A Flexible Functional Form Approach To Mortality Modeling: Do We Need Additional Cohort Dummies?

The increasing amount of attention paid to longevity risk and funding for old age has created the need for precise mortality models and accurate future mortality forecasts. Orthogonal polynomials have been widely used in technical fields and there have also been applications in mortality modeling. In this paper we adopt a flexible functional form approach using two‐dimensional Legendre orthogonal polynomials to fit and forecast mortality rates. Unlike some of the existing mortality models in the literature, the model we propose does not impose any restrictions on the age, time or cohort structure of the data and thus allows for different model designs for different countries' mortality experience. We conduct an empirical study using male mortality data from a range of developed countries and explore the possibility of using age–time effects to capture cohort effects in the underlying mortality data. It is found that, for some countries, cohort dummies still need to be incorporated into the model. Moreover, when comparing the proposed model with well‐known mortality models in the literature, we find that our model provides comparable fitting but with a much smaller number of parameters. Based on 5‐year‐ahead mortality forecasts, it can be concluded that the proposed model improves the overall accuracy of the future mortality projection. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting with Micro Panels: The Case of Health Care Costs

Micro panels characterized by large numbers of individuals observed over a short time period provide a rich source of information, but as yet there is only limited experience in using such data for forecasting. Existing simulation evidence supports the use of a fixed‐effects approach when forecasting but it is not based on a truly micro panel set‐up. In this study, we exploit the linkage of a representative survey of more than 250,000 Australians aged 45 and over to 4 years of hospital, medical and pharmaceutical records. The availability of panel health cost data allows the use of predictors based on fixed‐effects estimates designed to guard against possible omitted variable biases associated with unobservable individual specific effects. We demonstrate the preference towards fixed‐effects‐based predictors is unlikely to hold in many practical situations, including our models of health care costs. Simulation evidence with a micro panel set‐up adds support and additional insights to the results obtained in the application. These results are supportive of the use of the ordinary least squares predictor in a wide range of circumstances. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于动态组合残差修正的预测方法

本文建立了一种基于残差修正的组合预测方法,并基于该方法证明了针对多个单一的预测方法根据其在某个时间段的相对预测误差的大小选择组合选项可以进一步提高预测精度.提出了针对不同时间段可根据各种单项预测模型的相对预测误差的大小动态选取相对预测误差最小的两种模型构成组合残差来修正基本方法的预测误差,以提高预测精度.最后通过实际空调负荷预测对其进行了验证,结果表明这种动态组合残差修正的预测方法相对于基于多个固定单一预测方法的组合预测方法,可以进一步改善预测效果.     

Forecasting key US macroeconomic variables with a factor‐augmented Qual VAR

In this paper, we first extract factors from a monthly dataset of 130 macroeconomic and financial variables. These extracted factors are then used to construct a factor‐augmented qualitative vector autoregressive (FA‐Qual VAR) model to forecast industrial production growth, inflation, the Federal funds rate, and the term spread based on a pseudo out‐of‐sample recursive forecasting exercise over an out‐of‐sample period of 1980:1 to 2014:12, using an in‐sample period of 1960:1 to 1979:12. Short‐, medium‐, and long‐run horizons of 1, 6, 12, and 24 months ahead are considered. The forecast from the FA‐Qual VAR is compared with that of a standard VAR model, a Qual VAR model, and a factor‐augmented VAR (FAVAR). In general, we observe that the FA‐Qual VAR tends to perform significantly better than the VAR, Qual VAR and FAVAR (barring some exceptions relative to the latter). In addition, we find that the Qual VARs are also well equipped in forecasting probability of recessions when compared to probit models.     

The US Dollar/Euro Exchange Rate: Structural Modeling and Forecasting During the Recent Financial Crises

The paper investigates the determinants of the US dollar/euro within the framework of the asset pricing theory of exchange rate determination, which posits that current exchange rate fluctuations are determined by the entire path of current and future revisions in expectations about fundamentals. In this perspective, we innovate by conditioning on Fama–French and Carhart risk factors, which directly measures changing market expectations about the economic outlook, on new financial condition indexes and macroeconomic variables. The macro‐finance augmented econometric model has a remarkable in‐sample and out‐of‐sample predictive ability, largely outperforming a standard autoregressive specification. We also document a stable relationship between the US dollar/euro Carhart momentum conditional correlation (CCW) and the euro area business cycle. CCW signals a progressive weakening in economic conditions since June 2014, consistent with the scattered recovery from the sovereign debt crisis and the new Greek solvency crisis exploded in late spring/early summer 2015. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting the Daily Time‐Varying Beta of European Banks During the Crisis Period: Comparison Between GARCH Models and the Kalman Filter

This intention of this paper is to empirically forecast the daily betas of a few European banks by means of four generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models and the Kalman filter method during the pre‐global financial crisis period and the crisis period. The four GARCH models employed are BEKK GARCH, DCC GARCH, DCC‐MIDAS GARCH and Gaussian‐copula GARCH. The data consist of daily stock prices from 2001 to 2013 from two large banks each from Austria, Belgium, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. We apply the rolling forecasting method and the model confidence sets (MCS) to compare the daily forecasting ability of the five models during one month of the pre‐crisis (January 2007) and the crisis (January 2013) periods. Based on the MCS results, the BEKK proves the best model in the January 2007 period, and the Kalman filter overly outperforms the other models during the January 2013 period. Results have implications regarding the choice of model during different periods by practitioners and academics. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于网络搜索的票房预测模型——来自中国电影市场的证据

建立了一个将网络搜索与电影票房联系起来的模型, 考察了影片上映前后消费者网络搜索的动态变化及其在电影票房预测中的作用. 文章就中国电影产业对该模型进行了实证检验. 结果显示, 影片网络搜索量以及增长趋势都能预测该影片的首映周票房. 对于后续周票房, 动态联立方程模型的估计结果表明, 网络搜索既是电影票房的先行信号, 也是电影票房的后向结果. 样本外分析表明, 整合了网络搜索的模型能够提高预测的准确性.     

“德才兼备、以德为先”选拔任用干部标准观及意义研究

中共选拔任用干部的标准不断与时俱进，在发展中逐渐形成了“德才兼备、以德为先”的选拔任用干部标准观。“坚持德才兼备、以德为先”选拔任用干部，符合马克思主义理论要求，也是增强执政能力的需要和构建和谐社会的组织保证。     

Revisiting Targeted Factors

This paper proposes new methods for ‘targeting’ factors estimated from a big dataset. We suggest that forecasts of economic variables can be improved by tuning factor estimates: (i) so that they are both more relevant for a specific target variable; and (ii) so that variables with considerable idiosyncratic noise are down‐weighted prior to factor estimation. Existing targeted factor methodologies are limited to estimating the factors with only one of these two objectives in mind. We therefore combine these ideas by providing new weighted principal components analysis (PCA) procedures and a targeted generalized PCA (TGPCA) procedure. These methods offer a flexible combination of both types of targeting that is new to the literature. We illustrate this empirically by forecasting a range of US macroeconomic variables, finding that our combined approach yields important improvements over competing methods, consistently surviving elimination in the model confidence set procedure. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

天宫一号与载人飞船组合体能源管理设计与验证

天宫一号和载人飞船构成组合体期间,载人飞船处于停靠状态,由天宫一号负责组合体能源管理.基于供电安全性和传输功率的要求,组合体进行了近端采样反馈电压控制的并网供电架构设计.经过仿真、地面测试和在轨飞行试验验证,表明天宫一号与载人飞船组合体供电并网设计正确,为载人空间站工程各组合体间供电并网设计提供了有力保证.