Markov chains have increasingly become useful way of capturing stochastic nature of many economic and financial variables. Although the hidden Markov processes have been widely employed for some time in many engineering applications e.g. speech recognition, its effectiveness has now been recognized in areas of social science research as well. The main aim of Hidden Markov Models: Applications to Financial Economics is to make such techniques available to more researchers in financial economics. As such we only cover the necessary theoretical aspects in each chapter while...

Pascal Salin Many of the texts which have been used for the present book were presented as papers at a conference organized in Brussels by Michiel van Notten for the 1 Institutum Europaeum in December 1980on the subject of European Monetary Union and Currency Competition. However, this book is more than the mere proceedings of a conference. It aims at presenting the reader with an homogenous text, not a patchwork of papers, in spite of the large number of contributors. Though it would be absurd to pretend that these contributors -some of whom are prominent thinkers - agree on everything,...

There is a paucity of information on the dynamics of Ascorbic Acid (AA) turnover in relation to germination, metabolism, growth, differentiation and development of a plant and in those undergoing stress of various types. in presowing treatment of seeds etc. The turnover of AA plays an important role during the juvenile phase of growth of a plant and has a significant bearing on its subsequent growth, development and maturation. The beneficial effect of presowing treatment of seed with Ascorbic Acid (AA) + H2 O highlights the validity of the AA-nucleic acid 2 protein metabolism concept of...

The book is a civil engineering handbook on winch and cable systems. The handbook may be used as textbook for university studies in civil engineering and forestry and as the basis for studies in schools on a technical level. It should be a useful reference book for construction engineers, civil engineers, logging engineers, foresters and leaders of operational activities under difficult terrain conditions. The content in the book is based on more than 35 years experience with practical winch and cable operations. As a leader of the Norwegian Institute of Forest Operations, the author has...

For some time now the philosophy of science has been undergoing a major transfor- mation. It began when the 'received view' of scientific knowledge -that developed by logical positivists and their intellectual descendants - was challenged as bearing little resemblance to and having little relevance for the understanding of real science. Subsequently, an overwhelming amount of criticism has been added. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would support the 'received view' today. Yet, in the search for a new analysis of scientific knowledge, this view continues to exert influence over...

The publication of this clinically analytical and trenchantly insightful volume is felicitously timed. By fortuitous coincidence, it comes at a time when the Chicago School enjoys a high-water mark of acceptance in U.S. legal circles, and at a time when the U.S. merger movement of the 1980s is cresting. It provides a welcome warning against the dangers of translating abstract theories, based on highly restrictive (and unrealistic) assumptions, into facile public policy recommendations. As such the Schmidt/Rittaler study serves as a needed antidote to the currently fashionable predilection to...

The aim of this third, completely re-written, re-edited and considerably expanded, edition of this book is to provide a general overview of both the basics and - cent, more sophisticated, theoretical developments in panel data econometrics. It also aims at covering a number of ?elds of applications where these methods are used for improving our knowledge and understanding of economic agents' beh- iors. Since the pioneering works of Edwin Kuh (1959), Yair Mundlak (1961), Irving Hoch (1962), and Pietro Balestra and Marc Nerlove (1966), the pooling of cross s- tions and time series data has...

The effects of international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) on developing economies have always been controversial. From about the 1980s, however, the countries adopting open policies have tended to o- perform those adopting closed policies. The former, essentially the eco- mies of Asia and some countries of Latin America, have grown faster than the latter, the economies of sub-Saharan Africa. With the unstoppable spread of globalization and the supremacy of open policies over closed ones, the debate between participating and not participating in the world economy has been...

The family Trichodoridae was established by Thorne in 1935 but it remained of limited taxonomie interest until 1951 when Christie and Perry associated Trichodorus christie (now Paratrichodorus minor) with a "stubby root disease" that affected certain crops in Florida, USA and interest further increased from 1960 when P. pachydermus was implicated as a vector of the economically important tobacco raule virus. Such discoveries gave an impetus to studies on many aspects of the biology of trichodorid nematodes with a consequent proliferation of new species described from different parts of the...