Suchergebnisse

In this paper we investigate the impact of publication lags on forecast quality. Specifically, using a set of 285 economic series, we provide a concise measure of the forecast inefficiencies associated with series that are subject to a delay in their publication. This inefficiency is measured with respect to a variety of models and found to be statistically significant under certain conditions. These conditions include the persistence of the series, and the model used to generate the forecasts. Regarding the latter, we provide some evidence to suggest that recently proposed models based on real‐time predictor variables tend to deliver lower levels of forecast inefficiency.

AbstractThe economic significance of conditioning information in the presence of costly short‐selling is investigated. Using a compact testing framework, results demonstrate that fixed‐weight stock‐bond portfolios appear inefficient with respect to stock‐bond portfolios with weights determined by extant predictors. However, this result is highly dependent on ex ante knowledge of the predictor set and the ability to short‐sell at low cost. In the absence of such conditions, fixed‐weight stock‐bond portfolios appear efficient with respect to conditioning information.

The UK environmental voluntary subsector plays a key role in national environmental governance, yet little is known about it, the organisations that comprise it and how these organisations have been affected by the current period of public austerity. How have these organisations been fashioning operational responses to austerity and how do these relate to wider understandings about the contemporary voluntary sector? To address this, 18 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 organisations within an English UNESCO biosphere reserve in the summer of 2016. The findings led to an inductively constructed typology of organisations' operational responses to austerity, comprised of 'diversifying', 'restructuring', 'specialising', 'ignoring' or 'cooperating'. These are ordered on a hierarchical model, correlated to organisational size and institutionalism. This article advances our broad understandings about the voluntary sector under austerity and offers new empirical insights into the under-researched environmental voluntary subsector.

In 2011, Mojang released Minecraft Pocket Edition ( PE), a mobile version of their popular Minecraft franchise for Android and iOS devices that allows the infinitely blocky sandbox worlds to be manipulated directly through touchscreen interfaces. While the virtual worlds created by Minecraft players have drawn attention of various researchers, the configurations of play made possible by different gaming devices—particularly touchscreen devices—have been largely under-examined. Using Barad's notion of apparatuses to conceptualize gaming interfaces as sites of intra-activity, our study reports on a microethology of young Minecraft PE players engaged in collaborative play sessions. Over seven play sessions, which included two sessions observing Minecraft play on personal computer (PC)- and console-based versions, we examined how players' bodies and gaming apparatuses collaboratively materialize gaming events that highlight the space-time biases of these different modes of Minecraft play that what we call momentary and monumentary.