Progress in Economics Research: Volume 39

This compilation begins by discussing the connection between perceived employability and job insecurity on psychological health and job-related outcome variables. A study testing this correlation is presented, with results suggesting that perceived employability and job insecurity facilitates the effects of self-efficacy on psychological health, job satisfaction, and dedication. Additionally, research on productivity growth in 55 major Australian urban water utilities over a four-year period is described. In this study, productivity growth was broken-down into technical efficiency and technological change by way of Malmquist indices. Later, price dynamics are investigated to determine market integration, market efficiency and spatial arbitrage. Based on empirical investigations, several policy implications are derived in terms of efficacy and effectiveness of policy measures, or interventions on trade policies. The authors provide a review of federal-level regulation of the U.S. interstate natural gas pipeline industry, placing modern rules and regulations into their appropriate historical context by reviewing the evolution of gas pipeline regulation over the course of the 20th Century. The authors also examine the question of the creation of global government and global currency, especially analyzing the current unstable financial system and the threat of war resulting from unstable intergovernmental relationships. The use of global currency is imagined under the surveillance of a Global Central Bank, which would consist of representatives of national governments with voting rights determined by the share of national GNP in total gross product in the community of participating nations. A paper exploring restaurant bankruptcy in the U.S. between 1980 and 2014 is included, with the goal of developing a bankruptcy prediction model and explaining that restaurateurs should be more cautious in selecting their operation types to aid in financial stability. The active relationship between economic growth, inflation, stock market development, and globalization is studied using the panel VAR methodology, with the objective of determining the behavior of certain variables and observing how these elements interact with one another. Another paper studies whether or not the financial market of China is integrated with the financial market of the U.S., with its data converted into cumulative partial sums by using a software component created by the authors in Octave language. By estimating the asymmetric generalized impulse response functions, the authors suggest that these financial markets are linked interactively when the markets are falling. A final paper is presented investigating the nature of dependence between stock prices and exchange rate in Nigeria from January of 2000 to December of 2015. Overall, the evidence indicates the dominance of the portfolio balance effect, with stock prices leading the exchange rate. This leads the authors to determine that stabilizing the stock market is imperative for exchange rate management to minimize the transmission of systemic risk and contagion between both markets.