Eleni Zafeiriou

Mapping the Rural Problem and Development: What do Greek Landowners Think?☆

Abstract The adoption of alternative farming practices is regenerates production methods towards new directions, while comprises a new development path for less favoured areas (LFAs). Engaging in off-farm income generation activities can create new standards for employment, new professions and new midd le-c lass employees that will support development despite the downturn in trad itional agricultural activities. The present study examines the attitudes and perceptions of landowners regarding various options for rural development and the existence of alternative prospects for enhancing primary production, family income and, consequently, quality of life. Primary data were gathered through personally administered interviews (using a structured questionnaire) in the prefectures of Rodopi and Evros that were analyzed through multivariate data analysis methods. The results indicate the non-existence of significant d ifferences between the two regions. The majority of respondents consider the state and political parties as being responsible for environmental problems and they argue that future regional development may depend on agriculture and livestock production. Furthermore, most of them wish to engage in alternative crops like truffle, pomegranate and dogwood and the reasons behind such a decision are the competitive profile of and increased demand for such products, along with state subsidies.

Forecasting Bank Stock Market Prices with a Hybrid Method: The Case of Alpha Bank

The present study aims at constructing Confidence Intervals (C.I) for the predicted values of a Time Series with the application of a Hybrid method. The presented methodology is complicated and thus is completed in different stages. Initially the Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is applied on the raw time series in order to estimate C.I of the forecasts. Then, the Bootstrap method is employed on the residuals generated by the preceded process. On the upper and lower limit of the estimated C.I., two new ANNs are employed in order to make point estimations (of the upper and lower limits) using of Object Oriented Programming. For the empirical analysis daily observations of the closing prices of Alpha Bank stocks have been used. The sample period is extended from 28/01/2004 until 30/11/2005. The nonstationarity of the time series employed in our study is not a forbidding condition for the estimation of the confidence intervals, in our case, since the level of bootstrap still provides a satisfactory approximation for the roots arbitrarily close to unity (Berkowitz, Kilian 1996). The accuracy of the forecasts was surveyed with the use of different criteria and the results were satisfactory.

Investigating Farmer’s Perceptions of Adopting Alternative Farming Systems

Organic and integrated agriculture are recently developed alternative farming systems aimed at controlling environmental impacts and assuring the quality of agricultural products. Here we aim to: (1) describe the characteristics of certified of organic and integrated farms; and (2) analyze the factors affecting the farmers’ decision to implement either organic, integrated or conventional farming. The survey was based on a multinomial analysis applied to data obtained from a survey of farmers (structured questionnaire) in Greece. The findings confirmed that the decision to opt for one of three forms of agriculture was based on both the farms’ characteristics and the farmer’s attitudes.

Determinants of dissemination of environmental information: an empirical survey

The major objective of the present paper is to identify the factors that influence the dissemination of environmental information. In particular, analyst stock recommendation, country level risk, corporate value and environmental performance are surveyed as determinants of the environmental dissemination level. The survey was based on a sample of 92 multinational firms for the period 2009–2013, longer than that used in most past works. The methodology employed on our data is the panel data analysis with fixed effects. As proxies, for the dissemination level of environmental information, two different environmental disclosure indexes are used the Environmental Disclosure Score and Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index. According to our findings, the environmental performance in terms of Emission Reduction Initiatives and the country’s risk premium affects in a positive way the dissemination of environmental disclosures while the results regarding the stock analyst recommendation are controversial. Another important finding is that the firm’s value is validated as an insignificant factor for the dissemination level of environmental information. The aforementioned results provide the corporate managers with a tool to attract environmental friendly investors. The novelty on the present manuscript stands on the use of proxies for the environmental performance; namely the first one is based on outcome – objective while the second one refers to the corporate intention, elements that enrich the existing literature in the field of environmental behavior and dissemination of the environmental information of a firm.

Market and Economic Development in Bulgaria

The present paper tests empirically the existence of a causal relationship between the economic growth and the development in the banking and stock market in ex transition economies, recently member states of the EU and especially the case of Bulgaria. The Johansen cointegration test indicated a sole relationship between the banking sector, the stock market and the economic growth, while the application of the Granger causality/block exogeneity test indicated a bilateral relationship between the economic growth and the development in the stock market, as well as between the economic growth and the development in banking sector. Finally, no casual relationship was confirmed between the development in credit and stock market.

Validity of PPP for Producer Meat Prices in EU; Some Evidence☆

Abstract Market integration and the introduction of single currency has arisen the issue of the validity of the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis in EU within the last few decades. In most cases the surveys involve consumer prices and in particular the consumer price indices for the whole economy. Though, a few surveys focus on commodity prices and even less to producer prices. The present survey makes an effort to examine the behaviour of the real exchange rates based on producer meat prices for different EU countries. The role of CAP seems to be pivotal in our results, since no methodology employed could confirm stationarity and consequently, a mean reverting behaviour to a steady state for our data.

Stock price behavior of the Greek oil sector: The case of Hellenic petroleum S.A. Greece

The present study investigated the underlying process of the stock price returns time series of the oil sector taking as an example the case of Hellenic Petroleum SA, Greece. The data used are daily for over a 13 – year period. Nonlinearities were detected with different univariate tests that surveyed the independence and nonlinear deterministic structure of the time series studied. The data employed for these tests are the closing prices of Hellenic Petroleum SA, Greece. All the tests confirmed the existence of nonlinearities in the time series studied. Furthermore, a Layapunov test was employed to detect the chaotic behaviour of the stock prices under review. As it is well known, the macroeconomic environment plays an important role in the formation of the stock prices. Thus, the Johansen cointegration technique was employed to survey the inflation as an explanatory variable of the stock prices behaviour. Confirming that the two variables are not cointegrated, the noisy Mackey – Glass model was estimated, which is an equation with errors that follow an F- GARCH (p, q) process. This model was used in order to become able to interpret the volatility clustering as an endogenous phenomenon.