This study applies Narayan and Popp's () unit-root test with two endogenous breaks to assess the validity of long-run real interest rate parity (RIRP) via investigating the non-stationary properties of the real interest rate convergence relative to South Africa for ten African countries. This...

Our results suggest that the benefit policy change did not impact life-saving procedures or reduce patients’ burden of disease among AMI patients. The effect of ‘provider gaming’ was the strongest for the high reimbursement group as a result of the global budget cap pressure. The current...

In this paper we present a cellular automata (CA) model based on nonlinear kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) to simulate the spatiotemporal process of urban growth. As a generalisation of the linear principal component analysis (PCA) method, the KPCA method was developed to extract the...

In this paper, effect of heat treatment on the microstructures and wear properties of laser alloying (LA) composites is investigated. LA of the T-Co50/FeSi/TiC/TiN/CeO2 mixed powders on substrate of 45 steel can form the hard composites, which increased the wear resistance of substrate greatly....

Hong Kong is regarded as one of the most fantastic shopping paradise for tourists. Retailing is a major economic activity here and highly correlated with tourism industry. Implementation of Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) policy since July, 2003 which allows Mainland China citizens to visit Hong...

Direct foreign investment (DFI) allows a multinational corporation (MNC) to generate and appropriate extra-normal profits from its unique assets in a foreign market. China has become increasingly attractive for foreign investment over the past 20 years. This entails political risk, but MNCs can...

We develop a framework, extending the conventional duopoly model by replacing the Hotelling line with a simplex in high???dimension spaces, to study the competition and access regulation of multiple networks. We first characterize the competitive equilibrium when the substitutabilities of the...

The precise large deviations for the partial sums and random sums of negatively associated random variables with consistently varying tails are derived. The results obtained are similar to those of independent and identically distributed random variables.

An iterative (fixed-point) algorithm for the maximum-likelihood estimation of copula-based models that circumvents the need to compute second-order derivatives of the full likelihood function is adapted and examined. The algorithm exploits the structure of copula-based models that yield a...