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Forecasting Foreign Exchange Rates, Timothy M. Znaczko

Applied Economics Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to seek answers to different questions regarding the forecasting of foreign exchange rates. Exchange rate movement is regularly monitored by central banks for macroeconomic analysis and market surveillance purposes. Results in the literature show exchange rate models perform poorly in out-of-sample prediction analysis, even though some models have good in-sample analysis. The results were found using methods including moving average, exponential smoothing, random walk, and Box-Jenkins transfer function. The questions that I ask are: how accurate are these models when compared to a random prediction of future exchange rates, and what variables, if any, …

Industrial Machine Analysis: Economic Quality Control, Vandyke Kotoroka-Yiadom

Applied Economics Theses

The objective of the study is analyzing the optimality of industrial machines over time to explore causes of variation in the machines’ performance. The accurate estimation of machine efficiency is very important in capital-intensive industry. This study selected various productions units, labor hours per pound, product mix and shifts to analyze the variations in machine production.

This paper outlines methodology using statistical quality control methods, cluster analysis and econometrics to process and analyze the data. It then presents performance results of industrial machines and makes recommendations for future improvement of these machines. The firm that was analyzed is ideally positioned …