A cost Malmquist productivity index capturing group performance

This paper develops an index for comparing the productivity of groups of operating units in cost terms when input prices are available. In that sense it represents an extension of a similar index available in the literature for comparing groups of units in terms of technical productivity in the absence of input prices. The index is decomposed to reveal the origins of differences in performance of the groups of units both in terms of technical and cost productivity. The index and its decomposition are of value in contexts where the need arises to compare units which perform the same function but they can be grouped by virtue of the fact that they operate in different contexts as might for example arise in comparisons of water or gas transmission companies operating in different countries.

Spillovers from foreign direct investment in Central and Eastern Europe:an index for measuring a country’s potential to benefit from technology spillovers

In the paper, we construct a composite indicator to estimate the potential of four Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) to benefit from productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) in the manufacturing sector. Such transfers of technology are one of the main benefits of FDI for the host country, and should also be one of the main determinants of FDI incentives offered to investing multinationals by governments, but they are difficult to assess ex ante. For our composite index, we use six components to proxy the main channels and determinants of these spillovers. We have tried several weighting and aggregation methods, and we consider our results robust. According to the analysis of our results, between 2003 and 2007 all four countries were able to increase their potential to benefit from such spillovers, although there are large differences between them. The Czech Republic clearly has the most potential to benefit from productivity spillovers, while Poland has the least. The relative positions of Hungary and Slovakia depend to some extent on the exact weighting and aggregation method of the individual components of the index, but the differences are not large. These conclusions have important implications both the investment strategies of multinationals and government FDI policies.

Regrouping metric-space search index for search engine size adaptation

This work contributes to the development of search engines that self-adapt their size in response to fluctuations in workload. Deploying a search engine in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud facilitates allocating or deallocating computational resources to or from the engine. In this paper, we focus on the problem of regrouping the metric-space search index when the number of virtual machines used to run the search engine is modified to reflect changes in workload. We propose an algorithm for incrementally adjusting the index to fit the varying number of virtual machines. We tested its performance using a custom-build prototype search engine deployed in the Amazon EC2 cloud, while calibrating the results to compensate for the performance fluctuations of the platform. Our experiments show that, when compared with computing the index from scratch, the incremental algorithm speeds up the index computation 2–10 times while maintaining a similar search performance.

Stock price and volume effects associated with changes in the composition of the FTSE Bursa Malaysian KLCI

We examine the stock price and volume effects associated with changes in the composition of the FTSE Bursa Malaysia Kuala Lumpur Composite Index (KLCI), over the time period of 2005–2012. We find evidence to support the price pressure hypothesis for both additions to and deletions from the KLCI. This is because significant stock price and trading volume effects in the pre index revision period are entirely reversed after the announcement of the news. Our empirical findings can be explained by the market microstructure literature. Significant changes in liquidity cause trading volume and stock prices to reverse back to their original level before the index revisions took place.