International Asset Holdings and the Euro

The establishment of a monetary union in Europe in 1999 has eliminated exchange rate risk within the euro area and has led to a more unified financial framework. It has been established in the literature that the euro has led to a disproportional increase in bilateral asset holdings within the euro area. This paper builds on this evidence and answers the question whether this has been a one-off effect, or whether the euro effect in intra-euro area bilateral asset holdings has changed over time. We show, using a gravity framework, that the proportional increase in bilateral asset holdings took place in the early years of the European monetary union and was a unique event. The data used are bilateral data on equity and bond holdings, provided by the Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey of the IMF for the years 1997, and 2001 until 2006.international asset trade; gravity equation; euro

Modelling airport and airline choice behaviour with the use of stated preference survey data

The majority of studies of air travel choice behavior make use of revealed preference (RP) data, generally in the form of survey data collected from departing passengers. While the use of RP data has certain methodological advantages over the use of stated preference (SP) data, major issues arise because of the often low quality of the data relating to the un-chosen alternatives, in terms of explanatory variables as well as availability. As such, studies using RP survey data often fail to recover a meaningful fare coefficient, and are generally not able to offer a treatment of the effects of airline allegiance. In this paper, we make use of SP data for airport and airline choice collected in the US in 2001. The analysis retrieves significant effects relating to factors such as airfare, access time, flight time and airline and airport allegiance, illustrating the advantages of SP data in this context. Additionally, the analysis explores the use of non-linear transforms of the explanatory variables, as well as the treatment of continuous variations in choice behavior across respondents

Impact of railway station on Dutch residential housing market

In an efficient market, the levels of house prices reflect the values of value of physical, accessibility and environmental features corresponding to the house. The Dutch residential house market though could not be claimed to work under a perfectly efficient market; the prices can be diagnosed to reflect the value of these features. This paper focuses on the value of railway accessibility feature to the residential houses prices. Stations are treated as transport access points with distance and frequency of train services components and potential places for negative externalities. Applying a cross sectional hedonic price model, we found railway stations as identified by frequency of train service has elasticity of close to 0.3 for house up to a distance of 3 kms. Due to the spatial nature of the data we controlled the spatial effects by regional dummies. Proximity to railway line as differing from proximity to station, explaining the noise effect, has negative effect on prices. At the same time the immediate neighbourhood of the station is affected negatively from externality of the station. Highway accessibility on the other hand shows slightly different effect on house prices, in that peak effects occur at 4-5 km from the highway entry/exit point. All other physical and neighbourhood variables as income level and population composition show expected effect on house prices.

Rescue of the Seychelles warbler on Cousin Island, Seychelles:The role of habitat restoration

Management policies to save threatened species are not always successful, often due to the lack of a scientific basis and evaluation of the species response. We describe the ecological studies and the conservation actions taken between 1985 and 1992 on Cousin Island (29 ha, Seychelles) to safeguard the future of the highly threatened Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis), which until 1988 only occurred on this island. A detailed field study was designed to (1) identify the key processes influencing warbler demography, (2) identify appropriate management techniques to increase the warbler population, and (3), assess the influence of the resulting habitat management. Since 1980 the island has been saturated with c. 115 territories and c. 320 birds. The warbler is purely insectivorous. Morinda (Morinda citrifolia), the most insect rich tree, is preferred for foraging. The higher the insect abundance (and Morinda cover) in territories the higher the reproductive success and survival of warblers. Insect numbers were highest in the central part of Cousin and decreased towards the coast. Coastal territories protected by a salt tolerant hedge of Scaevola (Scaevola taccada) had more insects and higher reproductive success than unprotected territories. Between 1990 and 1992 Morinda trees were planted on the island and Scaevola along the coast. Although these habitat restoration measures have not resulted in higher numbers of adult warblers and territories due to habitat saturation, they have been successful in terms of improving the quality of existing breeding territories and with that the reproductive success of breeding birds (including the number of territories producing recruits), and the exchange of individuals (genetic material) between territories. We provide evidence that the high reproductive potential of this species is likely to improve the resilience of the species to catastrophic events. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Efficient simulation of DC-DC switch-mode power converters by multirate partial differential equations

In this paper, Multirate Partial Differential Equations (MPDEs) are used for the efficient simulation of problems with 2-level pulsed excitations as they often occur in power electronics, e.g., DC-DC switch-mode converters. The differential equations describing the problem are reformulated as MPDEs which are solved by a Galerkin approach and time discretization. For the solution expansion two types of basis functions are proposed, namely classical Finite Element (FE) nodal functions and the recently introduced excitation-specific pulse width modulation (PWM) basis functions. The new method is applied to the example of a buck converter. Convergence, accuracy of the solution and computational efficiency of the method are numerically analyzed

Coping strategies as mediators within the relationship between emotion-regulation and perceived stress in teachers

The aim of the present study was to examine whether different coping strategies (focus on positive, support coping, active coping and evasive coping) mediate the relationship between emotion-regulation (i.e., emotion acceptance skills, emotion resilience skills and emotion regulation skills) and perceived stress in physical education (PE) teachers. The sample consisted of 457 PE pre-service teachers. Results show that evasive coping strategies partly negatively mediate the relationship between emotion resilience skills and emotion regulation and perceived stress. Therefore, emotion-regulation might protect against using evasive coping strategies, which have been found to be related to higher stress in previous studies.peer-reviewe

Posterior analysis of random taste coefficients in air travel behaviour modelling

Increasing use is being made of random coefficients structures, such as mixed logit, in the analysis of air travel choice behaviour. These models have the advantage of being able to retrieve random variations in sensitivities across travellers. An important issue, however, arises in the computation of willingness to pay indicators, such as the valuation of travel time savings, on the basis of randomly distributed coefficients. Indeed, with the standard approach of using simulation of the ratios across random draws, major problems can be caused by outliers, leading to biased trade-offs, which in turn lead to major issues in policy analyses. Here, a different approach is explored, making use of individual-specific draws from the random distributions, conditioned on the observed sequence of choices for each respondent. An analysis making use of stated preference data for airport and airline choice confirms the advantages of the approach using conditional draws, producing much more realistic distributional patterns for a range of willingness to pay indicators

European Airline Mergers, Alliance Consolidation, and Consumer Welfare

This paper explores the effects of a European airline merger followed by a consolidation of two competing international alliances. The exercise has been inspired by the Air France-KLM merger, which is expected to spur consolidation of the Northwest-KLM and SkyTeam alliances into a single mega-alliance. The results of the analysis show that, although the airlines benefit through higher profits, the merger and alliance consolidation harm consumers while reducing overall social surplus. The reason for this negative outcome is that, as modeled, all the effects of the merger and alliance consolidation are anticompetitive.european airline merger, airlines, airline alliance, transportation

A Parametric Study of Tillage Effects on Radar Backscatter

Radar backscatter data for different field configurations and modulation function curves for angular and frequency variations are presented. A simplistic approach to modeling this effect is presented. It is concluded that: (1) row direction is a significant contributor to radar backscatter from cropland and must be considered when making radar measurements over bare or sparsely vegetated fields; (2) while the effect decrease with increasing frequency, it is still large (5 dB) at 13.3 GHz; (3) row effects are independent of linear polarization; (4) there is a strong aspect angle sensitivity which is a function of the scene and radar system parameters