自從中國大陸實施改革開放以來，隨著國際貿易越趨頻繁，對外之貿易依存度也逐漸上升，而迄今已成為貿易大國。而依據國際貿易理論，在滿足了要素稟賦理論全部條件的情況之下，自由的國際貿易會造成商品的相對價格趨於均等。而像中國大陸這種勞工豐沛的大型經濟體系融入了國際貿易體系，則將會促使與中國大陸經貿往來較為密切之國家與中國大陸之薪資差距逐漸縮小。故本文將利用中國大陸貿易夥伴之實證分析來探討貿易依存度對薪資差距之影響。 本文蒐集了2000年至2011年與中國大陸貿易關係較為密切的20個國家與中國大陸經濟變數之追蹤資料（Panel Data），包括：工業化程度差距、失業率差距、女性就業人口比例差距、教育程度差距，及上述國家對中國大陸之貿易依存度及中國大陸對該國之貿易依存度作為本研究之解釋變數，並以與中國大陸之薪資差距作為被解釋變數。將各數列資料進行單根檢定，經LLC單根檢定法判定所有數列皆為定態，再將各該數列以固定效果模型進行實證分析。 實證結果顯示，貿易夥伴對中國大陸之貿易依存度和與中國大陸之薪資差距，在1%的顯著水準之下呈現負向顯著影響，表示當各貿易夥伴對中國大陸之貿易依存度越高的時候，與中國大陸之薪資差距將會越小。而此結論與要素價格均等化之定理結論一致，故整體而言，國際貿易導致的薪資牽絆效果（Lock-in effect）獲得了實證上的支持。 / Since the implementation of reform and opening up in Mainland China, with increasingly frequent international trade, the dependence of foreign trade is gradually rising, but so far has become the largest trading nation. And based on the theory of international trade, under the circumstances to meet all the conditions of the endowment theory, free international trade will cause the relative prices of goods tend to be equal. And like the Mainland China such a large labor abundant economies into the international trading system, you will be prompted more closely with Mainland China 's national economic and trade exchanges with Mainland China salary differences is gradually narrowing. Therefore, this article will be to explore the impact of trade dependence on the use of empirical analysis of the salary differences trading partners in Mainland China. This paper collected from 2000 to 2011 trade relations with Mainland China more closely panel data from 20 countries and Mainland China Economic variables, including: the differences between the level of industrialization, the unemployment rate differences, the differences between the proportion of the female workforce, education differences, and the dependence of these countries on trade in Mainland China and the Mainland China to the country's trade dependence as explanatory variables of this study, and in Mainland China with the salary differences is interpreted as a variable. The number of columns in each data unit root test conducted by LLC unit root test method determines all the series are stationary state, then the number of columns in each of the fixed effects model for empirical analysis. The empirical results show that dependence on trade of trading partners in mainland China and the salary differences with Mainland China, under the 1% significance level showed a significant negative impact, which means that when all trading partners in Mainland China 's dependence on trade higher time, and the salary differences in Mainland China will be smaller. And this conclusion is consistent with the theorem of factor price equalization, so overall, lock-in effect resulting from international trade gained empirical support.

Over the last few decades, numerous studies have adopted efficiency and productivity techniques to examine and evaluate the overall performance of banking industries to inform policy effect as well as identify the best practice. The majority of banking efficiency and productivity studies focus on the developed US and European countries. There are only limited studies in the Asian banking industries but no cross-country comparison in major Asian economies. To fill this literature gap, this thesis attempts to measure and compare the cost efficiency and total factor productivity change in ten Asian banking sectors using an unbalanced panel data set consisting of 280 commercial banks over the period of 1998 to 2005. It is widely agreed that cross-country differences play an important part in examining banks performance in international comparison. They can influence the frontier technology as additional explanatory variables or they can enter inefficiency directly as a measure of determinants or heteroscedasticity. Both cases are considered in the empirical sections of this thesis. In the former case, the empirical results from systematic comparisons of panel data stochastic frontier models with and without incorporating these cross-country heterogeneities suggests that cross-country differences are important sources to explain banks performances therefore they should not be neglected. The overall cost efficiency in these Asian banking industries is 0.5897 with a decreasing trend, despite positive technical progress and slight economies of scale. The total factor productivity change is measured by using a new cost-based total factor productivity index, an index number counterpart of Bauer's (1990) total differential approach. A five-way decomposition is also provided with the attempt to identify the main contributors to the productivity change. Overall, Asian banking industries have experienced positive but not substantial productivity change from 1998-05. In the latter case, a general model that considers exogenous influences in both inefficiency and random noise error term is constructed and compared against other alternative specifications. The empirical results favour this general model and the overall and country-specific cost efficiency and total factor productivity are then estimated and calculated.

The Southeast Order has been milk deficit for over ten years and because of this milk has to be brought in from other orders to meet processor’s demand. Transportation credits provide processors with help to cover transportation costs to bring outside milk into the order. To help keep Class I utilization and support milk prices, relative to orders in the North, Order 7 has low diversion limits. As milk produced within Order 7 has been on a downward trend, milk brought into the order has not increased as consistently. In 2000 milk pooled from farms within the order made up an average of 66% out of the total amount pooled compared to a 2012 average of 43%. The objectives of this paper are to review the history of the federal milk marketing system, describe the structure of milk pricing, examine the unique features of the southern orders, and estimate the impact of the amount of milk diverted and the amount paid in transportation credits on Order 7’s uniform price. The results showed that only Class II diverted pounds had a statistically significant impact on the uniform price.

Due to widespread decentralization of spending responsibilities, increasing revenue power and borrowing capacity of sub-national governments, sub-national borrowing has become an increasingly important source of sub-national finance. While there are arguments for and against giving sub-national authorities room for raising their own financial resources, appropriate sub-national borrowing regulatory framework can reduce chances of defaults and fiscal crises. This dissertation investigates the effectiveness of sub-national borrowing regulations in maintaining fiscal sustainability. More precisely, it tests the hypothesis that is sub-national borrowing is restricted to financing capital investments (the “golden rule”), and if the sub-national governments are provided with some measure of revenue autonomy, then the sub-national borrowing should not endanger fiscal sustainability. Based on the sub-national government panel data for 57 countries between 1990 and 2008 and applying the system GMM estimator and the survival analysis, this dissertation provides support for this hypothesis. The results suggest that the “golden rule” is effective in maintaining fiscal sustainability at both general and sub-national government level. Sub-national tax autonomy, however, seems to have positive but very small marginal effect on fiscal sustainability. The obtained results also emphasize the risk of the soft budget constraint and the moral hazard. Significant central government financing may give encouraging signs to the sub-national governments to over-borrow and to expect being bailed out by the central government. The results obtained in this dissertation imply following policy recommendations. First, sub-national government borrowing does not have to endanger fiscal sustainability if the borrowing regulation framework is well designed and according to specific country circumstances. Second, reducing fiscal dependence on central government financing reduces the risk of moral hazard and improves the effectiveness of borrowing control in maintaining fiscal balance at the sustainable level.

Significant growth rates are in many times associated with countries embracing the ongoing globalization and openness to the international market of exchanging goods and services as well as ideas and technologies. Many researchers believe that participating in an international economy is a primary source of growth. The question is how strong the relationship between openness and growth is and has interested many researchers. This paper aims to investigate the effects of trade openness on economic growth in the long run and begins from Adam smith`s discussion on absolute advantage and specialization to discussions on trade organizations and policies. This study explores the relationship between trade openness and economic growth using a sample of 3 developed countries over the period (1970 – 2006) in a panel data analysis. The fixed effects model analysis indicates that trade openness has a positive and significant effect on economic growth.

This thesis is concerned with volatility estimation using financial panels and bias-reduction in non-linear dynamic panels in the presence of dependence. Traditional GARCH-type volatility models require large time-series for accurate estimation. This makes it impossible to analyse some interesting datasets which do not have a large enough history of observations. This study contributes to the literature by introducing the GARCH Panel model, which exploits both time-series and cross-section information, in order to make up for this lack of time-series variation. It is shown that this approach leads to gains both in- and out-of-sample, but suffers from the well-known incidental parameter issue and therefore, cannot deal with short data either. As a response, a bias-correction approach valid for a general variety of models beyond GARCH is proposed. This extends the analytical bias-reduction literature to cross-section dependence and is a theoretical contribution to the panel data literature. In the final chapter, these two contributions are combined in order to develop a new approach to volatility estimation in short panels. Simulation analysis reveals that this approach is capable of removing a substantial portion of the bias even when only 150-200 observations are available. This is in stark contrast with the standard methods which require 1,000-1,500 observations for accurate estimation. This approach is used to model monthly hedge fund volatility, which is another novel contribution, as it has hitherto been impossible to analyse hedge fund volatility, due to their typically short histories. The analysis reveals that hedge funds exhibit variation in their volatility characteristics both across and within investment strategies. Moreover, the sample distributions of fund volatilities are asymmetric, have large right tails and react to major economic events such as the recent credit crunch episode.

This thesis focuses on the relationship between crime and education, as well as macroeconomic and demographic factors such as police efficiency, GDP per capita, employment rate, population density, age and sexual composition of the society. We use the data of fourteen regions of the Czech Republic from 2000 to 2012. First, we apply the fixed-effect model in the data analysis, and further we use GMM for the estimation of new dynamic panel dataset. In addition, taking the possible time effects into account, we also add the time dummies in both regression models. Our finding finds the unexpectedly positive effects of secondary education with A-level exam, GDP per capita and the proportion of population aged 30-59 years old on most of criminal offences. On the other hand, the male ratio in population and the clearance rate are found to influence crimes negatively. Higher education and employment rate are also found to be related negatively with economic crimes. JEL Classification A14, E69, I21, I23, I25, I29, J19, R19 Keywords education, crime, employment, GDP, gender ratio, age, the Czech Republic, panel data, fixed-effect, GMM Author's e-mail cindy1114@livemail.tw Supervisor's e-mail brizova.ies@seznam.cz

The subject of this thesis is the relationship that exists between deflation and the macroeconomic stability of the economy. Much literature has been published on this topic, but there is still a dearth of quantitative research based on strong empirical work. In the present work I have used a set of large panel data composed of 18 countries over 34 years in order to analyze the relationship between changes in inflation and output growth in a more complete and rigorous fashion. I use 3 different econometric models, namely fixed effects, random effects and the generalized method of moments. I chose these models in order to more appropriately examine the contemporaneous and lagged correlation between prices and output of countries. I also introduced foreign direct investment as a control variable to avoid the presence of potential bias. The empirical work presented in this paper leads to several findings. First, there is an insignificant relationship between a country's GDP growth and its deflation rate. Second, the relation between inflation and GDP growth is significant, and this relation becomes even positive when the econometric model is conducted on the data excluding outliers. Third, FDI positively contributes to and is partly responsible for the level of economic growth of the countries...

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Determinants of financial development Abstract The paper studies effects of country level determinants on the rate of financial development and, in particular, assesses the empirical question whether democracy and political freedom can enhance financial development, as measured by Bank Private Credit to GDP and Liquid Liabilities to GDP. Using Fixed Effects estimation techniques and a panel data for a list of 39 countries over the period 1990 to 2011, we provide evidence that suggests positive link between political openness and financial development. The empirical evidence also confirms financial openness and real per capita income to be positively correlated to financial deepening and in contrast, we find that size of financial sector does not spur the rate of financial development.