. The fact that strong but sensible priors can substantially improve forecast performance implies VAR forecasts are sensitive to prior hyperparameters. But the nature of this sensitivity is seldom investigated. We develop a general method based on Automatic Differentiation to systematically compute the sensitivities of forecasts – both points and intervals – with respect to any prior hyperparameters. In a forecasting exercise using US data, we find that forecasts are relatively sensitive to the strength of shrinkage for the VAR coefficients, but they are not much affected by the prior mean of the error covariance matrix or the strength of shrinkage for the intercepts.

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Topics in Identification, Limited Dependent Variables, Partial Observability, Experimentation, and Flexible Modeling: Part A
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78973-241-2

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Book part
Publication date: 11 August 2021

Amanda DiGioia

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Gender and Parenting in the Worlds of Alien and Blade Runner
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83982-941-3

Book part
Publication date: 31 May 2016

Clement Kong Wing Chow, Michael Ka Yiu Fung and Japhet Sebastian Law

This chapter studies the technical efficiencies of Chinese airports by using a meta-frontier production function model which accounts for airports in different regions accessing…

Abstract

This chapter studies the technical efficiencies of Chinese airports by using a meta-frontier production function model which accounts for airports in different regions accessing different technologies. Our empirical results show that the technical efficiency scores of airports and provincial output in the coastal region are higher than their counterparts in the inland region. However, the technical efficiency scores of airports and provincial output in inland region are steadily increasing while the counterparts of airports and provincial output in coastal region are slowly declining. In addition, our analysis of provincial efficiency changes shows that airport productivity has a positive and statistically significant effect on the technical changes of provincial output. Our results partially confirm the success of the government policy of promoting airport construction and development in the western inland region.

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Airline Efficiency
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78560-940-4

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Traffic Safety and Human Behavior
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78635-222-4

Book part
Publication date: 13 September 2018

Samane Maroufi, Claudia A. Echeverria, Farshid Pahlevani and Veena Sahajwalla

Every year, tens of millions of the 1.4 billion cars on the world’s roads are decommissioned. While the ferrous and other metals that constitute about 75% of a vehicle by weight…

Abstract

Every year, tens of millions of the 1.4 billion cars on the world’s roads are decommissioned. While the ferrous and other metals that constitute about 75% of a vehicle by weight can be readily and profitably recycled, the remaining mix of plastics, glass, composites, complex materials, fragments and contaminants are mainly destined for landfill as automotive shredder residue (ASR). For every car, approximately 100–200 kg of ASR is disposed of in landfill, posing a growing technical and environmental challenge worldwide. The recovery of the ASR for high-end application is the focus of this study, aiming to optimise the use of these valuable resources and minimise the extractive pressure for raw materials, a future green manufacturing, contributing towards a zero waste circular economy. As the dissolution of carbon into iron is a key step in the manufacture of iron-carbon alloys, the feasibility of utilizing the waste polymers within ASR as sources of carbon in different areas of pyrometallurgical processing was investigated. Polypropylene and rubber, in a blend with metallurgical coke, were used as carbonaceous substrates and the slag-foaming phenomenon was investigated via the sessile drop technique in an argon environment at 1,550°C. The results indicated the rubber/coke blend achieved significantly better foaming behaviour, and the PP/coke blend exhibited a moderate improvement in slag foaming, in comparison to 100% metallurgical coke. The overall results indicated the incorporation of ASR had significant improvement in foaminess behaviour, increasing furnace efficiency.

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Unmaking Waste in Production and Consumption: Towards the Circular Economy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-620-4

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Book part
Publication date: 8 April 2024

Amaresh Panda and Sanjay Mohapatra

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The Online Healthcare Community
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83549-141-6

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Gender and Parenting in the Worlds of Alien and Blade Runner
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83982-941-3

Book part
Publication date: 16 December 2009

Yanqin Fan and Sang Soo Park

In this paper, we study partial identification of the distribution of treatment effects of a binary treatment for ideal randomized experiments, ideal randomized experiments with a…

Abstract

In this paper, we study partial identification of the distribution of treatment effects of a binary treatment for ideal randomized experiments, ideal randomized experiments with a known value of a dependence measure, and for data satisfying the selection-on-observables assumption, respectively. For ideal randomized experiments, (i) we propose nonparametric estimators of the sharp bounds on the distribution of treatment effects and construct asymptotically valid confidence sets for the distribution of treatment effects; (ii) we propose bias-corrected estimators of the sharp bounds on the distribution of treatment effects; and (iii) we investigate finite sample performances of the proposed confidence sets and the bias-corrected estimators via simulation.

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Nonparametric Econometric Methods
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-624-3

Book part
Publication date: 24 November 2022

Chin-Pang Lei

With its worldwide fame for making action films, Hong Kong cinema has been defined as masculine. Action films, including the costumed martial arts films and the modern gangster…

Abstract

With its worldwide fame for making action films, Hong Kong cinema has been defined as masculine. Action films, including the costumed martial arts films and the modern gangster films, have been a major genre in Hong Kong cinema from the 1960s on. Despite the dominant masculinity, women still play significant roles in some of these films. In fact, fighting women leave footprints in the history of Hong Kong cinema, which precede their counterparts in the West and even provide models for Hollywood after 2000.

This chapter focuses on the female characters portrayed by the acclaimed Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, whose works have an ambiguous connection to mainstream genres. He modifies Hong Kong action films and creates unconventional female characters such as the drug dealer in Chungking Express (1994), the killer dispatcher in Fallen Angels (1995), the swordswoman in Ashes of Time (1994), and the kung fu master in The Grandmaster (2013). Wong's films have been mush discussed in academia, but the gender images therein are quite ignored. With high intertextuality, these characters are used to question mainstream action films and redefine women's roles in male's cinematic space. In addition, via the writing of these women, Wong constructs an open and ambivalent post-colonial Hong Kong identity. This paper contextualises the figures of sword-wielding and gun-shooting women and examines how Wong Kar-wai deploys these images to articulate the cultural identity of a post-colonial city.

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Gender and Action Films 1980-2000
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-506-7

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