Hasil untuk "Commercial geography. Economic geography"

Ryuji Hashimoto, Masahiro Kaneko, Ryosuke Takata et al.

Opinion dynamics (OD) studies how individual opinions evolve and generate collective patterns such as consensus and polarization. While recent work explores OD using populations of LLM-based agents focusing on opinion exchange, it typically does not incorporate individuals' lived experiences, such as economic outcomes of past decisions, which play a critical role in shaping opinions. We propose a novel OD simulation framework that grounds LLM-based agents in an economic environment, allowing them to act and receive environmental feedback. Our simulations exhibit coherent OD at both individual and population levels: individual opinions follow structured trajectories shaped by economic experiences, with adverse conditions inducing opinion rigidity, while at the population level, collective opinions co-move with economic conditions, with inequality amplifying polarization and price instability driving larger distributional shifts. These results highlight the importance of grounding LLM-based agents in environments to capture collective OD.

Nebyu Adamu Abebe, Navkiranjit Kaur Dhaliwal

Abstract Corporate governance plays a crucial role within the contemporary corporate regulatory framework, encompassing the transmission of information from a corporation to the public via several communication channels. This study investigated the corporate governance disclosure practices of Ethiopian insurance companies. A comprehensive set of secondary data spanning eight years was gathered from seventeen insurance companies. The data were sourced primarily from the annual reports of these companies, covering the period from 2015–16 to 2022–23. To evaluate corporate governance disclosure practices, a corporate governance disclosure index comprising 123 items was developed. This index was based on the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance, the corporate governance disclosure directives specific to Ethiopian insurance companies, and insights from the existing literature. The unweighted disclosure index is used to calculate the corporate governance disclosure index. This study employed descriptive statistics and an independent t-test to evaluate and compare the corporate governance disclosure practices of insurance companies. According to the results, the disclosure practices of insurance companies were poor but improved from 2015 to 2022. The analysis revealed that the average corporate governance disclosure level of Ethiopian insurance companies during this study was 57.15. In addition, the independent t-test results showed that there is no significant difference in corporate governance disclosure practices between private and government insurance companies. Overall, the insurance industry in Ethiopia has made progress in terms of disclosure practices. However, there is a need for improvement to ensure better transparency and accountability.

Mahmoud Abdelmuty Hashim Abdelhameed

This study investigates the mediating role of Consulting Engineering Works (CEW) and Engineering Professional Ethics (EPE) in the relationship between Quality Management System (QMS) adoption and the sustainability of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Urban Development (MIUD) in the Northern State of Sudan. The research, motivated by observed weaknesses in the Ministry’s performance indicators—affecting economic, environmental, and social sustainability—aims to assess the significance and impact of QMS, CEW, and EPE on Ministry’s Sustainability (MS). Employing a quantitative research design, data were collected via questionnaires from 223 ministry employees, analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics, and structural equation modeling (SEM) through SPSS and AMOS. Key findings reveal that QMS has a high importance level, while CEW, EPE, and MS are of moderate importance. Path analysis demonstrated a statistically significant direct impact of QMS on MS (standardized effect = 0.584), as well as a full mediating effect of CEW and EPE together between QMS and MS, with a standardized indirect effect of 0.743 and total effect of 0.641. The results confirm that QMS implementation enhances CEW and EPE, which in turn drive the Ministry’s sustainability. The study highlights the necessity for integrating strong quality management, ethical standards, and professional engineering practices to achieve sustainable development in public infrastructure institutions.

Alejandro Islas Camargo, Juan A. Zumaya Galván

This study presents an exchange rate (Mexican Pesos / U.S. Dollar) forecasting model. The statistical methodology used is based on the Multi-State Markov Switching model with three different specifications. The model is applied to the trend of the time series data instead of the original observations to mitigate the effect of outliers and transitory blips. The filtering technique employed to estimate the trend allows us to control the amount of smoothness in the resulting trend. By doing this, the Markov-Switching approach captures the trend persistence of exchange rates more accurately and enhances both in-sample and out-of sample forecast performance. Our results show that correctly identifying the trend in the exchange rate (Mexican Pesos / U.S. Dollar) plays a key role in achieving superior forecasting ability concerning the simple random walk. Besides the new approach for estimating a trend with controlled smoothness, we emphasize that when working with asset prices time series, a usual assumption is that the series behaves as a random walk, that is, as an I(1) process, and not as an I(2) process. Since we are interested in decomposing a financial time series into trend plus noise, we use the exponential smoothing (ES) filter rather than the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, as other authors have done. Applying the HP filter to an I(1) process, as wrongly done, yields a specification error in the sense that a sub-optimal procedure is used.

Sara Fish, Julia Shephard, Minkai Li et al.

We develop evaluation methods for measuring the economic decision-making capabilities and tendencies of LLMs. First, we develop benchmarks derived from key problems in economics -- procurement, scheduling, and pricing -- that test an LLM's ability to learn from the environment in context. Second, we develop the framework of litmus tests, evaluations that quantify an LLM's choice behavior on a stylized decision-making task with multiple conflicting objectives. Each litmus test outputs a litmus score, which quantifies an LLM's tradeoff response, a reliability score, which measures the coherence of an LLM's choice behavior, and a competency score, which measures an LLM's capability at the same task when the conflicting objectives are replaced by a single, well-specified objective. Evaluating a broad array of frontier LLMs, we (1) investigate changes in LLM capabilities and tendencies over time, (2) derive economically meaningful insights from the LLMs' choice behavior and chain-of-thought, (3) validate our litmus test framework by testing self-consistency, robustness, and generalizability. Overall, this work provides a foundation for evaluating LLM agents as they are further integrated into economic decision-making.

Daniel Henrique Dario Capitani, Luiz Eduardo Gaio

Agricultural commodities price volatilities experienced an increase in the period of 2006 2008 and since then, the shocks from the global crises have been affecting these markets, as the Covid-19 pandemic period. Many studies have evaluated volatility spillovers around agricultural markets by focusing on crises cycles. However, few of these studies focus on emerging markets. This study examines the impacts of the Covid 19 pandemic on Brazilian agricultural price volatility. This study also considers the USD/BRL exchange rate and crude oil prices. We examine the volatility spillover effects and dynamic connectedness among the markets. A TVP-VAR model was applied, considering the specifications proposed by Antonakakis et al. (2020). The results indicate an increase in volatility connectedness after the Covid-19 outbreak, where volatility transmission affected all markets domestically. These effects were still significant after the Russia Ukraine conflict and dissipated from mid-2022 onwards. Overall, the exchange rate and soybean were the largest net transmitters during the pre- and post-Covid-19 pandemic, and corn was a net receiver. Crude oil had a significant transmission effect after a short period after the Covid-19 outbreak and the Russia-Ukraine war. Additionally, wheat was a significant volatility receiver after the Russia-Ukraine conflict and rice was a net transmitter during the Covid-19 pandemic. These findings corroborate that the crises cycles also affect Brazil but highlight that in the context of an emerging market, the exchange rate is more important in explaining agricultural price dynamics than crude oil.

Shourya Bose, Yijiang Li, Amy Van Sant et al.

Accurate short-term energy consumption forecasting for commercial buildings is crucial for smart grid operations. While smart meters and deep learning models enable forecasting using past data from multiple buildings, data heterogeneity from diverse buildings can reduce model performance. The impact of increasing dataset heterogeneity in time series forecasting, while keeping size and model constant, is understudied. We tackle this issue using the ComStock dataset, which provides synthetic energy consumption data for U.S. commercial buildings. Two curated subsets, identical in size and region but differing in building type diversity, are used to assess the performance of various time series forecasting models, including fine-tuned open-source foundation models (FMs). The results show that dataset heterogeneity and model architecture have a greater impact on post-training forecasting performance than the parameter count. Moreover, despite the higher computational cost, fine-tuned FMs demonstrate competitive performance compared to base models trained from scratch.

MITRA L. DEVKOTA, ERIC B. HOWINGTON

This paper attempts to describe the drivers of housing prices in Cumming, Georgia, a rapidly growing suburban area in the southeast of the US. Data from123 single family homes were collected and analyzed using multiple regression methodology. The findings from correlation matrix indicate that the price of the house is positively associated with the number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, square footage of the house, the lot size, and the number of parking spaces available in the house, and negatively associated with the age of the house. The results from regression analysis suggest that number of bathrooms, square footage, parking spaces, and the dummy variables for Denmark High School, Forsyth Central High School, and North Forsyth High School are statistically significant predictors of the price of the house for Cumming, Georgia. Finally, about 80% of the variation in the prices of the houses is accounted for by our regression model. These findings may have important implications for decision-making by residents, real-estate agents, house buyers and sellers, financial institutions, policymakers, and scholars alike.

Darija Barak, Edoardo Gallo, Alastair Langtry

Contact tracing and quarantine programs have been one of the leading Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions against COVID-19. Some governments have relied on mandatory programs, whereas others embrace a voluntary approach. However, there is limited evidence on the relative effectiveness of these different approaches. In an interactive online experiment conducted on 731 subjects representative of the adult US population in terms of sex and region of residence, we find there is a clear ranking. A fully mandatory program is better than an optional one, and an optional system is better than no intervention at all. The ranking is driven by reductions in infections, while economic activity stays unchanged. We also find that political conservatives have higher infections and levels of economic activity, and they are less likely to participate in the contact tracing program.

Habeel Alam, Muhammad Ashraful Alam, Nauman Zafar Butt

Agrivoltaics (AV) is a dual land-use approach to collocate solar energy generation with agriculture for preserving the terrestrial ecosystem and enabling food-energy-water synergies. Here, we present a systematic approach to model the economic performance of AV relative to standalone ground-mounted PV (GMPV) and explore how the module design configuration can affect the dual food-energy economic performance. A remarkably simple criterion for economic feasibility is quantified that relates the land preservation cost to dual food-energy profit. We explore case studies including both high and low value crops under fixed tilt bifacial modules oriented either along the conventional North/South (N/S) facings or vertical East/West (E/W) facings. For each module configuration, the array density is varied to explore an economically feasible design space relative to GMPV for a range of module to land cost ratio (M_L) - a location-specific indicator relating the module technology (hardware and installation) costs to the soft (land acquisition, tax, overheads, etc.) costs. To offset a typically higher AV module cost needed to preserve the cropland, both E/W and N/S orientated modules favor high value crops, reduced (<60%) module density, and higher M_L (>25). In contrast, higher module density and an increased feed-in-tariff (FIT) relative to GMPV are desirable at lower M_L. The economic trends vary sharply for M_L< 10 but tend to saturate for M_L> 20. For low value crops, ~15% additional FIT can enable economic equivalence to GMPV at standard module density. The proposed modeling framework can provide a valuable tool for AV stakeholders to assess, predict, and optimize the techno-economic design for AV

LAURA CIOBANU

Romania had to spend in 2014-2020 for rural development € 9.5 billion of which € 8.1 billion from the European Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) budget and € 1.4 billion national co-financing. Although the total budget and its distribution by year remained unchanged during the programming period, the allocation of funds by priorities and measures underwent several changes, mainly due to the intermediate results of implementation. This paper aims to identify the extent to which Romania has accessed European funds for rural development in the 2014- 2020 period and to offer an overview of Rural Development Programme (RDP) 2014-2020 implementation. It will emphasise which measures were least accessed and how the current situation of the results shows compared to the initial targets. The data were mainly taken from the official website of the National RDP 2014 - 2020. The analysis of the degree milestones achievement shows that the minimum threshold of 85% has been reached for all program priorities so far. All the alternative indicators established by the program and 5 of the 7 main indicators established at the level of all priorities have reached their milestone (stage objective?) in proportion of 100%. Currently, priorities 2, 4 and 6 have the highest chances of recording maximum values of the result indicators at the end of the period, as they have exceeded the 85% threshold within the milestones Although there was no perfect match between the programmed financial support and the Romanian rural reality, RDP 2014-2020 managed to respond largely to the needs of agriculture and rural space as a whole. The progress that Romania has made in terms of rural development is largely due to the measures implemented by the RDP during the last programming period. The results show that although there was no perfect match between the programmed financial support and the Romanian rural reality, RDP 2014- 2020 managed to respond largely to the needs of agriculture and rural space as a whole.

ABHAYA K. KUMAR, PRAKASH PINTO, IQBAL THONSE HAWALDAR et al.

India is the major producer of Areca nut in the world. Volatile demand and price are the major challenges for the Areca nut growers in India. The use of time series models to manage the price risk has become the interest of academicians today. This paper deals with developing an appropriate model to predict the prices of a new variety of Areca nut in Karnataka using monthly price data for the period January 2009 to December 2018. Box Jenkins ARIMA methodology is used to develop the model. Along with ARIMA estimates, log-likelihood, Akaike’s information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian (BIC) information criterion statistics are also estimated to decide on the appropriate model. ACF and PACF correlograms for residuals of ARIMA are used to do the diagnostic check of the selected ARIMA model. Appropriate model to forecast the new variety Areca nut price is ARIMA (3, 1, 3)

Gary Wolfowicz, F. Joseph Heremans, David D. Awschalom

Noiseless optical components are critical for applications ranging from metrology to quantum communication. Here we characterize several commercial telecom C-band fiber components for parasitic noise using a tunable laser. We observe the spectral signature of trace concentrations of erbium in all devices from the underlying optical crystals including YVO4, LiNbO3, TeO2 and AMTIR glass. Due to the long erbium lifetime, these signals are challenging to mitigate at the single photon level in the telecom range, and suggests the need for higher purity optical crystals.

Anton V. Vykhodtsev, Darren Jang, Qianpu Wang et al.

The penetration of the lithium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) into the power system environment occurs at a colossal rate worldwide. This is mainly because it is considered as one of the major tools to decarbonize, digitalize, and democratize the electricity grid. The economic viability and technical reliability of projects with batteries require appropriate assessment because of high capital expenditures, deterioration in charging/discharging performance and uncertainty with regulatory policies. Most of the power system economic studies employ a simple power-energy representation coupled with an empirical description of degradation to model the lithium-ion battery. This approach to modelling may result in violations of the safe operation and misleading estimates of the economic benefits. Recently, the number of publications on techno-economic analysis of BESS with more details on the lithium-ion battery performance has increased. The aim of this review paper is to explore these publications focused on the grid-scale BESS applications and to discuss the impacts of using more sophisticated modelling approaches. First, an overview of the three most popular battery models is given, followed by a review of the applications of such models. The possible directions of future research of employing detailed battery models in power systems' techno-economic studies are then explored.

Milan Jain, Soumya Kundu, Arnab Bhattacharya et al.

For effective integration of building operations into the evolving demand response programs of the power grid, real-time decisions concerning the use of building appliances for grid services must excel on multiple criteria, ranging from the added value to occupants' comfort to the quality of the grid services. In this paper, we present a data-driven decision-support framework to dynamically rank load control alternatives in a commercial building, addressing the needs of multiple decision criteria (e.g. occupant comfort, grid service quality) under uncertainties in occupancy patterns. We adopt a stochastic multi-criteria decision algorithm recently applied to prioritize residential on/off loads, and extend it to i) complex load control decisions (e.g. dimming of lights, changing zone temperature set-points) in a commercial building; and ii) systematic integration of zonal occupancy patterns to accurately identify short-term grid service opportunities. We evaluate the performance of the framework for curtailment of air-conditioning, lighting, and plug-loads in a multi-zone office building for a range of design choices. With the help of a prototype system that integrates an interactive \textit{Data Analytics and Visualization} frontend, we demonstrate a way for the building operators to monitor the flexibility in energy consumption and to develop trust in the decision recommendations by interpreting the rationale behind the ranking.

O. Mryglod, S. Nazarovets, S. Kozmenko

Our study is one of the first examples of multidimensional and longitudinal disciplinary analysis at the national level based on Crossref data. We present a large-scale quantitative analysis of Ukrainian economics. This study is not yet another example of research aimed at ranking of local journals, authors or institutions, but rather exploring general tendencies that can be compared to other countries or regions. We study different aspects of Ukrainian economics output. In particular, the collaborative nature, geographic landscape and some peculiarities of citation statistics are investigated. We have found that Ukrainian economics is characterized by a comparably small share of co-authored publications, however, it demonstrates the tendency towards more collaborative output. Based on our analysis, we discuss specific and universal features of Ukrainian economic research. The importance of supporting various initiatives aimed at enriching open scholarly metadata is considered. A comprehensive and high-quality meta description of publications is probably the shortest path to a better understanding of national trends, especially for non-English speaking countries. The results of our analysis can be used to better understand Ukrainian economic research and support research policy decisions.

GEORGE BUCĂŢA, ALEXANDRU-MARIUS RIZESCU

We live in a society in which change succeeds with great rapidity and in which, for the business world, the challenges and the obligation of change are in the field of normality. In order to progress and resist the fierce competition determined by an increasingly selective and dynamic market, organizations must continually develop their employees. The Human Resource Development process allows the organization to grow and obtain the competitive advantage that is so necessary to maintain the market.

Osama Ahmed, Supawat Rungsuriyawiboon, Sameh Abdelsalam

This study examines the relative technical efficiency of mixed crop-livestock farming systems and assesses their economic performance between the Upper and Delta regions of Egypt. A non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) method is empirically applied for measuring technical efficiency using farm-level data for 838 mixed crop-livestock farmers. The findings show that the mixed crop-livestock farms in Egypt are operating at a low level of technical efficiency, indicating most farms are unable to catch up with the current production frontier and existing production technologies. Farms in the Delta region perform slightly better than those farms in Upper Egypt. Results also suggest that technical efficiency improvement is positively affected by farmers’ education, having a farm milk production certificate, and being located in the Delta region, whereas farm size negatively affects the economic performance of mixed crop-livestock farming systems in Egypt.

GHERGHINA LILIANA

The objective of the paper The importance of the rating analysis of touristic reception structures, components of the tourist offer in Resita, was to highlight the fact that their higher rating level leads to increased flows of tourists in Resita. The legislation in force clearly specifies that in any structure of tourist reception rated in the 3-4 stars category, a level of comfort and services of superior quality is ensured. At the level of the Resita Municipality, 47.62% of the tourist reception structures with accommodation functions are rated in the 3 stars or flowers category, and those for public catering, 5.66% received 4 stars, respectively 47.17% , 3 stars. Most of the accommodations spaces are available in hotel type units, which represent 28.57% of the total units, 53.46% of the total spaces and 53.23% of the total touristic accommodation places. On the second place the touristic pensions are positioned with 38.10% of the total units, 29.62% of the total spaces and 29.28% of the total places. Out of the total structures of touristic reception with public catering functions, most are classic restaurant type units, which represent 35.85% of the total units and 54.85% of the total public catering places. The bar catering unit is positioned on the second place with a percentage of 24.53% of the total units and 18.96% of the total catering seats. The offer of the touristic reception structures in Resita can be capitalized and known through the ten travel agencies, organizers or intermediaries, functioning in the locality.

Marius-F. Danca

In this paper the dynamics of an economic system with foreign financing, of integer or fractional order, are analyzed. The symmetry of the system determines the existence of two pairs of coexisting attractors. The integer-order version of the system proves to have several combinations of coexisting hidden attractors with self-excited attractors. Because one of the system variables represents the foreign capital in ow, the presence of hidden attractors could be of a real interest in economic models. The fractional-order variant presents another interesting coexistence of attractors in the fractional order space.