Incorporating distributional considerations in the safe minimum standard approach: endangered species and local impacts

Explicitly incorporating current distributional concerns into the safe minimum standard (SMS) approach is the objective of this study. The SMS approach is a collective choice process that prescribes protecting a minimum level of a renewable natural resource unless the social costs of doing so are somehow excessive or intolerably high. More complete implementation of an SMS approach, if it is to be a pragmatic policy tool, requires that distributional considerations be included in determining whether the economic consequences of preservation actions are intolerable. Two case studies involving the US Endangered Species Act are used to illustrate how distributional concerns might be incorporated into the SMS approach.     

Neglected Features of the Safe Minimum Standard: Socio-economic and Institutional Dimensions

This article describes and critically investigates core features of the safe minimum standard of conservation (SMS), as outlined by Ciriacy-Wantrup, which have been neglected, de-emphasized or poorly interpreted. Different ensuing interpretations and developments of SMS, aimed at giving it a theoretical basis and operationalizing it, are scrutinized. It is shown that the definition of features such as irreversibility, uncertainty, threshold and critical zone imply a socio-economic and institutional approach of SMS. Hence, endeavors to find a formal and positive foundation (game theory) or to identify SMS as an adjunct to cost-benefit analysis are unsuccessful. Rather, approaches assigning the definition of acceptable resource use to politics and society conform with SMS (e.g. by political norm setting or societal discourse). Furthermore, the paper discusses close normative relatives of SMS and identifies intragenerational distributional justice as a crucial variable for setting SMS. It is argued that SMS is a socio-economic and institutional approach; this should be the basis for further discussion and development of SMS.     

短信诈骗中的银行卡风险与防控

随着经济金融格局的变化和居民消费水平的提高,我国银行卡产业进入了高速发展期。与此同时,银行卡短信诈骗案件呈多发态势,诈骗手段亦不断翻新。银行卡短信诈骗案件的频频出现,反映出法律风险潜伏于银行经营管理的各个环节。法律风险的不断累积,使得银行在银行卡短信诈骗案件中易陷于被动局面,严重影响银行的利益与声誉,并威胁银行卡业务的健康发展。     

Safe Minimum Standards in Dynamic Resource Problems: Conditions for Living on the Edge of Risk

Safe Minimum Standards (SMSs) has been advocated as a policy rule for certain environmental problems where uncertainty about risks and consequences are thought to be profound. This paper explores the rationale for such a policy within both static and dynamic frameworks and derives conditions for when SMS can be summarily dismissed as a policy choice and for when SMS can be defended as an optimal policy based on standard economic criteria. It turns out that these conditions can be checked with quite limited information about damages and risks. In order to analyze the SMSs in a dynamic setting, we develop a method for solving optimal control problems when state space is divided into risky and non-risky sub-sets.      

Species preservation versus development: An experimental investigation under uncertainty

The safe minimum standard (SMS) is a decision rule to preserve renewable resources, unless the social costs of doing so are intolerable. While unpersuasive to many, support for the SMS has been advocated by some economists for settings involving irreversibility and a high degree of uncertainty. The objective of this paper is to explore decision-making involving species preservation versus development within an experimental laboratory setting, and involving uncertainty. The experimental design implements a number of prior game-theoretic investigations of the SMS (Bishop, 1978; Ready and Bishop, 1991; Palmini, 1999), involving insurance, and lottery or combined games against nature. The choices are between species preservation, which possibly provides a cure for a disease, or developing habitat, leading to irreversible depletion. Econometric results from a random parameters logit model, using responses from 117 participants (across both U.S. and Mexican university student samples) and 9 treatment choices, indicate that support for the SMS varies across the type of game, the imposed maximum regret condition concerning the relative magnitude of the costs of disease and net benefits of development, a constructed measure of respondents' risk aversion, and other factors. There is also strong evidence of unobservable heterogeneous preferences for preservation within our sample.     

The more others care,the more you share? – Social contagion as a stardom trigger of social media superstars –

Emerging superstars on social media platforms reshape the media landscape. This research analyses social contagion as a stardom trigger of social media superstars (SMS). We argue that in addition to serving as a quality indicator, the number of observed consumers of SMS performances also indicates the suitability of discussing the SMS performances with others. We experimentally manipulated the number of previous views of a YouTube video and find that a high number of previous views significantly increases the perceived quality and the video’s discussion suitability even when holding all objective video characteristics constant. We discuss implications for aspiring SMS and (online) marketers.     

Personal identity management as a socio-technical network

This paper describes a framework which has proven useful in unpacking the socio-technical nature of personal identity management and in understanding how the introduction of the national identity card in the UK has been ‘configured’ among diverse agencies. The current paper provides an update to developments in the area and evaluates the developing discourse emerging from government circles. The issue is assuming a much larger role within e-government rollout generally and is seen as critical to effective service transformation. This means that the issue is being expanded outside of debate about the introduction of an identity card and is involving a greater range of stakeholders. We use this particular case to help understand a number of thematic and emergent elements surrounding personal identity management which we expect will frame attempts at organisational resolution in this area in the future.     

Can monetary policy stabilise food inflation? Evidence from advanced and emerging economies

This paper addresses a long-standing political debate as how effective is monetary policy to stabilise food inflation. While a wealth of theoretical literature suggests a stabilising role of monetary policy via aggregate demand channel, there exists hardly any empirical consensus on this issue. Very recently, a limited strand of empirical literature has attempted to shed light in this arena. The present study contributes to this literature by analysing the effectiveness of aggregate demand channel in presence of production cost channel of monetary policy transmission, affecting prices positively via supply side, in a panel of developed and emerging economies for the period 2006 Q1 to 2016 Q2. We find that an unexpected monetary tightening has a positive and significant effect on food inflation in both advanced and emerging economies. Our findings suggest that in the backdrop of inflationary pressure stemming from the food sector, a monetary tightening may turn out to be destabilising for the food as well as overall inflation in the economy.     

浅析河北省投融资制度创新

目前,河北省正处于经济结构战略性调整的关键时期,有效需求不足尤其是投资乏力日益成为制约全省经济发展的主要障碍。因此,应建立健全投资融资的间接调控体系,鼓励增设新型融资机构和融资工具的规模和品种,以拓宽融资规模和渠道。     

成员间信息共享对渠道经销商的绩效影响

随着渠道成员间建立战略联盟性关系趋势不断加强,信息共享成为提高渠道绩效的关键因素。本文选取海尔公司部分家电经销商为研究对象,构建了信息共享、关系信任、关系满意、关系承诺及渠道绩效之间的理论模型,利用结构方程模型对信息共享影响渠道绩效的机制进行实证研究。结果表明,信息共享对渠道绩效有直接正向影响;关系信任、关系满意、关系承诺在信息共享对渠道绩效的影响中起到部分中介作用。     

It's easier to contract than to pay: Judicial independence and US municipal default in the 19th century

It is well established in the literature that an independent judiciary can act as a signal of credibility by a sovereign state and as a guarantor of creditor rights. However, to date there has been little systematic work analyzing how an independent judiciary reacts to fiscal stress and public-sector default. This article addresses that very question by evaluating how and if judicial independence affects default rates using US municipal data through the nineteenth century. Overall, the results do indicate that greater judicial independence is associated with a significantly lower likelihood of default. This channel largely occurs through the method by which a member of a state's court of last resort is selected (either appointment or popular election) and term length.     

The role of new ICTs in the sustainable development of industrial cluster： a case study of Yangxunqiao textile cluster

The wide application of new information and communication technologies （ICTs） has been argued to be critical in local economic development, while the application of new ICTs will affect the development of industrial cluster, especially those small and medium-sized enterprises （SMEs）. This paper examines Yangxunqiao textile cluster located in Zhejiang Province as a case study to focus on the role of ICTs in the sustainable development. We argue ICTs application in firms boost flexible and customized production approach, improve e-commerce market channel and raise supply chain management. We also pay special attention to the spatial implication of ICTs adoption in industrial cluster, and suggest that application of ICTs tend to lead to further clustering of SMEs in the location with mature production chain. Our analysis shows that new ICTs are a facilitator in the sustainable development of the industrial cluster.     

Labor immobility and the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in a monetary union

It is believed that a common monetary policy in a monetary union will have identical effects on different countries as long as these countries have identical fundamentals. We show that, when there is specialization in production, the terms of trade react to the shock. The transmission mechanism of a monetary shock has in this case an additional channel, the terms of trade. This is the case even if state contingent assets can be traded across countries. For a reasonable parametrization, the differential on the transmission across countries is quantitatively significant when compared with the effect on the union's aggregates. Monetary shocks create cycles with higher volatility in “poor” countries than in “richer” ones.     

A two-stage technology foresight model with system dynamics simulation and its application in the Chinese ICT industry

Technology foresight is a process that identifies the critical technologies a country or industry needs to develop in order to shape a desired future. In this paper, a two-stage technology foresight approach is proposed. During the first stage, critical technologies are identified and evaluated by nationwide experts through Delphi surveys. In the second stage, a system dynamics simulation model is used to estimate how critical parameter values are likely to impact the attainment of foresight goals. A detailed illustration of this two-stage process is provided by a technology foresight case study in the Chinese information and communication technologies (ICT) industry. Because it was identified by the first-stage Delphi method as a critical technology, the diffusion of 4th generation wireless telecommunication technology (4G) was simulated, and experimentation was conducted. Suggestions are provided regarding how the Chinese information industry would need to expand the IP network infrastructure in order to support technology foresight goals under different scenarios.     

Real estate and relative risk aversion with generalized recursive preferences

This paper investigates how real estate wealth affects the household’s attitude toward risk, and derives the closed-form expressions for risk aversion with generalized recursive preferences. We find three channels through which real estate wealth affects risk aversion, and these channels are absent in the traditional measure of relative risk aversion as in Arrow (1965) and Pratt (1964). First, illiquidity and fluctuations in real estate value increase consumption risk, thereby increasing risk aversion. Second, real estate as an asset provides a cushion for absorbing negative shocks to households, reducing risk aversion. Third, an increase in real estate prices lowers the profit of the firm that uses real estate as a factor of production, induces a decline in the real wage, and causes a rise in consumption risk. This channel increases risk aversion. We study how these channels as a whole determine relative risk aversion using a basic real business cycle model with generalized recursive preferences and compare the results with the case of expected utility preferences. Finally, we explore the implications of the firm’s and the household’s real estate holdings and illiquidity of real estate on the risk premiums for equity and real estate.     

Investment decisions and coordination problems in a market with network externalities: An experimental study

We study decision-making and the associated coordination problems in an experimental setting with network externalities. Subjects decide simultaneously in every round how much to invest out of a fixed endowment; the gain from an investment increases with total investment, so that an investment is profitable iff total investment exceeds a critical mass. The game has multiple, Pareto-ranked equilibria; we find that whether first-round total investment reaches critical mass predicts convergence towards the Pareto optimal full-investment equilibrium. Moreover, first-round investments and equilibrium convergence vary with critical mass and group size in a complex way that is explicable by subtle effects of strategic uncertainty on decision making.     

Taiwan's ICP mechanism—a review and a stage approach

Most developing countries achieved necessary critical technology quickly and efficiently through the offset channel. Taiwanese government procurement is one of the most important sources of technological development. Over the past 10 years, this performance has not been remarkable in obtaining improved rising defense technology using the offset (namely, Industrial Cooperation Program, ICP). The main objective of this paper is to discuss the problems with Taiwan's ICP and propose a four-stage approach for Taiwan's ICP mechanism detailed improvements are suggested for Stage I and Stage II. F-16 fighter coproduction was used as an example to simulate Stages I and II in the four-stage approach process, considering all three levels of technology, economics and national security, to establish a set of fuzzy multiple criteria decision mode to identify the evaluative criteria variables and project item's order for ICP project. This decision mode was identified as a workable method.     

现代企业竞争的新潮流——生态经营战略

利益相关方对企业社会责任的关注已成为现代企业竞争的新潮流。本文就为履行社会责任,企业如何将生态经营战略纳入到企业的可持续发展战略之中进行了探讨。同时,指出企业要根据可持续发展战略的不同,制订出不同的生态战略以及如何明确具体的经营策略,选择适当的指标来衡量和监控企业的生态战略绩效。     

The ‘Greater Middle East’ as a ‘Modern’ Geopolitical Imagination in American Foreign Policy

This article aims at analysing how the September 11 terrorist attacks have caused the formation of a new geopolitical vision of an area called the ‘Greater Middle East’ and how this formation has led to changes in US foreign policy towards this region. To do that, the article first presents a theoretical background against which the modern geopolitical imagination of the USA is formulated. It considers the links between national traumas/myths, geopolitical codes and visions, and foreign policy actions. The article then applies this analysis to the case of the Greater Middle East with respect to how this imagined geography shapes the foreign and security policy of the USA. It concludes that even though this imagined region has been presented in texts as justifying US-led policies with liberal underpinnings, it has in reality laid the ground for and been used for justifying US extra-territorial intervention in the region.