Volume 3, Issue 4

This paper quantitatively investigates the effect of transportation system on trade flows of four major port cities in China. Due to the significant country-pair heterogeneities in both intercept and slope terms, this paper introduced a random-coefficients model for parameters estimation. The empirical findings imply that the impact of the explanatory variables included in the gravity equation could be inaccurately estimated if the pair-wise heterogeneity biases in both intercept and slope terms are not accounted for during the econometric estimation of the model. In particular, in the presence of this heterogeneity, parameter estimates tend to be underestimated for country-pairs with higher trade volume and overestimated for those country-pairs with lower trade volume. In addition, the empirical results suggest that the improvement transportation system in port cities of China offers greater scope for its trade competitiveness.

From the perspective of the mediation effect, this paper investigates whether institutional investors adjust their portfolios according to the listed companies earnings surprise. We find that the portfolio adjustments by institutional investors exert the mediation effect on the relationship between earnings surprise and stock price volatility. Institutional investors actively manage their portfolios in the rising market, which induces the stock price volatility; while they less adjust their portfolio in the falling market, the volatility declines. This paper helps understand the role of institutional investors in the fluctuation of stock prices, and provides a new basis for decision making of regulatory administration.

This paper investigates the detection for structural breaks in GARCH models based on Bayesian method. The authors firstly introduce the background and significance of this problem, then present the current situation and recent developments in this field. Because the rates of return have heavy tails, the authors present GARCH models. In this paper, the authors innovatively suppose that the error term follows standard student t distribution with degree of freedom v instead of standard normal distribution. The authors give the specific description of estimation using Bayesian method, including a single structural break situation and multiple structural breaks situation when the number of breaks is unknown. In an application, the authors empirically research the volatility of stock market in China. The authors estimate GARCH models with structural breaks for the Shanghai Α-share index and Shenzhen Α-share index rate of return over the period of January 4, 2000–September 30, 2011. The authors explain the breaks together with the nearby big political and economic events. Empirical results show that the detecting method used in this paper is feasible.

This paper makes a theoretical and empirical study on the impact of economic growth and financial development on the environment in China. Through the establishment of econometric models, some conclusions have been found as follows: Firstly, there’s Environmental Kuznets Curve in China in the long and short term; Secondly, China’s financial interrelations ratio and financial efficiency can alleviate environmental pollution, and in the long term financial interrelations ratio has a stronger effect, instead, in the short term financial efficiency has a stronger effect; Moreover, in the long term financial interrelations ratio and financial efficiency have a positive moderating effect that can weaken the impact of economic growth on the environment, whereas financial interrelations ratio’s moderating effect is stronger; Finally, this article makes conclusion and inspiration for the improvement of China’s environmental quality.

The real-time pricing plays an important role in demand-side management for smart grid. In this paper, we study real-time pricing strategy of electricity retailers by means of game theory in smart grid. The retailers are in the game situation where there is one leader with multi-followers. We propose a real-time electricity demand function and analyze the interactions between the retailers, then obtain its equilibrium solution. The analysis and simulation results of the equilibrium solution show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A time-division duplex (TDD) two-way channel exploits reciprocity to estimate the forward channel gain from the reverse link. Many previous works explore outage probabilities in the TDD system, based on the reciprocity property. However, a frequency-division duplex (FDD) system has no reciprocity property. In this letter, we investigate the impact of CSI estimation error on the performance of non-orthogonal and orthogonal analog network coding protocols in an FDD two-way system, where channel gains are independent of each other. Considering imperfect CSI, the closed-form expressions of outage probabilities by two protocols are derived in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, respectively. It is shown that the derived outage probabilities match results of Monte Carlo simulations in different communication scenarios. It is interesting that ANC in the FDD two-way channel is proved to outperform that in the TDD channel by the computer simulation.

In order to overcome the problem of low convergence precision and easily relapsing into local extremum in fruit fly optimization algorithm (FOA), this paper adds the idea of differential evolution to fruit fly optimization algorithm so as to optimizing and a algorithm of fruit fly optimization based on differential evolution is proposed (FOADE). Adding the operating of mutation, crossover and selection of differential evolution to FOA after each iteration, which can jump out local extremum and continue to optimize. Compared to FOA, the experimental results show that FOADE has the advantages of better global searching ability, faster convergence and more precise convergence.

This paper studies a single server M/G/1 stochastic clearing queue operating in a 3-phase environment, where the time length of the first and third phase are assumed to follow exponential distributions, and the time length of the second phase is a constant value. At the completion of phase 1, the system moves to phase 2, and after a fixed time length, the system turns to phase 3. At the end of phase 3, all present customers in the system are forced to leave the system, then the system moves to phase 1 and restarts a new service cycle. Using the supplementary variable technique, we obtain the distribution for the stationary queue at an arbitrary epoch. We also derive the sojourn time distribution and the length of the server’s working time in a cycle.