earnings risk taking and capital accumulation in small and large community banks abstract we examine the relationships between ownership structure and both earnings and risk taking among community banks before during and after the us financial crisis we find that publicly held small community banks had lower earnings than privately held ones before the recession but had higher earnings during and after the recession publicly held small community banks exhibited similar risk taking to privately held ones before and during the recession but greater risk taking after we also find that publicly held small community banks de risked more slowly than privately held ones following the recession large community banks on the other hand show no consistent relationship between ownership structure and earnings and a strong cyclical relationship between ownership structure and risk taking these findings expand our understanding of how community bank performance and capital accumulation behaves through different cyclical periods and how ownership structure affects that behavior

the contribution of tourism development to economic growth in the korean economy abstract this study investigates the causal relations between tourism growth and economic expansion for the korean economy by using engle and granger two stage approach and a bivariate vector autoregression var model two principle results emerge from this study first the results of a cointegration test indicate that there is no long run equilibrium relation between two series second the outcomes of granger causality test imply the one way causal relationship of economic driven tourism growth the hypothesis of tourism led economic growth is not held in the korean economy this consequence is supported by testing the sensitivity of causality test under different lag selections along with the optimal lag

time series forecasts of international travel demand for australia abstract this paper analyses stationary and non stationary international tourism time series data by formally testing for the presence of unit roots and seasonal unit roots prior to estimation model selection and forecasting various box jenkins autoregressive integrated moving average arima models are estimated over the period 1975 1 1989 4 for tourist arrivals to australia from hong kong malaysia and singapore the mean absolute percentage error and root mean squared error rmse are used as measures of forecast accuracy as the best fitting arima model is found to have the lowest rmse this model is used to obtain post sample forecasts tourist arrivals data for 1990 1 1996 4 are compared with the forecast performance of the arima model for each origin market the fitted arima model forecasts tourist arrivals from singapore for the period 1990 1 1996 4 very well although the arima model outperforms the seasonal arima models for hong kong and malaysia the forecasts of tourist arrivals are not as accurate as in the case of singapore

cointegration analysis of german and british tourism demand for greece abstract germany and great britain are traditionally two of the most important sources of tourism for greece the purpose of this paper is to investigate changes in the long run demand for tourism to greece by these two countries in order to explain the demand for tourism we are using a number of leading macroeconomic variables including income in origin countries germany and great britain tourism prices in greece and transportation cost and exchanges rates between the three countries annual data from the three countries covering the period from 1960 to 2000 are employed augmented dickey fuller test for unit root is examined in the univariate framework and johansen s maximum likelihood procedure is used to test the cointegration method and to estimate the number of cointegrating vectors of var model error correction models are estimated to explain german and british demand for tourism to greece

advertising and food drink and tobacco consumption in the united kingdom a dynamic demand system this paper tests for the influence of advertising on the inter product distribution of consumer demand for non durable goods and services in the uk 1963 1996 the long run demand for seven categories of non durable products is modelled through an advertising augmented version of the almost ideal demand system aids which is incorporated into an error correction model to allow for short run dynamic adjustments to long run equilibrium positions model estimates confirm that the restrictions of price homogeneity and symmetry appear to be consistent with the data yield measures of the various types of demand elasticity that are in general plausible confirm the strong influence of prices on the allocation of consumer expenditure but find little evidence to support the hypothesis that advertising has the power to effect marked changes in the inter product pattern of consumer demand in the uk

social comparisons and contributions to online communities a field experiment on movielens we design a field experiment to explore the use of social comparison to increase contributions to an online community we find that after receiving behavioral information about the median user s total number of movie ratings users below the median demonstrate a 530 percent increase in the number of monthly movie ratings while those above the median decrease their ratings by 62 percent when given outcome information about the average user s net benefit score above average users mainly engage in activities that help others our findings suggest that effective personalized social information can increase the level of public goods provision

modeling and forecasting tourism demand for arrivals with stochastic nonstationary seasonality and intervention abstract this paper presents the use of time series sarima and marima with interventions in forecasting tourism demand using ten arrival series for hong kong augmented dickey fuller tests indicated that all the series were seasonal nonstationary significant interventions such as relaxation of the issuance of out bound visitors visas the asian financial crisis the handover and the bird flu epidemic were all empirically identified with significant test results and expected signs the forecasts obtained using models that capture stochastic nonstationary seasonality and interventions sarima and marima with intervention analysis are compared with other eight time series models and were found to have the highest accuracy

events in indonesia exploring the limits to formal tourism trends forecasting methods in complex crisis situations the desire to know the future is as old as humanity for the tourism industry the demand for accurate foretelling of the future course of events is a task that consumes considerable energy and is of great significance to investors this paper examines the issue of forecasting by comparing forecasts of inbound tourism made prior to the political and economic crises that engulfed indonesia from 1997 onwards with actual arrival figures the paper finds that current methods of forecasting are not able to cope with unexpected crises and other disasters and that alternative methods need to be examined including scenarios political risk and application of chaos theory the paper outlines a framework for classifying shocks according to a scale of severity probability type of event level of certainty and suggested forecasting tools for each scale of shock

cointegration analysis of quarterly tourism demand by hong kong and singapore for australia hong kong and singapore are two of the most important and fastest growing markets for tourists to australia the purpose of this paper is to investigate movements in the long run demand for tourist travel by these two origin countries for australia some of the leading macroeconomic variables examined to explain tourism demand are incomes in hong kong and singapore tourism prices in australia and transportation costs and exchange rates between the two countries and australia seasonally unadjusted quarterly data are used for hong kong for the period 1975 1 1996 4 and for 1980 4 1996 4 for singapore several proxy variables are used for the incomes of tourists from hong kong and singapore to explain quarterly tourist arrivals to australia the augmented dickey fuller test for unit roots is examined in the univariate framework and johansen s maximum likelihood procedure is used to test for cointegration and to estimate the number of cointegrating vectors error correction models are estimated to exp

tourism demand modelling and forecasting a review of recent research abstract this paper reviews the published studies on tourism demand modelling and forecasting since 2000 one of the key findings of this review is that the methods used in analysing and forecasting the demand for tourism have been more diverse than those identified by other review articles in addition to the most popular time series and econometric models a number of new techniques have emerged in the literature however as far as the forecasting accuracy is concerned the study shows that there is no single model that consistently outperforms other models in all situations furthermore this study identifies some new research directions which include improving the forecasting accuracy through forecast combination integrating both qualitative and quantitative forecasting approaches tourism cycles and seasonality analysis events impact assessment and risk forecasting

social norms and pro environmental behavior a review of the evidence in light of the growing attention that social norm interventions have garnered as policy tools we review the current body of evidence on their effectiveness with respect to pro environmental behaviors we identify the various conceptualizations of social norms currently in use and inventory the experimental economics and social psychology literature that has examined the impacts of social norm interventions on pro environmental behavior for each study included in this inventory we note several contextual features the data collection and analytical methods used and any significant main effects attributed to the social norm intervention we also review several theoretical models of behavior that incorporate social norms based on this empirical and theoretical review we draw a number of policy implications and identify avenues for future research on the role of social norms with respect to pro environmental behavior

a generalized valuation model for fixed rate residential mortgages this paper uses option pricing techniques to rationally price mortgage instruments subject to both default and prepayment risk attention is given to terminations due to purely financial consideration of the mortgage contract itself as well as to personally induced terminations explicit inclusion of default in the mortgage valuation procedure also permits the valuation of insurance against such default qualitatively it is found that default differs significantly in the behavior from either prepayment or nonfinancial termination quantitatively however there is significant substitution between prepayment and default so that the addition of a default feature to the contract has only a modest impact on mortgage values unless there is substantial price volatility in the housing market or a high loan to value ratio copyright 1992 by ohio state university press

forecasting international tourist flows to macau abstract the vector autoregressive var modelling technique is used to forecast tourist flows to macau from eight major origin countries regions over the period 2003 2008 the existing literature shows that the var model is capable of producing accurate medium to long term forecasts and also separate forecasts of the explanatory variables are not required a further justification for using the var technique is that it permits an impulse response analysis to be performed in order to examine the ways in which the demand for macau tourism responds to the shocks in the economic variables within the var system the implications of this analysis are discussed the forecasts generated by the var models suggest that macau will face increasing tourism demand by residents from mainland china since the needs of chinese tourists tend to be different from those from other origin countries regions especially western countries the business sectors in macau need to pay considerable attention to catering for the needs of chinese tourists

the implications of tourism specialisation in the long run an econometric analysis for 13 oecd economies abstract the paper aims to illumine the longrun impact of specialisation in tourism it is shown that specialisation in tourism may not be deleterious for economic welfare once the terms of trade are considered conditions for an improvement in welfare are laid out and their existence tested by econometric methods within an almost ideal demand system formulation of tourist expenditure for 13 oecd economies the analysis uses cointegration techniques and novel sequential break dating procedures evaluated where the time dimension is small the values of the estimated parameters suggest that long run growth may not be harmed by tourism specialisation

income and the substitution pattern between domestic and international tourism demand this article analyses the role of income in the decision of participating in the tourism demand within 1 year the tourists who are participating can travel to domestic destinations only abroad destinations only or to both of them such a substitution pattern is modelled using a bivariate probit model the analysis is carried out to the regional level using a survey conducted in 15 european eu 15 countries in addition to the traditional socioeconomic variables the analysis adds new variables to the outbound tourism demand modelling such as the attributes of the place of residence the results show that tourism demand is income elastic however there are marked differences in the income elasticities of the probabilities of travelling domestically or abroad above certain income threshold the substitution pattern between destinations takes part the probability of travelling domestically only remains constant whereas the probability of travelling abroad keeps growing additionally the article prov

evaluating the costs and benefits of appliance efficiency standards the available empirical evidence does not provide a very convincing case that mandatory appliance efficiency standards will increase economic efficiency or reduce energy consumption significantly there is a real chance that such standards could actually reduce economic efficiency and possibly lead to an increase in energy use a broader use of programs to provide consumers with better information seems to represent the most productive short run strategy consumer education would not only help to improve decisions but it will also provide time to better assess consumer behavior allow the market to reveal the technical and economic possibilities for appliance efficiency improvements and ultimately allow public policies to be based on more than guesswork 12 references

testing macroprudential stress tests the risk of regulatory risk weights we compare the capital shortfall measured by regulatory stress tests to that o fa benchmark methodology the v lab stress test that employs only publicly available market data we find that when capital shortfalls are measured relative to risk weighted assets the ranking of financial institutions is not well correlated to the ranking of the v lab stress test whereas rank correlations increase when required capitalization is a function of total assets we show that the risk measures used in risk weighted assets are cross sectionally uncorrelated with market measures of risk as they do not account for the risk that risk will change furthermore the banks that appeared to be best capitalized relative to risk weighted assets were no better than the rest when the european economy deteriorated into the sovereign debt crisis in 2011

an experimental test of the effect of negative social norms on energy efficient investments abstract energy efficiency is an important economic and environmental concern and likewise the correction of current wasteful energy practices we document widespread tire pressure neglect three quarters of drivers waste gas driving on underinflated tires negative descriptive social norms are one potential cause but have not been tested in high neglect environments where those norms are widespread this confounds the mechanism are these norms signals of private value to consumers or do they imply standards for social judgment from others we conducted a field experiment at gas stations in chicago our intervention included treatments with information about tire pressure neglect promotions in the form of price reductions from 0 50 to free a descriptive norm of behavior and help in the form of air pump assistance the treatments are designed to provide the ability to consider four potential underlying drivers information monetary cost social norms and social pressure treatments that only included information were ineffective despite average fuel savings of 10 51 but small promotions had substantial impacts when the air pump price was free the social norm discouraged inflation however when the research assistant offered help inflation rates were buoyed by the social norm these results highlight the importance of incentives over mere information treatments and offer a new perspective on how information and monetary levers can influence decision making in the presence of negative social norms

competition in tourism among the mediterranean countries this paper examines tourism competition among the mediterranean countries with particular emphasis on greece the estimated model includes as explanatory variables an income index a price index of the host country a price index of the competitors spain portugal and italy and exchange rate the results show that the main determinants of greece s tourism demand are both price indexes and exchange rate they also show that spain seems to be greece s main competitor

assessing financial stability the capital and loss assessment under stress scenarios class model abstract the class model is a top down capital stress testing framework that uses public data simple econometric models and auxiliary assumptions to project the effect of macroeconomic scenarios on u s banking firms through the lens of the model we find that the total banking system capital shortfall under stressful macroeconomic conditions began to rise 4 years before the financial crisis peaking in the fourth quarter of 2008 the capital gap has since fallen sharply and is now significantly below pre crisis levels in the cross section banking firms estimated to be most sensitive to macroeconomic conditions also have higher capital ratios consistent with a precautionary view of bank capital though this behavior is evident only since the crisis we interpret our results as evidence that the resiliency of the u s banking system has improved since the financial crisis and also as an illustration of the value of stress testing as a macroprudential policy tool

an empirical investigation of direct and iterated multistep conditional forecasts when constructing unconditional point forecasts both direct and iterated multistep dms and ims approaches are common however in the context of producing conditional forecasts ims approaches based on vector autoregressions var are far more common than simpler dms models this is despite the fact that there are theoretical reasons to believe that dms models are more robust to misspecification than are ims models in the context of unconditional forecasts marcellino stock and watson msw 2006 investigate the empirical relevance of these theories in this paper we extend that work to conditional forecasts we do so based on linear bivariate and trivariate models estimated using a large dataset of macroeconomic time series over comparable samples our results reinforce those in msw the ims approach is typically a bit better than dms with significant improvements only at longer horizons in contrast when we focus on the great moderation sample we find a marked improvement in the dms approach relative to ims the distinction is particularly clear when we forecast nominal rather than real variables where the relative gains can be substantial

leading indicator tourism forecasts leading indicators have been widely used in general business forecasting situations but only rarely in a tourism context in this study leading indicator transfer function tf models are developed to generate forecasts of international tourism demand from the uk to six major destinations the out of sample forecasting accuracy is compared with the accuracy of forecasts generated by univariate arima and error correction models ecms the inclusion of a causal input within an arima time series framework tf model does not result in an improvement in forecasting performance the time series models outperform the ecm for short term forecasting but the ecm generates more accurate longer term forecasts

forecasting turkey s tourism revenues by armax model abstract an appropriate armax model is applied to forecast international tourism revenues for turkey for the post 2001 economic crisis international tourist arrivals were seasonally dependable on earlier arrivals at lagged periods one two and four this implies high levels of repeat visiting through this model the future international tourists arrivals are forecast for the 2002 2007 period to determine possible revenues for that same period international tourism revenues can be explained by the current arrivals a first order autoregressive and a stochastic moving average filter at lag 3 for the 1963 2001 sample period future values of revenues are forecasted based on this model the estimated models and their forecasts may be important for the economy of turkey which is currently recovering from the recent economic crisis once us dollars expenditure per tourist is forecasted the gap between forecasts and needs can be defined more rationally to overcome economic crises in short discrepancy analysis may aid marketing promotion to increase arrivals and tourist expenditures

an econometric study of tourist arrivals in aruba and its implications abstract the principal purpose of this study is to analyze econometric estimates in order to explain tourist arrivals to aruba from the united states the netherlands and venezuela the study specified a dynamic econometric model for modeling short term as well as the long term responses it estimated both linear and log linear functions and it applied the box cox statistical method to determine the appropriate functional form the inclusion of venezuela as a developing country permitted the comparison of the behavior of tourism demand in relatively rich and poor countries the results indicated the extent to which cross country behavior of demand differs with respect to changes in effective prices and exchange rates this study can assist in the formulation of future macroeconomic policies as well as market and pricing strategies in a small or microstate economy

the demand for international tourism in the mediterranean region the paper studies the demand for international tourism in the mediterranean region first a review of the most important attempts to model econometrically the demand for international tourism in the past is given followed by a formal presentation of the proposed theoretical model in particular a version of the almost ideal demand system aids is adopted and a description of the variables involved and their sources together with the estimation procedure are provided the diagrammatic analysis performed contributes to a better understanding of the evolution of the dependent variable over time the results with respect to the expenditure as well as to the own and cross price elasticities may be regarded as econometrically satisfactory and a reasonable economic explanation is given

modelling and forecasting australian domestic tourism abstract in this paper we model and forecast australian domestic tourism demand we use a regression framework to estimate important economic relationships for domestic tourism demand we also identify the impact of world events such as the 2000 sydney olympics and the 2002 bali bombings on australian domestic tourism to explore the time series nature of the data we use innovations state space models to forecast domestic tourism demand combining these two frameworks we build innovations state space models with exogenous variables these models are able to capture the time series dynamics in the data as well as economic and other relationships we show that these models outperform alternative approaches for short term forecasting and also produce sensible long term forecasts the forecasts are compared with the official australian government forecasts which are found to be more optimistic than our forecasts

capital shortfall a new approach to ranking and regulating systemic risks the financial crisis of 2007 2009 has given way to the sovereign debt crisis of 2010 2012 yet many of the banking issues remain the same we discuss a method to estimate the capital that a financial firm would need to raise if we have another financial crisis this measure of capital shortfall is based on publicly available information but is conceptually similar to the stress tests conducted by us and european regulators we argue that this measure summarizes the major characteristics of systemic risk and provides a reliable interpretation of the past and current financial crises

modelling multivariate international tourism demand and volatility international tourism demand which is typically measured as tourist arrivals to australia has experienced dramatic fluctuations in recent years due to changes in the economic financial and political environment however variations in tourism demand specifically the conditional variance or volatility have not previously been investigated in the tourism literature an analysis of such volatility is essential for investigating the effects of shocks in tourism demand models this paper models the conditional mean and conditional variance of the logarithm of the monthly tourist arrival rate from the four leading tourism source countries to australia namely japan new zealand uk and usa using three multivariate static or constant conditional correlation ccc volatility models specifically the symmetric ccc mgarch model of rev econ stat 72 1990 498 symmetric vector arma garch model of econ theory 19 2003 278 and asymmetric vector arma agarch model of australasian meeting of the econometric society brisbane australia 2002 monthly data from july 1975 to 2000 are used in the empirical analysis the results suggest the presence of interdependent effects in the conditional variances between the four leading countries and asymmetric effects of shocks in two of the four countries this is an important result as it emphasizes interdependencies between major tourism source countries as well as the asymmetric effects of positive and negative shocks in tourism demand the estimated ccc matrices for the three models are not substantially different from each other which confirms the robustness of the estimates to alternative specifications of the multivariate conditional variance

modelling substitution between domestic and outbound tourism in australia a system of equations approach this study uses a system of equations approach to model the substitution relationship between australian domestic and outbound tourism demand a new price variable based on relative ratios of purchasing power parity index is developed for the substitution analysis short run demand elasticities are calculated based on the estimated error correction almost ideal demand systems the empirical results reveal significant substitution relationships between australian domestic tourism and outbound travel to asia the uk and the us this study provides scientific support for necessary policy considerations to promote domestic tourism further

choice and procrastination author s o donoghue ted rabin matthew abstract recent models of procrastination due to self control problems assume that a procrastinator considers just one option and is unaware of her self control problems we develop a model where a person chooses from a menu of options and is partially aware of her self control problems this menu model replicates earlier results and generates new ones a person might forego completing an attractive option because she plans to complete a more attractive but never to be completed option hence providing a non procrastinator additional options can induce procrastination and a person may procrastinate worse pursuing important goals than unimportant ones

the performance of periodic autoregressive models in forecasting seasonal u k consumption the parameters of a periodic model are allowed to vary according to the time at which observations are made periodic autoregressive models are fitted to the quarterly values of seasonally unadjusted real nondurable consumers expenditure for the united kingdom and its components the periodic model offers no improvement over conventional specifications if the aggregate is modeled directly on the other hand periodic models generally perform well for the components which contain additional seasonal information the choice between a periodic or nonperiodic specification is also shown to have an important influence on the resulting dynamic properties

forecasting with the almost ideal demand system evidence from some alternative dynamic specifications the almost ideal demand system is used as a representation of long run demands in discrete time and continuous time error correction models to produce forecasts of budget shares beyond the sample period the estimated models are subjected to a battery of tests and an analysis of the forecasts indicates that continuous time adjustment mechanisms based around fully modified estimates of the long run preference parameters provide a remarkably accurate method of forecasting budget shares

a system of equations model of uk tourism demand in neighbouring countries this paper uses a system of equations model to examine tourism demand during periods of destination country transition and integration into the wider international community the almost ideal demand system model is applied to the uk demand for tourism in the neighbouring destinations france spain and portugal spain and portugal are interesting cases as during the period under consideration they experienced a process of transition from economies with characteristics typical of developing countries only entering the world bank s industrialized countries classification in the 1980s the paper examines the evolution of tourism demand during these countries transition from developing to developed status consideration of france as a neighbouring destination also allows the behaviour of tourism demand to be compared between relatively rich and poor countries the results show the extent to which the cross country behaviour of demand becomes more or less similar over time with respect to changes in ex

predicting tourism demand using fuzzy time series and hybrid grey theory abstract forecasting tourism demand in a capacity constrained service industry has been a major theme in this field this study presents two models that can be used to predict tourism demand both two models are based on artificial intelligent ai neural network theory was first applied to tourism demand forecasting in 2000 and empirically tested using the raw data from hong kong this work provides empirical evidence using grey theory and fuzzy time series which do not need large sample and long past time series these ai models are estimated for tourist arrivals to taiwan from hong kong united states and germany during the period of 1989 2000 gm 1 1 model achieves an accurate forecast when the sample data show a stable increase trend nevertheless the markov modification model can efficiently improved the gm 1 1 model when the sample data show significant fluctuations

the short term price effect of a tourist tax through a dynamic demand model the case of the balearic islands abstract tourist taxes have become an important source of revenue for many tourist destinations taxes on accommodation are upheld by their proponents as a way of shifting the local tax burden on to non residents while the travel industry claims that these levies do significant damage to their level of competitiveness the objective of this paper is to identify the market s sensitivity to price changes in travel related services or groups of services assuming that one of the main factors that influences travel decisions is the information on the destination that consumers receive in order to include this effect the study applies a combination of a diffusion model and a traditional economic utility theory model to tourists visiting the balearic islands spain from the united kingdom germany france and the netherlands

a comparison of three different approaches to tourist arrival forecasting abstract forecasting plays a major role in tourism planning the promotion of tourism projects involving substantial sums of money requires an estimate of future demand and market penetration the commitment to developing tourism would be much easier if it were possible to analyse current and past tourist traffic and predict the nature of changes in tourism demand these extrapolative approaches to forecasting require historical data this paper investigates the application of three time series forecasting techniques namely exponential smoothing univariate arima and elman s model of artificial neural networks ann to predict travel demand i e the number of arrivals from different countries to hong kong exponential smoothing and arima are two commonly used statistical time series forecasting techniques the third approach neural networks is an artificial intelligence technique derived from computer science according to the analysis presented in this paper neural networks seems to be the best method for forecasting visitor arrivals especially those series without obvious pattern

modelling us tourism demand for european destinations abstract an almost ideal demand system model is used to examine us demand for tourism in european destinations the model provides policy makers with useful information concerning the sensitivity of tourism demand to changes in relative prices exchange rates and expenditure the results show that price competitiveness is important for us demand for france italy and spain but is relatively unimportant for the uk france and italy are regarded as substitutes by us tourists as are spain and italy as us expenditure rises the market shares of spain and the uk decline while france and italy benefit the demand modelling and forecasting indicate that in the absence of a tourism price index the choice between alternative price indices does not have a significant effect on the results

a micro econometric analysis of vacation behaviour we present a micro econometric limited dependent variable model which simultaneously explains the decision whether to go on vacation or not the choice of destination and the decision on the level of the vacation expenditures the model has been estimated on the basis of a cross section of dutch households we find a striking difference in income elasticity between domestic vacations and vacations abroad and a large impact of owning certain durables such as a boat on the choice of destination to illustrate the potential of the model some simulations are performed

testing restrictions in a flexible dynamic demand system an application to consumers expenditure in canada traditionally restrictions on systems of demand equations have been tested using static models whilst being estimated with time series data this paper develops a vector time series model of expenditure shares in the context of a singular dynamic demand system the model allows for non symmetric and non homogeneous short run behaviour the homogeneity and symmetry restrictions are only examined in the long run structure results based on canadian time series data are presented and reject the current practise of static modelling while restrictions suggested by economic theory are not rejected when imposed on the long run structure

tourism forecasting to combine or not to combine abstract existing non tourism related literature shows that forecast combination can improve forecasting accuracy this study tests this proposition in the tourism context by examining the efficiency of combining forecasts based on three different combination methods the data used for this study relate to tourist arrivals in hong kong from the top ten tourism generating countries regions the forecasts are derived from four different forecasting models autoregressive integrated moving average arima model autoregressive distributed lag model adlm error correction model ecm and vector autoregressive var model all forecasts are ex post and the empirical results show that the relative performance of combination versus single model forecasts varies according to the origin destination tourist flow under consideration which parallels previous findings regarding the relative performance of individual forecasting methods the results also vary with the combination techniques used furthermore although the combined forecasts do not always outperform the best single model forecasts almost all the combined forecasts are not outperformed by the worst single model forecasts this suggests that forecast combination can considerably reduce the risk of forecasting failure this conclusion also implies that combined forecasts are likely to be preferred to single model forecasts in many practical situations

bank funding costs in a rising interest rate environment one key risk to the banking system is how funding costs will change as monetary policy is normalized and interest rates rise after almost a decade of near zero rates our contribution is to develop a model that jointly estimates banks balance sheets and retail interest rates to arrive at a consistent estimate of the change in bank funding costs as market rates change our estimates imply a 100 basis point shock to the federal funds rate would increase overall deposit funding costs by about 40 billion which is roughly equal to 25 of aggregate annual net income for commercial banks and savings institutions we also find that deposit rate responses are largely symmetric in contrast to some previous research showing deposit rates are less responsive to upward movements in reference rates we introduce unique and confidential data on bank deposit betas to anchor our results

an econometric study of tourism demand the aids model of us and european tourism in mediterranean countries the almost ideal demand system aids model was used to estimate tourism expenditure allocation by us and west european countries among a range of mediterranean destinations the approach has the advantage of an explicit basis in consumer expenditure theory and by modelling the changes in the budget shares of expenditure among destinations provides new information relative to that provided by the traditional single equation approach the estimated model was econometrically satisfactory although symmetry and homogeneity were rejected in line with the findings of past studies of consumer demand the expenditure elasticities demonstrated considerable differences in tourism demand preferences between origin countries and between traditional and newly developing destinations the own and cross price elasticities indicated the importance of effective prices in determining the allocation of expenditure among destinations

an empirical study of outbound tourism demand in the uk a general to specific methodology is used to construct uk demand for outbound tourism models to twelve destinations a tourism destination preference index is introduced to take into account social cultural and psychological influences on tourists decisions concerning their overseas holiday destinations the tests support the existence of a cointegration relationship for each of 11 uk overseas holiday destinations the corresponding error correction models are estimated the empirical results show that the long run income elasticities for all destinations range from 1 70 to 3 90 with an average of 2 367 the lowest and highest short run income elasticities are 1 05 and 3 78 respectively with an average of 2 216 the estimates of the income elasticities imply that overseas holidays are highly income elastic while the own price elasticities suggest that the demand for uk outbound tourism is relatively own price inelastic in terms of the significance of substitution prices in the regression equations ir