The role of authoritative media in Economics

The paper explores the link between authoritative media, which is called the public court in the paper, and economic prosperity. Three types of evidence are used. First, arguments of the superiority of the public court over traditional media are provided. Second, a formal model shows a causal effect from more authoritative media viewers to greater political efficiency. Finally, the paper presents an overview of empirical literature on the link between political efficiency and economic prosperity. The finding of the paper is that the public court facilitates economic prosperity regardless of whether the traditional media are politically biased or not.institutional economics, media, politics, public court, economic prosperity

A note on GDP now-/forecasting with dynamic versus static factor models along a business cycle

We build a small-scale factor model for the GDP of one of the hardest hit economies during the latest recession to study the exact dynamic versus static factor model performance along a business cycle, with an emphasis placing on nowcasting performance during a pronounced switch of business cycle phases due to the latest recession. We compare the factor models' nowcasting performance to a random walk, autoregressive and the best-performing nowcasting models at our hands, which are vector autoregressive (VAR) models. It is shown that a small-scale static factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) model tends to improve upon the nowcasting performance of the VAR models when the model span and the nowcasting period stretch beyond a single business cycle phase, while exact dynamic factor models tend to fail to detect the timing and depth of the recession regardless of ARMA specifications. As regards the case when the model span and the nowcasting period are contained within a single business cycle phase, static and dynamic factor models appear to show similar performance with potentially slight superiority of dynamic factor models if the factor-forming set of variables and factor dynamics are carefully selected.nowcasting; business cycle; static versus dynamic factors; small-scale FAVAR; VAR; GDP

Forecasts with single-equation Markov-switching model: an application to the gross domestic product of Latvia

The paper compares one-period ahead forecasting performance of linear vector-autoregressive (VAR) models and single-equation Markov-switching (MS) models for two cases: when leading information is available and when it is not. The results show that single-equation MS models tend to perform slightly better than linear VAR models when no leading information is available. However, if reliable leading information is available, single-equation MS models tend to give somewhat less precise forecasts than linear VAR models.Markov-switching, VAR, forecasting, leading information

Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) for Market Analysis of FP7 CHOReOS Products

AbstractThe European 7th Framework FP7-ICT-2009-5 project CHOReOS No. 257178 (2010-2013) “Large Scale Choreographies for the Future Internet (IP)” is aimed to elaborate on new methods and tools related to Future Internet ultra-large-scale (ULS) solution development based on the use of choreographies. The purpose of this research is to identify exploitable CHOReOS products and approaches and business market trends that may exploit them. The aim is to collect and assess early market inputs, thereby ensuring that market needs are addressed properly by the CHOReOS project. The market acceptance assessment is done using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), but the credibility of results is assessed using Cronbach's Alpha, Split-Half Reliability and Spearman–Brown testing methods

A little respect: four case studies of HCI’s disregard for other disciplines

HCI research often demonstrates lack of respect for other disciplines, evidenced by the way work from those disciplines are cited in CHI papers. We present 4 case studies that demonstrate; 1) that HCI researchers sometimes misunderstand and misrepresent work from other disciplines, and 2) how initial misrepresentations can become ‘accepted wisdom ’within HCI. This disregard for other disciplines leads to errors such as authors citing work to support ‘facts’ precisely opposite to those demonstrated by the cited literature. We conclude with recommendations for authors, editors, publishers and readers on how to reduce the risk of such failures

Wagner and the Little Balletmaster That Could

Theatre history accounts of the nineteenth-century always throw up the names of two geniuses of the German theatre who made significant reforms to the theatre of their day: Richard Wagner and the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. Richard Wagner wanted to create a new form of music drama, a 'gesamtkunstwerk' (“total art work”) uniting music, poetry, dance, the visual arts in works for which he was solely responsible. Accounts of the emergence of the director in the nineteenth century also regularly begin with the Duke’s resident court theatre troupe which toured widely throughout Europe to great acclaim up to 1890. Long before the Meininger troupe was formed, however, Richard Fricke had been putting together notable productions in Dessau, with singers who could also act, drawing on a system of movement training which he himself had developed—doing, in short, much of what the Duke has been credited with initiating. He’d been doing this for over 20 years, in fact, before Wagner visited Dessau in 1872, looking for soloists for the premiere of his Ring cycle at the new Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Wagner was amazed by the production he saw there—“I have never witnessed a more noble and more perfect theatre performance than this production”—and insisted that Fricke assist him in Bayreuth. He began by claiming that he needed only Fricke’s choreographic skills—”I do not need a ‘stage director’”—but he soon began to rely heavily on Fricke to recommend, recruit and train singers and performers; co-ordinate stage machinery and the performers’ use of it; choreograph scenes; and solve other problems of staging, scenery, props and costumes. The 'lone genius' did require help to realise his work: the contributions of others, and especially his 'ballet master'—actually more of an assistant or co-director—remain undervalued. This paper look behind the scenes at Bayreuth to investigate how performance preparation and rehearsal—essentially collaborative practices—may inflect a notion of individual, directorial ownership of a resulting production. This will allow me to problematise a remarkably persistent 'few great men of history' narrative, identifying other underacknowledged practitioners and their practices, and thereby also to cast new light on early developments in the evolution of the contemporary director.The conference was sponsored by A.D.S.A., the Department of Performance Studies, the School of Letters, Arts and Media, and the Faculty of Arts of the University of Sydney

SYSTEM DYNAMICS USE IN BLOGOSPHERE DEVELOPMENT SIMULATION

Today the Latvian blogosphere is a community of almost 200 000 blogs. Blogs have become an important part of news agencies and web portals because they deliver information to the reader faster than traditional media. To forecast the computational resources and necessary funding for community development, it is necessary to design an evolutional model based on the data collected and give an insight into its evolution ways

Labour market modelling in the light of the financial crisis

This paper revisits the empirical relationship between unemployment and output, and its evolution following the financial crisis of 2008, with the aim of drawing potential consequences for labour market modelling strategies in place within the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). First, the negative correlation between output and unemployment (Okun’s law) at cyclical frequencies is found to be a robust feature of macro data across time, countries and identification schemes. Focusing on the euro area, the financial distress seems to have altered the dynamics of output and unemployment mainly at lower frequencies, interpreted as trend developments by the statistical filters used in the analysis. Looking at the implications for modelling strategies, we propose an extension of the standard labour search and matching model in which financial frictions impinge directly on the labour market rather than on the capital market, opening the way to protracted and lagged response of employment after a “financial” crisis. In terms of policy implications, the importance of the interplay between financial and labour market frictions in trend developments should be read as strong support for an ambitious structural reform agenda in Europe, so as to make our labour (and goods) markets more flexible and resilient

Forecasts with single-equation Markov-switching model: an application to the gross domestic product of Latvia

The paper compares one-period ahead forecasting performance of linear vector-autoregressive (VAR) models and single-equation Markov-switching (MS) models for two cases: when leading information is available and when it is not. The results show that single-equation MS models tend to perform slightly better than linear VAR models when no leading information is available. However, if reliable leading information is available, single-equation MS models tend to give somewhat less precise forecasts than linear VAR models

Forecasting economy with Bayesian autoregressive distributed lag model: choosing optimal prior in economic downturn

Bayesian inference requires an analyst to set priors. Setting the right prior is crucial for precise forecasts. This paper analyzes how optimal prior changes when an economy is hit by a recession. For this task, an autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) model is chosen. The results show that a sharp economic slowdown changes the optimal prior in two directions. First, it changes the structure of the optimal weight prior, setting smaller weight on the lagged dependent variable compared to variables containing more recent information. Second, greater uncertainty brought by a rapid economic downturn requires more space for coefficient variation, which is set by the overall tightness parameter. It is shown that the optimal overall tightness parameter may increase to such an extent that Bayesian ADL becomes equivalent to frequentist ADL