Yongil Jeon

The relationship between air pollution emissions and income: US Data

Considerable interest has focused on the possible existence of an environmental Kuznets curve, whereby pollution first increases but later falls with increasing income. Empirical studies have concentrated on a wide spectrum of countries and run into inevitable problems of data comparability and quality. We avoid these problems by looking at seven types of air emissions across the 50 US states and find all seven pollutants decrease with increasing per capita income. We also find strong evidence of heteroscedasticity with respect to the income–emissions relationship: lower-income states display much greater variability in per capita emission levels than higher-income states. Additionally, we look at the best measured of these emissions, air toxics, for the period 1988–94. Using a simple sign test, we find support for the notion that an increase in income is associated with a decrease in per capita emissions. However, the change in emissions appears to be unrelated to the magnitude of the change in income. We do find, though, that the reduction in per capita emissions is increasing both in terms of the 1988 level of per capita emissions and income. Possible implications of these results for the development process are discussed.

Spurious regressions with stationary series

A spurious regression occurs when a pair of independent series, but with strong temporal properties, are found apparently to be related according to standard inference in an OLS regression. Although this is well known to occur with pairs of independent unit root processes, this paper finds evidence that similar results are found with positively autocorrelated autoregressive series or long moving averages. This occurs regardless of the sample size and for various distributions of the error terms.

Reputation and efficiency: A non-parametric assessment of America's top-rated MBA programs

Widely publicized reports of fresh MBAs getting multiple job offers with six-figure annual salaries leave a long-lasting general impression about the high quality of selected business schools. While such spectacular achievement in job placement rightly deserves recognition, one should not lose sight of the resources expended in order to accomplish this result. In this study, we employ a measure of Pareto-Koopmans global efficiency to evaluate the efficiency levels of the MBA programs in Business Weeks top-rated list. We compute input- and output-oriented radial and non-radial efficiency measures for comparison. Among three tier groups, the schools from a higher tier group on average are more efficient than those from lower tiers, although variations in efficiency levels do occur within the same tier, which exist over different measures of efficiency.

The Performance of Domestic and Foreign Banks: The Case of Korea and the Asian Financial Crisis

Abstract This paper examines the performance of banks, domestic and foreign, in Korea before and after the Asian financial crisis, examining how the profitability of those banks differed and identifying factors that explain why those differences existed. The performance of Korean banks deteriorated dramatically in 1998 with most banks recovering somewhat in 1999. Foreign banks did not experience the same negative effect on their performance as a rule. Overall, the domestic Korean banks suffered more severely from the Asian financial crisis than foreign banks. Several possible explanations exist. First, foreign banks, unlike domestic Korean banks, were not subject to credit allocation directives from the Korean government to selected, favoured industries. Second, foreign banks, since they relied for governance on the mother bank in the home country, achieved higher efficiency and better asset and liability management. Finally, foreign banks rely more heavily on fee-for-service income rather than loan revenue.

Forecasting Performance of Information Criteria with Many Macro Series

Stock & Watson (1999) consider the relative quality of different univariate forecasting techniques. This paper extends their study on forecasting practice, comparing the forecasting performance of two popular model selection procedures, the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC). This paper considers several topics: how AIC and BIC choose lags in autoregressive models on actual series, how models so selected forecast relative to an AR(4) model, the effect of using a maximum lag on model selection, and the forecasting performance of combining AR(4), AIC, and BIC models with an equal weight.

An analysis of fishing capacity in the western and central Pacific Ocean tuna fishery and management implications

Recent increases in the volume of canning grade tuna caught in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) have led to concern about the increasing catching capacity of the fleet of purse seine vessels operating in the fishery. In this paper, data envelopment analysis is used to examine the current technical efficiency of the WCPO purse seine fleet, the potential catching capacity of the fleet and the excess capacity currently present in the fishery. These estimates are then used to examine possible implications of a move to a management regime based on limiting the total number of fishing days in the fishery.

Comparing forecasts of inflation using time distance

Abstract When considering the relative quality of forecasts the method of comparison is relevant: should we use vertical measures, such as mean square forecasting error, or the recently developed horizontal measure time distance. Four models for inflation in the US are considered based on univariate time series, a leading indicator, a univariate model combining with the specifications of the two models, and a bivariate model. According to the mean squared forecast errors an AR(1) model is superior, but it performs much less well than models using a leading indicator when considered in terms of time distance. These results hold for both standard procedures and for the bootstrap reality check.

Fishing Skill in Developing Country Fisheries: The Kedah, Malaysia Trawl Fishery

Fishing skill is perceived to play a crucial role in catching fish. The question arises for fishery managers as to whether or not there are observable and measurable attributes of the skipper or vessel that can be monitored and regulated to account for skipper skill and, hence, this source of fishing capacity. Equating technical efficiency with skipper skill, this paper evaluates technical efficiency and skipper skill in the Kedah, Malaysia, trawl fishery to address this issue.

Is There a Global Market for Tuna? Policy Implications for Tropical Tuna Fisheries

Regional ex-vessel markets for cannery-grade skipjack tuna throughout the globe are spatially integrated by price, but such markets for yellowfin tuna are spatially independent. The Americas exert primary price leadership in ex-vessel skipjack markets, but Bangkok and American Samoa also exert price leadership, and Ivory Coast, Japan, and Spain are largely price followers. Regional ex-vessel markets for skipjack and yellowfin are not integrated by prices. While price effects of this nature are simply evidence of a pecuniary externality, and thereby do not necessarily affect the overall size of global net benefits, in practice such price effects affect distribution among players—who wins and who loses—and in this manner, the eventual formation of, and compliance with, different management policies.

A time-distance criterion for evaluating forecasting models

Abstract In modeling series with leading or lagging indicators, it is useful to compare models in terms of time–distance. This paper formalizes the concept of time–distance in terms of various metrics, and investigates their behavior. For evaluating forecasts, time–distance metrics are shown to be more useful than standard measures (such as mean squared forecasting errors) under some circumstances and some time–distance metrics outperform others. An application to business cycle leading indicators is provided.