Constructing Co-governance between Government and Civil Society: An Institutional Approach to Collaboration

The aim of this paper is to analyze how civil society organizations (CSOs) collaborate with both developed and developing governments in Asia through institutional processes. It argues that in developed countries, institutional arrangements have a positive impact on collaboration. Favourable administrative governance can create collaboration between governments and CSOs. This paper reports on 3,944 studies of CSOs from 2004 to 2009 in Tokyo, Seoul, Manila, and Dhaka. CSOs in Tokyo have better combined collaborative and institutional processes than those in the other three cities. Governance in Seoul is more polarized than in the other cities, and in both Manila and Dhaka, despite there being a high degree of institutionalized relations between CSOs and the government, their collaboration is low. This research also finds that intermediary institutions between governments and CSOs play a role in co-governance.     

Bayesian sample‐size determination methods considering both worthwhileness and unpromisingness for exploratory two‐arm randomized clinical trials with binary endpoints

A randomized exploratory clinical trial comparing an experimental treatment with a control treatment on a binary endpoint is often conducted to make a go or no‐go decision. Such an exploratory trial needs to have an adequate sample size such that it will provide convincing evidence that the experimental treatment is either worthwhile or unpromising relative to the control treatment. In this paper, we propose three new sample‐size determination methods for an exploratory trial, which utilize the posterior probabilities calculated from predefined efficacy and inefficacy criteria leading to a declaration of the worthwhileness or unpromisingness of the experimental treatment. Simulation studies, including numerical investigation, showed that all three methods could declare the experimental treatment as worthwhile or unpromising with a high probability when the true response probability of the experimental treatment group is higher or lower, respectively, than that of the control treatment group.     

On the Usefulness or Lack Thereof of Optimality Criteria for Structural Change Tests

Elliott and Müller (2006) considered the problem of testing for general types of parameter variations, including infrequent breaks. They developed a framework that yields optimal tests, in the sense that they nearly attain some local Gaussian power envelop. The main ingredient in their setup is that the variance of the process generating the changes in the parameters must go to zero at a fast rate. They recommended the so-called qL?L test, a partial sums type test based on the residuals obtained from the restricted model. We show that for breaks that are very small, its power is indeed higher than other tests, including the popular sup-Wald (SW) test. However, the differences are very minor. When the magnitude of change is moderate to large, the power of the test is very low in the context of a regression with lagged dependent variables or when a correction is applied to account for serial correlation in the errors. In many cases, the power goes to zero as the magnitude of change increases. The power of the SW test does not show this non-monotonicity and its power is far superior to the qL?L test when the break is not very small. We claim that the optimality of the qL?L test does not come from the properties of the test statistics but the criterion adopted, which is not useful to analyze structural change tests. Instead, we use fixed-break size asymptotic approximations to assess the relative efficiency or power of the two tests. When doing so, it is shown that the SW test indeed dominates the qL?L test and, in many cases, the latter has zero relative asymptotic efficiency.     

A Bayesian non‐inferiority test for two independent binomial proportions

In drug development, non‐inferiority tests are often employed to determine the difference between two independent binomial proportions. Many test statistics for non‐inferiority are based on the frequentist framework. However, research on non‐inferiority in the Bayesian framework is limited. In this paper, we suggest a new Bayesian index τ = P(π₁ > π₂ ? Δ₀ | X₁,X₂), where X₁ and X₂ denote binomial random variables for trials n₁ and n₂, and parameters π₁ and π₂, respectively, and the non‐inferiority margin is Δ₀ > 0. We show two calculation methods for τ, an approximate method that uses normal approximation and an exact method that uses an exact posterior PDF. We compare the approximate probability with the exact probability for τ. Finally, we present the results of actual clinical trials to show the utility of index τ. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting With Nonspurious Factors in U.S. Macroeconomic Time Series

This study examines the practical implications of the fact that structural changes in factor loadings can produce spurious factors (or irrelevant factors) in forecasting exercises. These spurious factors can induce an overfitting problem in factor-augmented forecasting models. To address this concern, we propose a method to estimate nonspurious factors by identifying the set of response variables that have no structural changes in their factor loadings. Our theoretical results show that the obtained set may include a fraction of unstable response variables. However, the fraction is so small that the original factors are able to be identified and estimated consistently. Moreover, using this approach, we find that a significant portion of 132 U.S. macroeconomic time series have structural changes in their factor loadings. Although traditional principal components provide eight or more factors, there are significantly fewer nonspurious factors. The forecasts using the nonspurious factors can significantly improve out-of-sample performance.     

A modified confidence set for the structural break date in linear regression models

Elliott and Müller (EM) (2007 Elliott, G., Müller, U. K. (2007). Confidence sets for the date of a single break in linear time series regressions. Journal of Econometrics 141:1196–1218.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) provide a method for constructing a confidence set for the structural break date by inverting a variant of the locally best test statistic. Previous studies have shown that the EM method produces a set with an accurate coverage ratio even for a small break; however, the set is often overly lengthy. This study proposes a simple modification to rehabilitate their method through the long-run variance estimation. Following the literature, we provide an asymptotic justification for the improvement of the modified method over the original method under a nonlocal asymptotic framework. A Monte Carlo simulation shows that the modified method achieves a shorter confidence set than the EM method, especially when the break is large or the HAC correction is conducted. The modified method may exhibit minor errors in the coverage rate when the break is small; however, the coverage is more stable than alternative methods when the break is large. We apply our method to a level shift in post-1980s Japanese inflation data.     

Traditional or Economic Values? Analyzing Absentee Landowner Attitudes Amid Social and Agricultural Transformation in Japan

Agricultural landownership in Japan has changed drastically over the last century due to post-World War II land reforms and cultural, political, and economic shifts in the subsequent decades. Initial land reform shifted the concentrated ownership of land from the wealthy to small-scale farmers. But as Japan industrialized and became more urban-centered, a substantial amount of rural land has been left abandoned or unmanaged by descendants of those farmers. This paper analyzes the attitudes of absentee agricultural landowners in Japan to better understand the prevalence of economically rational versus traditional attitudes toward land ownership. We draw on the rural sociological literature on place attachment to hypothesize why some absentee landowners feel a strong tie to the land of their ancestors, while others would be willing to sell for a reasonable price. We use unique survey data obtained from 466 absentee agricultural landowners in Japan. Logistic regression results indicate that attachment to place, gender, age, educational attainment, and usage of land is significant predictors of whether landowners hold traditional, rather than economic, values. We discuss the implications of these findings for the future of sustainable agricultural land management in Japan.     

Distinguishing Providing Public Services from Receiving Government Funding as Factors in Nonprofit Advocacy

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - This study innovates by introducing a conceptual distinction between the provision of public services and the receipt of...     

A generalization of Campbell and Kelly’s trade-off theorem

This article considers social choice theory without the Pareto principle. We revisit the trade-off theorem developed by Campbell and Kelly (Econometrica 61:1355–1365, 1993) and generalize their result. By introducing an alternative measure of decisive structure, a dominance relation, we show that if a social welfare function dominates another social welfare function, then the number of pairs of alternatives which social ranking is independently of individual preferences under the former is not more than that under the latter. Moreover, we offer two applications of our main result.