Volume 9, Issue 5

In this paper, we apply the structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model to decompose the international oil price shock into oil supply shocks, aggregate demand shocks and oil-specific demand shocks, and then use the DCC-GARCH model to analyse the dynamic correlations between these three kinds of oil price shocks and the macroeconomic variables of several oil importing and exporting countries. To quantify the intensity of the effect of oil shocks on these variables, we propose a measure, conditional expectation (CoE), to capture the percent change of the economic variable under oil price shocks relative to the median state. The time-varying copula model is employed to estimate the proposed measure through time. The empirical results show that, for instance, the impacts of oil price shocks on macroeconomic variables are different in different periods, showing the time-varying characteristics. Additionally, the impacts of oil price shocks on macroeconomic variables show great differences and some similarities among different countries. Finally, we give some policy suggestions for these countries, in particular for China’s special results.

Given consumers’ trade-offs between conventional economic and environmental attributes of products, we provide a game-theoretic model to explore the role of GTA strategy in duopoly competition by incorporating two salient features: Two product types — The green product produced by a firm with GTA strategy and the ordinary product produced by a firm without GTA strategy, and two consumer segments, i.e., the green consumers who are willing to pay for green products and the ordinary consumers who are willing to pay for ordinary products. Our analysis shows that GTA strategy may either increase or decrease the green firm’s quality provision. The subtle relationship between the green firm’s quality strategy and GTA strategy not only affects its own equilibrium performances but its rival’s. We also find that two consumer segments may be better off in the presence of a lower GTA intensity. Additionally, although the GTA strategy benefits the environment, the GTA investment is not the more the better. Finally, we find that GTA strategy would lead to higher social welfare only when the GTA efficiency is high enough. Our work not only provides an alternative economic explanation why some firms choose to implement GTA strategy and some do not in reality, but gives managerial insights for firms with different GTA strategies as well as policy insights for the social planner.

We develop a statistical framework to use the data of night-time-lights (DN) from satellite to augment official GDP measures, and a non-linear substitution relationship between DN and GDP is given. In this paper, we take advantage of DN instead of GDP to measure the imbalance of regional development (IRD) in China by using the method of bi-dimensional decomposition under the population-weighted coefficient of variation. The method enables us to analyze the contributions of DN components to within-region and between-regions inequality under the framework which has been proposed, we can get the conclusion that the imbalance between-regions rather than within-region is the main reason for the influence of IRD for the whole country in China.

This paper investigates a simple step-stress accelerated lifetime test (SSALT) model for the inferential analysis of exponential competing risks data. A generalized type-I hybrid censoring scheme is employed to improve the efficiency and controllability of the test. Firstly, the MLEs for parameters are established based on the cumulative exposure model (CEM). Then the conditional moment generating function (MGF) for unknown parameters is set up using conditional expectation and multiple integral techniques. Thirdly, confidence intervals (CIs) are constructed by the exact MGF-based method, the approximate normality-based method, and the bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) percentile bootstrap method. Finally, we present simulation studies and an illustrative example to compare the performances of different methods.

Pollution cost control is key to solve pollution problem. The paper takes pollution control cost of pollution control contract between management authority and pollutant discharge enterprise as research object, considers pollution control quality level, pollution control quality inspection and pollution control cost model, and establishes pollution control cost model of management authority and pollutant discharge enterprise, including rational constraints of pollutant discharge enterprise. And it analyzes principal-agent relationship between the two under condition of asymmetric information, and un-observability of pollution control level is shown as hiding information of sewage enterprises. In essence, it is problem of adverse selection in principal-agent. Pollution control cost of management is objective function. The first order condition of pollution control cost of sewage enterprise is transformed into state space equation, and optimal control of problem is solved by using maximum principle. In particular, management authority, as principal, uses pollution control provisions to reward, punish and encourage pollutant discharge enterprises as agents.

The topic recognition for dynamic topic number can realize the dynamic update of super parameters, and obtain the probability distribution of dynamic topics in time dimension, which helps to clear the understanding and tracking of convection text data. However, the current topic recognition model tends to be based on a fixed number of topics K and lacks multi-granularity analysis of subject knowledge. Therefore, it is impossible to deeply perceive the dynamic change of the topic in the time series. By introducing a novel approach on the basis of Infinite Latent Dirichlet allocation model, a topic feature lattice under the dynamic topic number is constructed. In the model, documents, topics and vocabularies are jointly modeled to generate two probability distribution matrices: Documents-topics and topic-feature words. Afterwards, the association intensity is computed between the topic and its feature vocabulary to establish the topic formal context matrix. Finally, the topic feature is induced according to the formal concept analysis (FCA) theory. The topic feature lattice under dynamic topic number (TFL_DTN) model is validated on the real dataset by comparing with the mainstream methods. Experiments show that this model is more in line with actual needs, and achieves better results in semi-automatic modeling of topic visualization analysis.