Economy
Decline in Pacific Currencies: Crisis or More Adjustment to Come? : Pacific Beat Interview
By Sumner La Croix 1. The last few months have seen 10-20 percent declines in the exchange rates of many Pacific countries against the US dollar. The decline in the value of Indonesia’s currency has been particularly notable. Why is this happening? Each country has its own story, but the driving force behind the decline […]
Read MoreThe Unintended Consequences of Affordable Housing Policy
By Carl Bonham Honolulu City Council Resolution 13-168 would amend the percentages of affordable housing units that developers must provide to receive authorization for housing projects. Current city policy requires that 10% of a development’s units must be affordable for households earning no more than 80% of the HUD median income for Honolulu. Another 10% of units in […]
Read MoreUHERO 101.8: Are All Tax Credits Created Equal?
By Kimberly Burnett and James Jones The intention of well-designed tax credit programs is to incentivize individuals or organizations to invest or participate in a commodity or service that will increase the greater good (by, for example, stimulating the economy and/or reducing environmental damage), but that they might not invest in without this additional benefit. […]
Read MoreCommon correlated effects and international risk sharing
Correct assessment of consumption risk and its international diversification has important policy implications. However, existing studies of international risk sharing rely on the unrealistic assumptions that all economies are characterized by symmetric preferences and uniform transmission of global shocks. We relax these homogeneity constraints and compare our proposed approach with the conventional ones using a […]
Read MoreEstimating Demand Elasticities in Non-Stationary Panels: The Case of Hawai‘i Tourism
It is natural to turn to the richness of panel data to improve the precision of estimated tourism demand elasticities. However, the likely presence of common shocks shared across the underlying macroeconomic variables and across regions in the panel has so far been neglected in the tourism literature. We deal with the e ffects of cross-sectional […]
Read MoreUHERO 101.7: School’s Out, Unemployment Up?
By Kimberly Burnett and James Jones Last week’s Star Advertiser reported that Honolulu’s unemployment rate increased from May’s 4.0% to 4.7% in June. Is the local labor market in free-fall? Not exactly. When students graduate or are released for summer break, many of them start searching for employment. Suddenly the labor market is flooded with thousands […]
Read MoreUHERO 101.6: Recession Dating
By Kimberly Burnett While the U.S. economy has been out of the last recession since the summer of 2009, a new poll found that a majority of people (54%) thinks the country is still there. How are these things measured, and who decides when a recession starts and ends? The National Bureau of Economic Research […]
Read MoreThe Impact of Marriage Equality on Hawai′i’s Economy and Government: An Update After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Same-Sex Marriage Decisions
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in the two same-sex marriage cases have substantially increased the short-term and medium-term benefits that could accrue to Hawai‘i if the Hawai‘i State Legislature enacts legislation allowing same-sex marriages to begin in Fall 2013 or early in 2014.
Read MoreForecasting with Mixed Frequency Factor Models in the Presence of Common Trends
We analyze the forecasting performance of small mixed frequency factor models when the observed variables share stochastic trends. The indicators are observed at various frequencies and are tied together by cointegration so that valuable high frequency information is passed to low frequency series through the common factors. Diff erencing the data breaks the cointegrating link among […]
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