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Threshold Effects (threshold + effects)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting71%

Selected Abstracts

Trends in the state of nature and their implications for human well-being

ECOLOGY LETTERS, Issue 11 2005
Andrew Balmford
Abstract Two major international initiatives , the Convention on Biological Diversity's target to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment , raise the profile of ecological data on the changing state of nature and its implications for human well-being. This paper is intended to provide a broad overview of current knowledge of these issues. Information on changes in the status of species, size of populations, and extent and condition of habitats is patchy, with little data available for many of the taxa, regions and habitats of greatest importance to the delivery of ecosystem services. However, what we do know strongly suggests that, while exceptions exist, the changes currently underway are for the most part negative, anthropogenic in origin, ominously large and accelerating. The impacts of these changes on human society are idiosyncratic and patchily understood, but for the most part also appear to be negative and substantial. Forecasting future changes is limited by our poor understanding of the cascading impacts of change within communities, of threshold effects, of interactions between the drivers of change, and of linkages between the state of nature and human well-being. In assessing future science needs, we not only see a strong role for ecological data and theory, but also believe that much closer collaboration with social and earth system scientists is essential if ecology is to have a strong bearing on policy makers. [source]

Financial integration, capital mobility, and income convergence

ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 58 2009
Abdul Abiad
Summary Recent studies have found that capital moves ,uphill' from poor to rich countries, and brings little or no growth dividend when it does flow into poor economies. We show that Europe does not conform to this paradigm. In the European experience of financial integration, capital has flown from rich to poor countries, and such inflows have been associated with significant acceleration of income convergence. Analysing broader samples of countries, we find that ,downhill' capital flows tend to be observed above certain thresholds in institutional quality and financial integration. But Europe remains different even when allowing for such threshold effects, and its experience is similar to that of interstate flows within the United States. Our findings are consistent with the notion that financial diversification reduces countries' incentives to save in order to self-insure against specific shocks. ,Abdul Abiad, Daniel Leigh and Ashoka Mody [source]

Measurement non-invariance of DSM-IV narcissistic personality disorder criteria across age and sex in a population-based sample of Norwegian twins

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF METHODS IN PSYCHIATRIC RESEARCH, Issue 3 2010
Thomas S. Kubarych
Abstract We investigated measurement non-invariance of DSM-IV narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) criteria across age and sex in a population-based cohort sample of 2794 Norwegian twins. Age had a statistically significant effect on the factor mean for NPD. Sex had a statistically significant effect on the factor mean and variance. Controlling for these factor level effects, item-level analysis indicated that the criteria were functioning differently across age and sex. After correcting for measurement differences at the item level, the latent factor mean effect for age was no longer statistically significant. The mean difference for sex remained statistically significant after correcting for item threshold effects. The results indicate that DSM-IV NPD criteria perform differently in males and females and across age. Differences in diagnostic rates across groups may not be valid without correcting for measurement non-invariance. [source]

Asymmetry in the link between the yield spread and industrial production: threshold effects and forecasting

JOURNAL OF FORECASTING, Issue 5 2004
Ivan Paya
Abstract We analyse the nonlinear behaviour of the information content in the spread for future real economic activity. The spread linearly predicts one-year-ahead real growth in nine industrial production sectors of the USA and four of the UK over the last 40 years. However, recent investigations on the spread,real activity relation have questioned both its linear nature and its time-invariant framework. Our in-sample empirical evidence suggests that the spread,real activity relationship exhibits asymmetries that allow for different predictive power of the spread when past spread values were above or below some threshold value. We then measure the out-of-sample forecast performance of the nonlinear model using predictive accuracy tests. The results show that significant improvement in forecasting accuracy, at least for one-step-ahead forecasts, can be obtained over the linear model. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

A joint test of market power, menu costs, and currency invoicing

AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2009
Jean-Philippe Gervais
Exchange rate pass-through; Currency invoicing; Menu costs; Threshold estimation Abstract This article investigates exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) and currency invoicing decisions of Canadian pork exporters in the presence of menu costs. It is shown that when export prices are negotiated in the exporter's currency, menu costs cause threshold effects in the sense that there are bounds within (outside of) which price adjustments are not (are) observed. Conversely, the pass-through is not interrupted by menu costs when export prices are denominated in the importer's currency. The empirical model focuses on pork meat exports from two Canadian provinces to the U.S. and Japan. Hansen's (2000) threshold estimation procedure is used to jointly test for currency invoicing and incomplete pass-through in the presence of menu costs. Inference is conducted using the bootstrap with pre-pivoting methods to deal with nuisance parameters. The existence of menu cost is supported by the data in three of the four cases. It also appears that Quebec pork exporters have some market power and invoice in Japanese yen their exports to Japan. Manitoba exporters also seem to follow the same invoicing strategy, but their ability to increase their profit margin in response to large enough own-currency devaluations is questionable. Our currency invoicing results for sales to the U.S. are consistent with subsets of Canadian firms using either the Canadian or U.S. currency. [source]

INCOME THRESHOLDS AND GROWTH CONVERGENCE: A PANEL DATA APPROACH,

THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL, Issue 2 2006
TSUNG-WU HO
This paper applies a dynamic panel model to explore whether the low-income countries ,catch up' with the rich ones by examining the threshold effects of per capita income on the convergence behavior of growth rates. Empirical evidence from 121 Penn World Table economies and 48 US states indicates that income levels have substantial impacts on the convergence behavior. First, convergence is insignificantly found in the lowest-income regimes, which is interpreted that these poor countries persist at their income levels, which cause possible income barriers-to-growth. That is, the poor countries may not be able to catch up with the rich ones easily, unless an income threshold is overcome. Second, convergence is significantly found beyond the lowest-income regime, implying that the low-income countries catch up with the rich. We conclude that when a certain income threshold is overcome, the poor countries catch up with the rich ones; hence a subsidiary income policy can be helpful. [source]

A Non-Linear Analysis of Excess Foreign Exchange Returns

THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL, Issue 6 2001
Jerry Coakley
In this paper we explore the dynamics of US dollar excess foreign exchange returns for the G10 currencies and the Swiss franc, 1976,97. The non-linear framework adopted is justified by the results of linearity tests and a parametric bootstrap likelihood ratio statistic which indicate threshold effects or differential adjustment to small and large excess returns. Impulse response analysis suggests that the effect of small shocks to excess returns inside the no-arbitrage band exhibits most persistence. Large shocks outside the band decay most rapidly and also exhibit overshooting. These phenomena are explained in terms of noise trading strategies and transaction costs. [source]