This article analyzes the current trend towards online education. It examines some of the reasons for the trend and the ramifications it may have on students, faculty and institutions of higher learning. The success and profitability of online programs and institutions such as the University of Phoenix has helped to make the move towards online education more appealing to other institutions, as...

Financial returns, although seemingly unpredictable, have been successfully modelled using market and macro-economic factors. The effect of these factors, however, may vary with time and only be statistically significant for specific periods. This paper utilises factors that have been found to capture financial market returns and applies them to the modelling of a broad set of commodities. A ch...

Primary commodities are important exports for Fiji, contributing around 60 to 65 percent to total export receipts. Prices of primary commodities have been very unstable, subject to both secular and temporary fluctuations, which in turn, has given rise to unevenness in the value of export earnings and reserve levels. To date, there has not been any empirical evidence on the influence of commodit...

We consider an economy in which a set of agents own productive assets which provide a commodity dividend stream, and the agents also receive individual commodity income streams over a finite time horizon. The agents can buy and sell this commodity at a certain spot price and buy and sell their shares of the productive assets. The proceeds can be invested in financial assets whose prices are mod...

This paper investigates the common movements of commodity sectors in China as well as the economic underpinnings of the comovements. We employ a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to disentangle the common and idiosyncratic sector-specific factors of the prices of a group of China's commodity sectors: petrochemicals, grains, energy, non-ferrous metals, oils & fats, and softs. The results indi...