Market Drivers Research Articles

News and Noise in the Housing Market

Housing prices are subject to boom and bust episodes with long-lasting deviation from fundamentals. By considering a present value housing price model under noisy information, I study the macroeconomic implications of movements in housing prices related (news) and not related (noise) to future fundamentals. I provide empirical evidence of the sizable macroeconomic effects of news and noise shocks. Following Forni et al. (2014, 2016), I identify news and noise shocks through a non-standard VAR technique which exploits future information. In the US, news shocks are the main driver of the housing market at low frequencies, but in the short-medium horizon noise shocks explain a large share of the variability in housing prices, residential investment and GDP. Historically, many housing cycles are driven by noise. The empirical findings are consistent with a model JEL Classification: E30, E40, E50

Investment, global capital and other drivers of England’s housing crisis

The popular diagnosis of the ‘housing crisis’ afflicting England, particularly in London and the South East, is of acute housing under-supply. Not enough new homes are being built, and the scarcity of housing where it is needed is driving up prices, resulting in widespread unaffordability and all the socio-economic challenges that follow. All the main political parties have committed to programmes of accelerated housebuilding, highlighting ways to sidestep the sluggish planning system and build consensus for rapid development. An opposing diagnosis of the crisis has emerged in recent years, however, claiming that available housing space in England is now double, per capita, what it was 100 years ago. England’s — and London’s — housing problems are rooted in unequal distribution, and not simply in the under-supply of new homes. Inequality in access to the housing resource results from an increased reliance on market allocation and a rising tide of domestic and international investment, concentrated in the London property market, but which causes price distortions to ripple outwards. This paper argues that, although data are scarce and contested, with regard to investment buying, the asset value attached to housing is a key market driver, which cannot be addressed solely through additional housing supply.

European Sugar Market - Impact of Quota System

The European agricultural market has been criticized for its heavy regulations and subsidization. The sugar market is one of the most regulated ones; however, this will change radically in 2017 when the current system of production quotas will end. The aim of this paper is to present the basic characteristics of the EU quota sugar market. The analysis identifies the main drivers of EU sugar market and their position within the EU sugar market. The paper identifies especially those drivers/companies/alliances which take control over the EU sugar production realized under the quota production system. The paper also highlights the level of EU sugar market concentration and also identifies those countries and companies which are the main leaders in the sugar production area realized under the quota system. Based on the results deriving from the paper, it is possible to characterize the EU sugar market as a heavily concentrated one – nearly 75% (10 mil. tonnes) of the quota is controlled by five multinational companies only; these companies are operating more than 50% of all the available sugar plants located in the EU. These multinational alliances are also in control of the production capacities of their subsidiaries. In most countries, this causes serious problems as the given quota is controlled by one or two producers only. The EU sugar market is extremely concentrated especially if we take into consideration the location of each alliance’s headquarters. The majority of production capacities are under (the) control of especially German and French companies. These two countries are also the main beneficiaries in relation to the EU sugar production quota system.

Forecasting Canadian mortgage rates

ABSTRACTMortgage rates are one of the important drivers of the housing market. While there is a literature looking at the pass-through effect from Central Bank rates to mortgage rates, there is less known about how useful Central Bank rates are for forecasting mortgage rates. This article uses a selection of models (ARIMA, ARIMAX, BATS, state space error, trend seasonal (ETS), Holt Winter, random walk, simple exponential smoothing (SES), OLS and VAR) to forecast Canadian 5-year conventional mortgage rates. Based on RMSE, regression-based approaches like ARIMAX or OLS that use Central Bank rates to forecast mortgage rates are preferred when it comes to forecasting Canadian mortgage rates 6 or 12 months into the future, respectively.

Stumbling to a New Equ'Oil'Ibrium: Understanding the Current Upheaval in the Global Crude Oil Market

The precipitous decline in crude oil prices over the past year has sparked a renewed discussion around the drivers of the oil market and the role of OPEC. The decision by OPEC ministers in November 2014 not to reduce their quota can be interpreted in multiple ways: was OPEC deliberately driving out U.S. shale oil producers by depressing the price? Or were OPEC members instead overtaken by market forces beyond their control?

Integrating Gender Dynamics into Innovation Ecosystems

Innovation ecosystems can be constructed around any subject matter. We choose here the topic of gender, which we examine as a component of innovation success. Most analyses of innovation systems tend to assume gender-neutral position with regard to identity and roles of participating actors and their activities. However, real-life innovations can often result in different quality of outcomes for women and men; the innovation potential of highly trained women remains unrealised; and the recent socioeconomic empowerment of women as driver of market needs continues to be ignored. Drawing on latest research evidence from studies of gender issues in science, we show how innovation systems can benefit from adopting more gender sensitive approaches, which recognise the role gender plays in shaping knowledge and market activities. We propose four scenarios for constructing gender sensitive innovation ecosystems based on different gender dynamics that combine scientific understanding of sex and gender differences with improved engagement of women in innovation process, enabled through participatory methods and open and inclusive innovation practices.

PVMirror: A New Concept for Tandem Solar Cells and Hybrid Solar Converters

As the solar electricity market has matured, energy conversion efficiency and storage have joined installed system cost as significant market drivers. In response, manufacturers of flat-plate silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells have pushed cell efficiencies above 25%—nearing the 29.4% detailed-balance efficiency limit—and both solar thermal and battery storage technologies have been deployed at utility scale. This paper introduces a new tandem solar collector employing a “PVMirror” that has the potential to both increase energy conversion efficiency and provide thermal storage. A PVMirror is a concentrating mirror, spectrum splitter, and light-to-electricity converter all in one: It consists of a curved arrangement of PV cells that absorb part of the solar spectrum and reflect the remainder to their shared focus, at which a second solar converter is placed. A strength of the design is that the solar converter at the focus can be of a radically different technology than the PV cells in the PVMirror; another is that the PVMirror converts a portion of the diffuse light to electricity in addition to the direct light. We consider two case studies—a PV cell located at the focus of the PVMirror to form a four-terminal PV–PV tandem, and a thermal receiver located at the focus to form a PV–CSP (concentrating solar thermal power) tandem—and compare the outdoor energy outputs to those of competing technologies. PVMirrors can outperform (idealized) monolithic PV–PV tandems that are under concentration, and they can also generate nearly as much energy as silicon flat-plate PV while simultaneously providing the full energy storage benefit of CSP.

Local Currency Bond Market Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Stock-Taking Exercise and Analysis of Key Drivers

ABSTRACTThis article studies the current state and drivers of government local currency bond market (LCBM) development in Sub-Saharan Africa. We first show that, increasingly, African governments issue fixed-rate local currency bonds with tenors of ten years and more on a regular basis. However, African LCBMs are also often marked by illiquidity, very few corporate securities, and narrow, bank-dominated investor bases. Second, we present an econometric analysis of the drivers of African government LCBMs based on a new high-quality, OECD-compiled panel dataset. LCBM capitalization is found to be correlated negatively with governments’ fiscal balance and inflation, and positively with common law legal origins, institutional quality and democracy.

Crowdfunding as a Fast‐Expanding Market for the Creation of Capital and Shared Value

This article explores the fast‐expanding market of crowdfunding − a market that will have created over $62 billion in new capital, primarily for entrepreneurs and small and medium‐sized business enterprises (SMEs), by the end of this year. We will look at the history of crowdfunding, the main drivers of the current market, the various platforms and business models, and the rapid and exponential growth of the market. We will discuss the importance of the concept of “shared value” in the development and evolution of this market, and look more closely at the United States’ current economy and how the mechanism of access to capital has been disrupted since the financial crisis. We will examine the premise that crowdfunding is the “crowd's” (anyone other than the top 1%) way of responding to this disruption and creating new capital. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Housing need outcomes in England through changing times: demographic, market and policy drivers of change

The housing system in England has experienced unprecedented stress and instability over the last decade, absorbing the impact of demographic pressure, a credit-fuelled boom, financial crisis, recession and policy change. A failing supply system and unexpected tenure changes now confront austerity and welfare cutback. How have these conditions impacted on traditional and contemporary indicators of housing need and what does this tell us about the drivers and dynamics of housing need outcomes? Drawing mainly on analysis of large-scale longitudinal and cross-sectional surveys, linked to subregional market data, this paper describes and models the changes in housing need outcomes over two decades. It explores the impact of demography, market affordability, labour markets, tenure change and supply on these outcomes. Particular attention is paid to the persistence or recurrence of need in the context of different housing pathways and different market contexts, including the relationship with poverty.

Fan-in WLP: Technology and Market Trends

The semiconductor industry is facing a new era in which device scaling and cost reduction will not continue on the path they followed for the past few decades, with Moore's law in its foundation. Advanced nodes do not bring the desired cost benefit anymore and R&D expenses for new lithography solutions and devices in sub-10nm nodes are rising substantially. Subsequently, new market shifts are expected in due time, with “Internet of Things” (IoT) getting ready to take over pole market driver position from mobile. In these circumstances, where front-end-of-line (FEOL) scaling options remain uncertain and IoT promises application diversification, in order to answer market demands, the industry seeks further performance and functionality boosts in package level integration. Emerging packages such as fan-out wafer level packages, 2.5D/3D IC and related System-in-Package (SiP) solutions together with more conventional but upgraded flip chip BGAs aim to bridge the gap and revive the cost/performance curve. In such an environment, what is the importance of fan-in wafer level packages (FI WLP), the current status of the fan-in WLP industry and how will fan-in WLP market and technology evolve? This work aims to answer these questions by performing an in-depth analysis on fan-in WLP market dynamics and technology trends.

Innovative service satisfaction and customer promotion behaviour in the Chinese budget hotel: an empirical study

The paper studies the role and influence of operational capability and competitive market drivers required for satisfying customers with innovative service that encourages customer promotion behaviour in the Chinese context. Based on inside out and outside in strategies that include both resource based view and market priorities, the study develop models to match innovative service satisfaction with customer promotion behaviour. We captured the importance of operational capability drivers on innovative service satisfaction, market priority drivers on customer promotion behaviour and the match between innovative service satisfaction and customer promotion behaviour using three models. We carried out an empirical survey to validate our three models and hypotheses. We find operational capability drivers such as physical product, staff attributes and services have positive relationship with innovative service satisfaction. In terms of market priority drivers’ budget hotels have to concentrate on location and image. Finally, we find that budget hotel can be successful if it is able to convert service satisfaction to increase customer promotion behaviour. The major contributions of this study are to propose models integrating consumer behaviour and service operations literature and to validate our innovative service satisfaction and customer promotion behaviour models in the Chinese budget hotel context.

Investigating Barriers and Drivers of the E-Commerce Market in Russia

The evolution of e-commerce positively affects the development of business in different areas, especially in developing countries. Also the development of e-commerce assists in creating new business models that are in certain cases results of overcoming existing barriers of the e-commerce market. However, there is little research on e-commerce market development and it hinders our understanding of the e-commerce market potential. The internet audience in Russia is 66.5 million people – the largest online audience in Europe. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the barriers and drivers for e-commerce market development in Russia. It gives an overview of the current Russian internet market development and trends. To identify the obstacles to and opportunities for the Russian e-commerce market, 25 in-depth interviews with representatives of Russian internet businesses were conducted. The empirical research reveals that the most significant barriers for the Russian market are barriers concerning market, infrastructure, and institutional issues.

The Drivers of the Great Bull Stock Market of 2015 in China: Evidence and Policy Implications

This paper investigates what drove the great bull stock market of 2015 in China being called China’s 1929. Multiple regression models based on the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) theory are developed to describe the variation in the stock return using economic fundamentals. The results indicate that during the normal period, the Chinese stock market is sensitive to economic conditions. However, the fundamentals cannot justify the variation in the stock return during the bull markets. The paper finds that during the bull market from May 2014 to June 2015, margin trading was the main driver of stock prices. And the actual stock returns during the bull period are significantly different from the conditional predictions based on the multiple regression model which is robust for the normal period. These results suggest that there is a speculative bubble in the bull market of 2015 in China. As commercial banks are becoming more exposed to the stock market, the volatility of stock prices may have the potential to increase the risk of the financial system and limit the freedom of monetary policy to deal with economic fundamentals. Therefore, it is important for China to stop margin trading and commercial banks’ financing for investment in the stock market to prevent a similar bubble from occurring again in the future.

Business model innovations for deploying distributed generation: The emerging landscape of community solar in the U.S.

Increasing penetration of residential photovoltaic (PV) systems has intensified concerns over the related impacts on utility revenue and the equity of deployment subsidies. Community solar (CS) has surfaced as an alternative deployment model for PV that could potentially mitigate these concerns, while integrating distributed solar PV. Given the potential that CS holds in stabilizing the customer-utility relationship amid deeper penetration of distributed solar, in this paper we combine four complementary datasets to analyze how policy, regulatory, and market factors impact the deployment of CS. Specifically, we present a detailed assessment of CS deployment in the United States, including pertinent insights relating to nameplate capacity, billing models, propensities of off-taker utilities to adopt different types of CS, and local market and policy drivers. We find that accounting for both underlying demand and policy/regulatory conditions is essential for understanding the nuanced connections between utility strategy and CS adoption. A particularly interesting finding, stemming consistently across the multiple data streams we analyze, is that utilities are motivated to develop CS not only to satisfy consumer demand or regulatory requirements for renewable energy, but also to alleviate revenue losses related to residential solar PV.

Technological, Market and Policy Drivers of Emerging Trends in the Diffusion of Plug-in Electric Vehicles in the U.S.

It has only been over the past decade that key technologies advanced sufficiently to enable the development of viable electric vehicles. This article explores the remaining barriers, the cost trajectory for electric vehicles and for conventional vehicles, differentiating and unique features of electric drive, and the lowered barriers to entry for new firms created by electric powertrains.

Heritage Values and Agricultural Landscapes: Towards a New Synthesis

The conservation of agricultural heritage is an emerging field that offers opportunities for integrating heritage values into strategies for environmental, economic and social sustainability in rural areas in the US. Even though farmsteads and ranches are iconic representations of rural communities, little attention has been given to the cultural heritage values of agricultural landscapes or in agricultural policy. Climate change, global market drivers and significant demographic shifts threaten agrarian resources. Today, there is an urgent need to address the loss of agricultural land and enhance the sustainability of agricultural systems. This article argues that it is timely to consider heritage as an integral part of developing strategies to adapt agricultural systems and make them more resilient. Some promising recent efforts demonstrate that heritage designations, partnerships and stewardship programmes offer strategic advantages and should be an integral part of a broader set of agricultural reforms, creating a new synthesis.

Adolescents Care but Don’t Feel Responsible for Farm Animal Welfare

Adolescents are the next generation of consumers with the potential to raise standards of farm animal welfare—to their satisfaction—if their preferences and concerns are translated into accurate market drivers and signals. There are no published data about adolescent views of farm animal welfare to allow meaningful design, implementation, and evaluation of educational strategies to improve consideration of—and behavior toward—farm animals. Knowledge of farm animal welfare, as well as beliefs and attitudes about farm animal welfare and behavioral intention relevant to it were determined in a sample of uk adolescents, using a survey incorporating an extended version of the theory of planned behavior and novel assessment tools. Our results indicate that adolescents have only a limited knowledge of welfare problems for farm animals and welfare-relevant product labels. Intentions to identify welfare standards for the animals from whom their food was derived were weak. Although they cared about farm animal welfare and agreed with fundamental principles—for example, the provision of space and the absence of pain and suffering—like adults they held limited belief in the power and responsibility that they possess through their choices as consumers; responsibility was often shifted to others, such as the government and farmers.

Providing Authentic(ated) Food

The 2013 horsemeat scandal and other such cases have led consumers to question their trust in extended global food supply chains. The aim of this research is to identify how small and medium-sized rural food retailers maintain food integrity with a market driver for cheaper food and the potential for food fraud. Qualitative interviews with industry insiders and analysis of data from rural food retail stores (n = 20) enabled a conceptual framework to be postulated. Adding value through Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) can deliver product differentiation, but also provides opportunities for food fraud/substitution if there is a large price differential between the niche and the standard product. Therefore value can be added to products by developing associated trust and social capital, but consumers must be safeguarded from making false assumptions on provenance or from potential food criminality and predatory, criminal entrepreneurs.

How to Build a Learning Capability for Innovation? A Framework of Market-Based Learning Process

Learning organization has been an important issue in both management and marketing areas. Also learning capability is a key construct of innovation process in a firm. Especially, in marketing context, several researchers have studied market-based learning and its relation with performance. Previous studies have shown that market-based learning has a positive impact on overall firm performance. However, there has been inconsistency in the concept of market-based learning itself and its relationships with antecedents and consequences. Given this conflicting and inconsistent results of previous research, this study has two main objectives. First, this paper proposed a conceptual framework that marketbased learning has two types of processes and each types of market-based learning will generate different types of performance. Second, the mediating role of marketing capability in learning-performance link is proposed. The proposed conceptual framework shows that organizations which have marketbased learning for innovation management can enjoy ambidextrous firm performance on both side of effectiveness and efficiency via marketing capability. Moreover our research model proposes key drivers of market based organizational learning.