Common paths,divergent patterns: The social protection by other means approach in Australia and Japan

This article reports on a study of the welfare reform trajectories of two countries that are often identified in the literature as having institutional patterns of the ‘social protection by the other means’ approach. It is questioned in the article whether these two countries have undergone a converging reform trajectory against the increasing forces of economic liberalisation and whether their distinct ways of doing social policy have now come to an end. It argues that while both Australia and Japan have followed a similar neoliberal path in their social policy reform direction, the forms and patterns they have taken to follow have been distinct, largely aligned with the existing structure of social protection in each. Distinctive strategies of welfare adopted by each country have led to a divergent pattern in their way of doing social policy.     

Empirical bayes approach to bayes sequential estimation: the poisson and bernoulli cases

The problem considered is the Bayes sequential estimation of the mean with quadratic loss and fixed cost per observation. Assume the prior distribution is not completely known. Some empirical Bayes procedures are proposed in the Poisson and Bernoulli cases, and they are shown to be asymptotically non-deficient in the sense of Woodroofe (1981).     

Central Limit Theorems for Reduced U‐Statistics Under Dependence and Their Usefulness

A reduced ‐statistic is a ‐statistic with its summands drawn from a restricted but balanced set of pairs. In this article, central limit theorems are derived for reduced ‐statistics under ‐mixing, which significantly extends the work of Brown & Kildea in various aspects. It will be shown and illustrated that reduced ‐statistics are quite useful in deriving test statistics in various nonparametric testing problems.     

Tests for structural breaks in memory parameters of long-memory heterogeneous autoregressive models

Tests for structural breaks in the coefficients of the long-memory heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) models are developed. The tests are based on the partial sum process of the normalized efficient score vector. The tests have the nice property of identifying the parameters of the daily, weekly, and monthly regressors in which breaks occur. Limiting null distributions of the proposed tests are proven to be derived from standard Brownian bridges. A finite sample Monte-Carlo experiment shows reasonable size and power properties of the proposed tests. The proposed method is illustrated by a real data analysis.     

Improved confidence estimators for Fieller's confidence sets

Fieller's confidence set C_F for ratios of location parameters, although of great importance in practice, is often cited as an example to criticize frequentist theory. The reason is that the set can consist of the whole parameter space and yet the confidence is γ = 1 – α in any case. In this paper, we study the problem of constructing data-dependent estimators better than γ₊, A reasonable estimator appears to be γ₊, which is one if C_F is the whole parameter space and γ otherwise. By using an estimated confidence approach and a squared-error loss, it is shown that γ₊ dominates γ. The risk improvement of γ₊ over γ can be sizable. Also, by numerically comparing γ₊ with a generalized Bayes estimator γ_L, which is shown to be admissible when one or two ratios are concerned, it is shown that γ₊ is nearly admissible. We also conclude that the common practice of reporting 1 – α only when C_F is not the whole parameter space is nearly admissible.     

Comparisons of normalization methods for relative quantitative in real-time polymerase chain reaction

The real-time polymerase chain reaction (rtPCR) provides sensitive and accurate quantitative results and becomes a widespread technique in analyzing gene expressions. House-keeping genes are required as references to normalize data of target genes, which may be unstable. This normalization process is similar to the normalization in analyzing high-density oligonucleotide arrays. This article evaluates the feasibility of normalizations for high-density oligonucleotide arrays to normalize data collected in rtPCR experiments. Since data features are different, simulations are used to evaluate the performance of these normalizations to rtPCR data based on five indices. Their feasibilities are illustrated by a rtPCR data.     

The chernoff efficiency of the wilcoxon rank test

Exact limiting Chernoff efficiencies of the Wilcoxon rank test are derived using Hoadley's results. Efficiency curves are derived for the two-sample Wilcoxon rank test relative to the two-sample t test for normal shift alternatives when the null hypothesis is that of common normality. The comparisons with Bahadur efficiency and small sample Hodges-Lehmann efficiency-are also made.     

State Economic Strength and Some Methodological Issues on Its Assessment

At present, many international organizations and scholars, who are aimed to compare and assess country-specific economy or competitiveness, have set different standards and indicators and tried to assess the economic strength of individual country. But most of these standards and indicators are for the assessment of individual aspects and what is worse, they are not suitable for the real situation of the countries concerned. This paper deals with methodological issues on the assessment of state economic strength. To this end, authors investigate the preceding studies on the assessment of economy of a given country, conceptualize the state economic strength, set a new system of indicators for assessing it and on this basis, produce a methodology for the synthetic assessment of state economic strength. The findings are that state economic strength must be defined in a view of economic capability which any country can exhibit by itself even under uncertain external environment, the indicators for assessing it include a variety of indicators in line with its essence, and assessment methodology must be synthetic one based on considering the weights of indicators. These findings may help, on the one hand, in assessing the economy of a given country and taking an economic and technical measures for its strengthening for policymakers, and on the other hand, in comparing and assessing the country-specific economy for organizations or scholars in a new perspective.

     

The elephant in the room is awake and takes things personally: The North Korean nuclear threat and the general public's estimation of American diplomacy

The general audience for a global crisis can become a grassroots force in the ultimate fate of policy decisions. Focusing on the North Korean nuclear crisis case, certain contingent factors (dominant coalition characteristics, external threat, and external public characteristics) were overall strong predictors for public estimation about the government stance. Further, perception of situational factors (external threat and external public characteristics) was a stronger predictor for the participants’ stance estimation than perception of predisposing factors (dominant coalition characteristics). Implications for international diplomacy were discussed.     

A fuzzy set approach for R&D portfolio selection using a real options valuation model

Making R&D portfolio decision is difficult, because long lead times of R&D and market and technology dynamics lead to unavailable and unreliable collected data for portfolio management. The objective of this research is to develop a fuzzy R&D portfolio selection model to hedge against the R&D uncertainty. Fuzzy set theory is applied to model uncertain and flexible project information. Since traditional project valuation methods often underestimate the risky project, a fuzzy compound-options model is used to evaluate the value of each R&D project. The R&D portfolio selection problem is formulated as a fuzzy zero–one integer programming model that can handle both uncertain and flexible parameters to determine the optimal project portfolio. A new transformation method based on qualitative possibility theory is developed to convert the fuzzy portfolio selection model into a crisp mathematical model from the risk-averse perspective. The transformed model can be solved by an optimization technique. An example is used to illustrate the proposed approach. We conclude that the proposed approach can assist decision makers in selecting suitable R&D portfolios, while there is a lack of reliable project information.