Around the Bloc: Obama Ice Cream
A new Russian brand is only the latest in a line of controversial usages of the U.S. president’s image.
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A new Russian brand is only the latest in a line of controversial usages of the U.S. president’s image.
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Tensions between pro-American and pro-Russian supporters are running high ahead of Victory Day parades.
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Destroyed during the war, historic mosque finally welcomes worshippers as dignitaries hope for greater religious tolerance.
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Symbolic concert honors victims of terrorism, as Russian and Syrian dignitaries look on.
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Security service says arrested Central Asians had been planning major attacks.
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One of the last projects of the late architect Zaha Hadid is a big step closer to reality.
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How a nuclear error hundreds of miles away helped start a war of the worlds in Bulgaria.
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Naming Russians cited in Panama Papers may have been the last straw for the independent media group.
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Fans of the Trabant, the iconic East German car, now have a place in the Czech Republic to show their love.
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FIFA membership could soon follow, as the former Serbian province gains increasing acceptance by major sports organizations.
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The IT sector has emerged from post-Soviet doldrums to become a rare success story in the economically challenged country.
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Police discover grenades ahead of commemoration of bloody 2014 clashes.
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For second year in a row, authorities prevent “Night Wolves” club from driving through the country, irking Moscow.
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As tensions reached the boiling point in Nagorno-Karabakh last month, the breakaway region saw support from some unlikely allies: U.S. state governments.
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Looking forward to elections, Bloc Against Islam looks West for a model.
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This paper investigates the long-run and short-term dynamics of 351 US metropolitan statistical area housing prices in relation to personal income. We apply a panel cointegration approach on annual data from 1993 to 2011 and find a long-run relationship between local house prices and per capita personal income. The causal direction is then assessed based on an autoregressive distributed lag specification that also accommodates for error-correction. Results from Granger-causality tests reveal the existence of a bi-directional causality between real house prices and real per capita personal income over both long and short-horizons. Our results continue to be robust, when our bivariate system is extended to include additional MSA-level (employment and population) and national-level variables (real stock price and mortgage interest rate). We conclude that changes in personal income can predict house price movements and vice versa.
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Economic variation and its effects on construction demand have received a great deal of attention in construction economics studies. An understanding of future trends in demand for construction could influence investment strategies for a variety of parties, including construction developers, suppliers, property investors and financial institutions. This paper derives the determinants of demand for construction in Australia using an econometric approach to identify and evaluate economic indicators that affect construction demand. The forecasting contribution of different determinants of economic indicators and their categories to the demand for construction are further estimated. The results of this empirical study suggest that changes in consumer's expectation, income and production, and demography and labour force are closely correlated with the movement of construction demand; and 14 economic indicators are identified as the determinants for construction demand. It was found that the changes in construction price, national income, size of population, unemployment rate, value or export, household expenditure and interest rates play key roles in explaining future variations in the demand for construction in Australia. Some “popular” macroeconomic indicators, such as GDP, established house price and bank loans produced inconclusive results.
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Real estate developers in China are using mergers and acquisitions (M&As) to ensure their survival and competitiveness. However, no suitable method is yet available to assess whether such M&As provide enhanced value for those involved. Using a hybrid method of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Malmquist total factor productivity (TFP) indices, this paper evaluates the short and medium term effects of M&As on acquirers’ economic performance with a set of 32 M&A cases occurring during 2000–2011 in China. The results of the analysis show that M&As generally have a positive effect on acquirers’ economic performance. Acquisitions on average experienced a steady growth in developer Malmquist TFP, a more progressive adoption of technology immediately after acquisition, a slight short-term decrease in technical efficiency after acquisition but followed by a marked increase in the longer term once the integration and synergy benefits were realised. However, there is no evidence to show whether developers achieved any short or long term scale efficiency improvements after M&A. The findings of this study provide useful insights on developer M&A performance from an efficiency and productivity perspective.
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The real estate sector has been negatively affected by the recent economic recession, which has forced structural changes that impact property value and price. Recent pressures have also motivated reduced liquidity and access to credit, causing a drop in property sales and, thus, boosting the rental housing market. It is worth noting, however, that the rental housing segment is not with-out difficulties and complexity, namely in terms of legislation and rental value revaluation. In light of this reasoning, this study aims to develop a multiple criteria decision support system for calculation of residential rents. By integrating cognitive maps and the measuring attractiveness by a categorical based evaluation technique (MACBETH), we also aim to introduce simplicity and transparency in the decision making framework. The practical implications, advantages and shortfalls of our proposal are also analyzed.
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The recent sluggish recovery in the U.S. house market has further motivated our research interests in overbuilding in real estate markets. Our model is an extension to Grenadier's (1996), who emphasizes rational investment decisions possibly leading to oversupply in real estate markets, by further allowing for the important implication of irrational expectation for the strategic interaction amongst competing investors. In this model, two market participants are asymmetric because one of them is allowed to have heterogeneous expectations about the growth and volatility of demand shocks. Unlike most of previous studies that only simply think of this phenomenon as a result of irrationality, our model further finds that irrational investors’ value-maximizing investment choices matter in understanding the strategic interaction of investment decisions in real estate markets, therefore providing additional insights into overbuilding and other puzzling phenomena in real estate markets.
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