Real Trends Research Articles

Natural Rate Chimera and Bond Pricing Reality

Incorporating arbitrage-free term-structure dynamics into a semi-structural macro-model, we jointly estimate the real equilibrium interest rate (r), trend inflation, and term premia for the United States and the euro area, using a Bayesian approach. The natural real rate and trend inflation are cornerstones determining equilibrium yields across maturities and macroeconomic trends. Taking into account the secular decline in equilibrium rates, term premia exhibit cyclical behavior over the business cycle, rather than the commonly reported trend. Our estimates suggest a fall in r from a pre-crisis level of about 3% to around zero, but estimates are subject to sizeable uncertainty. Including survey expectations can lift r estimates for recent quarters by a margin.

Recent Trends in Real Estate Research: A Comparison of Recent Working Papers and Publications Using Machine Learning Algorithms

This paper is organized as follows. In Section 1, we describe the economic relevance of the real estate sector and its recent dynamics. Then, we identify the most mentioned keywords of working papers presented at the real estate conferences between 2015 and 2019 and showing network figures for them in Section 2. In order to identify the newest trends, we rely on working papers since they have an average lead time of at least 1 to 2 years before they are published. In addition, we give a short overview of the articles published in this special issue. To get a better overview of the relevance of real estate related topics in finance, we analyzed the most relevant finance conferences and journals between 2015 and May 2020 in Section 3. To find the topics, we apply the text mining approach Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), an unsupervised machine learning method. The real estate trends (retail, e-commerce) and the potential impact of COVID-19 is described in Section 4.

Constructing County-Level Data for Agricultural Inputs and Analyzing Agricultural Productivity, 1951-1980

Constructing County-Level Data for Agricultural Inputs and Analyzing Agricultural Productivity, 1951-1980

Residual Valuation of Land Parcel at Airoli

In the absence of comparable sales, the development approach to valuation (also known as residual valuation) is considered an acceptable method to determine the value of land. The method involves considering the value after the completion of the development, then by deducting the cost of such a development, the remaining amount (residual amount) is the amount that a developer would be prepared to pay for such a property in order to obtain the development potential (Boshoff, 2011). Currently, Airoli real estate market is saturated and recently there has not been any transaction related to land parcels, so to derive at a land value application of residual valuation approach is appropriate as it take into consideration current real estate market trends, which directly rely on the proposed mix of development conceptualized by developer.

Empirical Analysis Тowards the Effect of Social Media on Cryptocurrency Price and Volume

Bitcoin’s value is highly dependent on the communities that use it. This network effect is true for all new technologies. Today’s online communities are so large in population that both the Facebook user and Youtuber populations have surpassed the Chinese population. We take a big data approach using millions of samples of posts from Twitter, Telegram, and Reddit to study how and if social media platforms, the epitome of online communities, affect Bitcoin’s price and volume as well as the price and volume of fifteen other top cryptocurrencies. We work in collaboration with Solume, a data centered fin-tech startup, as well as with Sentistrength, an opinion mining tool developed by researchers in the UK, to classify the sentiment of the millions of posts we study. We collected millions of posts related to 16 cryptocurrencies from November 2017 through August 2018 on an hourly basis and explore social media volume sentiment effect on these cryptocurrencies. Findings confirm that volumes of exchanged posts may predict the fluctuations of Bitcoin’s price but mainly, they predict volume. We also find that Reddit and Telegram posts have greater impact on Bitcoin volume than Twitter. Results indicate that information about the use of social media platforms can assist in tracking real world behavior and may even predict real financial market trends.

Strategic Directions of Environmental Management in the Region

In the article the author scientifically justified the choice of strategic directions of environmental activities in the region, which provide the formation of a real trend of gradual improvement of the environmental situation.
 The author uses a variety of methodological tools. The tools include methods of analysis, generalization, design, statistical methods.
 Aggravation of environmental problems requires regionalization of environmental policy, regulation and management of natural resources in the long term. Currently, the need to develop an effective strategy for environmental protection in the region is being actualized. Environmental consequences of economic activity arise and manifest themselves in a particular area. The local nature of anthropogenic impact on the processes of reproduction of natural resources and the state of the environment require the search for ways to effectively solve environmental problems, taking into account the characteristics of natural factors and conditions of the territory. It is necessary to analyze the specifics of the production and spatial structure of the regional production complex. The development of the environmental strategy provides for the definition of the environmental mission of the region and its ecological image of the future. When developing the strategy, priority environmental goals and objectives are selected. These tasks are then detailed in specific environmental programs. Further, the mechanism of their implementation is developed, the analysis and evaluation of the results and consequences of the implementation of programs are carried out. At the same time, the ecological mission of the region and its ecological image of the future are based on the analysis of internal and external factors that affect the formation of the ecological situation in the region. Further opportunities and threats for ensuring ecological safety of development of regional economy and habitat of people are revealed. The authors consider the regional environmental program as the main tool for planning, forecasting and practical implementation of regional environmental policy. The regional environmental programme facilitates the coordination of environmental activities in the region. Regional programs are developed within the framework of long-term forecasting and include strategic interests of Ukraine.
 The conditions of implementation of the environmental strategy in the region and the problems of creating economic tools to stimulate environmental protection measures, modern legal support of environmental policy are analyzed. The authors identify the features of financing environmental activities in Ukraine and explore innovative aspects of environmental safety of the national economy.
 The researchers revealed the place of the ecological subsystem in the structure of programs of socio-economic development of the region, analyzed the basic methodological and methodical bases of formation of the strategy of environmental protection in the region. The authors scientifically justified the choice of strategic directions of environmental activities in the region, which provide the formation of a real trend of gradual improvement of the environmental situation. The recommendations on improving the management mechanism of the regional ecological and economic system are substantiated.

Combining convolutional neural networks and in-line near-infrared spectroscopy for real-time monitoring of the chromatographic elution process in commercial production of notoginseng total saponins.

The chromatographic elution process is a key step in the production of notoginseng total saponins. Due to quality variability of loading samples and resin capacity decreasing over cycle time, saponins, especially the five main saponins of notoginseng total saponins, need to be monitored in real time during the elution process. In this study, convolutional neural networks, one of the most popular deep learning methods, were used to develop quantitative calibration models based on in-line near-infrared spectroscopy for notoginsenoside R1 , ginsenosides Rg1 , Re, Rb1 and Rd, and their sum concentration, with root mean square error of prediction values of 0.87, 2.76, 0.60, 1.57, 0.28, and 4.99mg/mL, respectively. Partial least squares calibration models were also developed for model performance comparison. Results show predicted concentration profiles outputted by both the convolutional neural network models and partial least squares models show agreements with the real trends defined by reference measurements, and can be used for elution process monitoring and endpoint determination. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported case study of combining convolutional neural networks and in-line near-infrared spectroscopy for monitoring of the chromatographic elution process in commercial production of botanical drug products.

Measuring Uncertainty for New Zealand Using Data‐Rich Approach

AbstractThis paper develops two state‐of‐the‐art uncertainty indices for New Zealand by exploiting two separate data‐rich environments. The first index follows the methodology outlined in Jurado, Ludvigson and Ng (2015) to construct an estimate of uncertainty based on a large New Zealand macro dataset. The second index is constructed based on freely accessible and real time Google Trends data to provide a real‐time and freely‐accessible measure of uncertainty as in Castelnuovo and Tran (2017) and Shields and Tran (2018). Both indices do a reasonable job measuring uncertainty in New Zealand. VAR evidence documents significant impacts of uncertainty shocks on GDP in New Zealand.

Features in scientific and technical cooperation in the field of non-conventional renewable energy

This article discusses the prospects for the development of the implementation of scientific and technical cooperation. On the example of international cooperation between Ukraine and Chile, there are approaches to improving the procedure for developing cooperation priorities. The current state of these relations does not reflect real trends in the development of international economic relations in the vector of strengthening the scientific and technical component. Based on the analysis of analytical materials, one of the priority areas of the joint development of scientific and technical issues may be the use of non-traditional renewable energy technologies. Both in Ukraine and in Chile there are objective factors (natural, resource, socio-economic, environmental-technological) for their development. For Ukraine, it is interesting the experience of the scientific and production implementation of these technologies and the organizational and economic support of these priorities in the context of state and regional policy. All these aspects, including through the exchange of intellectual products, will make it possible to increase the effectiveness of support policies, the innovative susceptibility of subjects of production and business activities of Ukraine and the corresponding development of producers and consumers' motivation to non-conventional renewable energy technology.

TrendNet Algorithm: Towards Personalization of Twitter Trends

Twitter displays a list of currently popular keywords and hashtags on the user homepage which are referred as trends. Trends play an important role in discovering the hottest emerging topics of discussion and also help in categorizing the tweets through which the user can easily find similar tweets in that group. Twitter provides its user with a list of top ten trending topics but these trends are general topics which are popular based on the user location and are not context sensitive. These suggestions are not personalized. This paper examines an application for finding personalized trending topics on Twitter. We propose a novel real time trend recommendation system referred as TrendNet that helps its users to find what is currently popular in their network of friends by considering both the tweet content and the social structure. Comprehensive experiments on real Twitter users having different interests were conducted in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm. The results demonstrate that our scheme provides more accurate and personalized recommendations of trends as compared to the existing scheme.

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES AND MODERN EMPLOYEES OF SENIOR AGE

This article discusses the relationship between the “aging” of labor and technological changes in the modern economy. The author analyzes the increase in demand for robots both in production and in society due to an increase in the number of older workers. Increasing the average age of the population in developed countries and the Russian Federation is already a major factor in the transformation of the world economy. The “graying” of the labor force necessitates changes in both organizational and managerial decisions at the enterprise level and in the macroeconomic policy of the state. These changes should optimally link two real trends in the improvement of modern production: a) the growth in the use of artificial intelligence, automation and robotization of production processes, the digital economy; b) the aging of the labor force in all developed countries and the Russian Federation. Supporting only one trend does not allow the national economy to remain competitive in the global market. The author, on the basis of inter-country analysis, reveals a new approach to the organization of labor of older workers, based on modern technologies of organization and personnel management in the company. The state should ensure the creation of a favorable environment for the work of older workers, which allows to overcome the adverse economic and social consequences of the aging workforce.

Long-term, non-anthropogenic groundwater storage changes simulated by three global-scale hydrological models

This study examined long-term, natural (i.e., excluding anthropogenic impacts) variability of groundwater storage worldwide. Groundwater storage changes were estimated by forcing three global-scale hydrological models with three 50+ year meteorological datasets. Evaluation using in situ groundwater observations from the U.S. and terrestrial water storage derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites showed that these models reasonably represented inter-annual variability of water storage, as indicated by correlations greater than 0.5 in most regions. Empirical orthogonal function analysis revealed influences of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on global groundwater storage. Simulated groundwater storage, including its global average, exhibited trends generally consistent with that of precipitation. Global total (natural) groundwater storage decreased over the past 5–7 decades with modeled rates ranging from 0.01 to 2.18 mm year−1. This large range can be attributed in part to groundwater’s low frequency (inter-decadal) variability, which complicates identification of real long-term trends even within a 50+ year time series. Results indicate that non-anthropogenic variability in groundwater storage is substantial, making knowledge of it fundamental to quantifying direct human impacts on groundwater storage.

Internet Governance in Russia – Sovereign Basics for Independent Runet

Nationalization of Internet governance, or, in other words, the assertion of sovereignty over “national segments” of the Internet is a real trend nowadays and it happens predominantly in authoritarian countries. To academically study the assertion of sovereignty and the extent of such an assertion, I use the theoretical framework of cyberspace alignment to national borders introduced by Mueller (2017). He argues that instead of technical fragmentation of the Internet, there are attempts to align the control of cyberspace with national borders while preserving the benefits of using the global network. He suggested three main methods to implement such an alignment: national securitization, territorialization of information flows, and efforts to structure control of critical Internet resources along national lines. This theoretical and methodological frame is useful to study Internet governance in Russia and explain what is happening with RUnet and how close it is now to become a truly “sovereign network.” The first part of this study describes national securitization in detail: (1) emergence of cybersecurity as a national security issue in the Russian doctrinal documents; (2) centralization of threat intelligence in a form of GOSSOPKA program and creation of the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents; (3) reliance on nationally produced technologies; (4) establishment or reassertion of legal authority for network kill switch. Notably, the fourth component stands out because the Russian discourse differs from Mueller’s understanding of domestic Internet shutdowns. The Russian focus was (and still is) on an external kill switch for the RUnet by hostile states because it is conceived as a threat to Internet security and resilience in Russia. The study shows that each of the four components takes place in the Russian policy with varying levels of completeness and success. The second part deals with external content filtering, data localization laws, and geo-blocking. Russia has a comprehensive mix of all components; however, it doesn’t look similar to the Chinese Golden Shield. On the contrary, there is a gradual process of territorializing data and information, elaboration of laws regulating the blocking of websites with unlawful content and filtering of search engine results, while pressing foreign companies to comply with national law. The third part devoted to the alignment of critical Internet resources to national borders is the most interesting because of its implications for Internet fragmentation. The case of RUnet offers an opportunity to track the development of legislation that deals with critical Internet infrastructure and attempts to create a system that allows RUnet to work independently from the Internet in case of emergency or external shutdown. In summary, the case study provides the evidence for the Mueller’s theory, but the most important aspect that threatens the Internet with fragmentation is unpacking now in a form of recent legislation about the new logic of routing policies and attempts to make RUnet independent from procedures that ICANN use to maintain the global network. If eventually there will be a technical solution to make it, Russia will create a dangerous precedent for Internet fragmentation.

Demographic change and real house prices: a general equilibrium perspective

This paper analyzes the effects of demographic changes on the long-run pattern of real house prices in an overlapping generations general equilibrium model with housing-wealth effects. It is demonstrated that declines in the birth rate and in population growth, associated with increases in life expectancy, generate disinflation and a fall in the real interest rate, triggering a rise in real house prices over the long run. The positive relationship between contemporary demographic trends and real house price trends observed in the United States and in the OECD countries is thus not puzzling, but is perfectly consistent with dynamic macroeconomic theory. In this context, ceteris paribus, falling prices in the housing market are possible only when self-fulfilling boom–bust dynamics, unrelated to demographic fundamentals, occur.

Technological Breakthrough in the Modern Economy

The subject of the researchis factors accelerating the technological development of the country.The relevance of the subject is due to the low level of innovation activities in the Russian economy and high dependence on technology imports in a number of the most important manufacturing and mining industries while a number of government programs to promote innovation do not yield the expected results. The implementation of the goals for accelerating the economic development and Russia’s entry into the top five largest world economies based on the technological breakthrough set forth in the May presidential decrees requires taking into account the real technological trends in the largest economies.The purpose of the researchwas to show that the modern technological development requires building a research base for business, especially for large companies, which is in line with provisions of the economic theory developed by a number of economists from J. Schumpeter to P. Romer who substantiated the special role of business research and development under the support of the state. It is empirically proven that it is the high level of R&D expenditures that distinguishes developed countries from those less developed. The paper analyzes the scope and sectoral structure of the R&D carried out by large leading-edge corporations. The statistical data related to technological leaders and other high-tech companies was used in the research. The data was supplemented by patent statistics. The specific features of the growing technological competition between the United States and China were considered.

English and French Metaphorically-Motivated Phraseological Units Containing Religious Terms

The central point of discussion is how distinctive features of a traditional for English or French-speakers religious practice are reflected in the metaphorically motivated phraseological units of the English and French languages, containing a religious term. Such phraseological units constitute a substantial part of the phraseological corpuses of the languages being compared. Thus they are capable of reflecting not just individual associations connected with that or another religious term, but they can throw light on real trends showing how phraseology reflects certain aspects of traditional religious practice typical of the English and French cultures. The research has involved 500 French and 200 English metaphorically-motivated phraseological units containing a religious term, chosen from bilingual or monolingual idioms dictionaries. The analysis of their inner form reveals that in both languages being studied most of the metaphorically-motivated phraseological units containing a religious term are aimed at human beings, i.e. human in most cases appear as a target domain of metaphorical transposition of meaning. However as far as the source domain is concerned, notions connected with religious rites, cult procedures and objects are more characteristic of the French language, while the English phraseology mostly appeal to the general religious ideas as the source domain for metaphor-based phraseological units.

A study of build inflation in 30 million CPAN builds on 13 Perl versions and 10 operating systems

Continuous Integration (CI) is a cornerstone of modern quality assurance, providing on-demand builds (compilation and tests) of code changes or software releases. Yet the many existing CI systems do not help developers in interpreting build results, in particular when facing build inflation. Build inflation arises when each code change has to be built on dozens of combinations (configurations) of runtime environments (REs), operating systems (OSes), and hardware architectures (HAs). A code change C1 sent to the CI system may introduce programming faults that result in all these builds to fail, while a change C2 introducing a new library dependency might only lead one particular build configuration to fail. Consequently, the one build failure due to C2 will be “hidden” among the dozens of build failures due to C1 when the CI system reports the results of the builds. We have named this phenomenon build inflation, because it may bias the interpretation of build results by developers by “hiding” certain types of faults. In this paper, we study build inflation through a large-scale study of the relationship between REs and OSes and build failures on 30 million builds of the CPAN repository on the CPAN Testers package-level CI system. We show that the builds of Perl packages may fail differently on different REs and OSes and any combination thereof . Thus, we show that the results provided by CPAN Testers require filtering and selection to identify real trends of build failures among the many failures. Manual analysis of 791 build failures shows that dependency faults (missing modules) and programming faults (undefined values) are the main reasons for failures, with dependency faults being easier to fix. We conclude with recommendations for practitioners and researchers in interpreting build results as well as for tool builders who should improve he scheduling of builds and the reporting of build failures.

Changing trends in aortic valve procedures over the past ten years-from mechanical prosthesis via stented bioprosthesis to TAVI procedures-analysis of 50,846 aortic valve cases based on a Polish National Cardiac Surgery Database.

Aortic valve replacement (AVR) is one of the most common surgeries performed in cardiac surgery operating rooms. We present actual, real life trends from the last 10 years for AVR interventions based on a multicentre National Registry of Cardiac Surgery Database. The study population consisted of all 50,846 consecutive adult patients who underwent AVR between January 2006 and August 2016 in all cardiac surgery units in Poland. The main outcome measures were changes in the number of valves, characteristics of valves, operative details, and in-hospital mortality. Analysis consisted of all aortic valve (AV) procedures, including isolated AV surgery, combination procedures and patients who had a prior valve operation. In last 10 years, the number of procedures increased by 46%. Isolated surgical AVR was performed in 61.2%, AVR + coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in 23.9%, AVR + mitral valve replacement (MVR) in 7%, and transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) in 2.3% of patients. The mean patient age increased significantly from 61.4 years in 2006 to 66.1 years in 2016. Aortic stenosis was diagnosed in 73.4%, severe aortic insufficiency in 15.8% of cases. The most common valve pathology was calcification. Congenital valve dysfunction was diagnosed in 3.7% of cases. There was a 33.7% increase of bioprosthesis, and the most common implanted bioprosthesis was the Hancock II. The most common implanted mechanical prosthesis was the St. Jude Medical Mechanical Valve. In-hospital mortality decreased significantly over the 10-year period in all AV procedures from 10.9% in 2006 to 8.3% in 2016. Mean in-hospital mortality was: 4.0% in isolated surgical AVR, 5.4% in TAVI, 6.8% in AVR + CABG, 9.8% in AVR + MVR, 17.2% in AVR + MVR + CABG. In the last ten years, the number of AV procedure has doubled. Mortality was significantly lower with all types of AV procedure despite very rapid aging of AVR patients. TAVI procedure rapidly grew in popularity. There is significant increase in the use of bioprosthesis.

Linking environmental sustainability and nutritional quality of the Atlantic diet recommendations and real consumption habits in Galicia (NW Spain)

Today's society is increasingly aware of food consumption patterns. Under the perspective that real consumption trends are often not in line with healthy recommendations, this research focuses on the study of the environmental and nutritional sustainability of two types of food consumption habits present in the northern Atlantic area of Spain (Galicia). The main objective is, therefore to detect the existing deviations between the current Galician diet (GD) and the traditional and increasingly relevant Recommended Atlantic Diet (RAD), allowing verifying whether current consumption patterns ensure an optimal and sustainable nutritional profile. In this sense, the carbon footprint from a Life Cycle Assessment perspective has been estimated as environmental indicator of both dietary patterns and, the nutritional quality has been determined by the Nutrient Rich Diet 9.3 index and the Health gain score. The carbon footprint of both dietary models is moderately high compared to recommended diets such as the Mediterranean one. Comparing the two scenarios, the associated greenhouse gas emissions are about 15% higher for GD than for RAD, mainly due to the higher intake of beef and dairy products. On the other hand, nutritional quality is comparatively higher for RAD than for GD, associated with higher consumption of vegetables and fruits. An additional objective of this work has been to consider a sensitivity analysis to determine the effect of replacing beef with alternative sources.Having in mind this study, it can be concluded that the real consumption pattern in Galicia is far from the recommended one, with worse environmental and nutritional quality. The promotion of social awareness policies to guide consumers in the choice a healthier and more environmentally sustainable dietary pattern should be advisable for regional decision-makers as well as for those who wish to promote adherence to the Atlantic diet in other regions and countries.

Age-independent site index mapping with repeated single-tree airborne laser scanning

ABSTRACTA novel method for age-independent site index estimation is demonstrated using repeated single-tree airborne laser scanning (ALS) data. A spruce-dominated study area of 114 km2 in southern Norway was covered by single-tree ALS twice, i.e. in 2008 and 2014. We identified top height trees wall-to-wall, and for each of them we derived based on the two heights and the 6-year period length. We reconstructed past, annual height growth in a field campaign on 31 sample trees, and this showed good correspondence with ALS based heights. We found a considerable increase in site index, i.e. about 5 m in the H40 system, from the old site index values. This increase corresponded to a productivity increase of 62%. This increase appeared to mainly represent a real temporal trend caused by changing growing conditions. In addition, the increase could partly result from underestimation in old site index values. The method has the advantages of not requiring tree-age data, of representing current growing conditions, and as well that it is a cost-effective method with wall-to-wall coverage. In slow-growing forests and short time periods, the method is least reliable due to possible systematic differences in canopy penetration between repeated ALS scans.