中国城镇居民的职业流动性研究—来自微观数据的经验分析

采用了微观的城镇居民调查数据,对我国当前职业流动的特征进行了考查,研究了性别、年龄、教育程度、婚姻状况及收入水平等劳动者的个体特征与职业流动性之间的关系。不同性别之间的职业流动并无显著差异,教育程度越高的流动性越强,未婚者的流动性低于已婚者,劳动者的流动性与收入水平成反比,而职业流动性随着年龄的增大而减小。     

代际间的职业流动与收入流动——来自中国城乡家庭的经验研究

本文通过对中国城乡家庭代际间的职业流动与收入流动进行实证研究,得出以下结论:(1)城镇家庭子女的职业随其职业生涯的发展有向父辈职业"回归"的趋势,而农村家庭中父代从事非农职业有助于子女实现职业的向上流动。(2)子女受教育程度的提高有利于代际间职业的向上流动,但其父辈的社会经济特征也对代际间的职业传承和流动有显著的影响。(3)代际之间职业的传承在一定程度上阻碍了代际间的收入流动,代际职业传承对高收入家庭的代际收入弹性影响更强。     

跨省流动就业人口主观幸福感影响因素实证研究——以重庆户籍人口为例

采用重庆市人口计生委于2012年进行的流动人口动态监测调查获得的大样本微观数据,运用排序模型研究了重庆户籍跨省流动就业人口主观幸福感的影响因素。实证研究表明,他们的主观幸福感大部分为"一般"和"幸福";性别、年龄、婚姻状况、收入、房租、子女是否在身边、流入地(是东部、中部还是西部)、对流入城市的偏好、他们认为流入地城市居民对外来人口的态度、在流入城市工作年限以及是否计划长期在流入城市工作均对其主观幸福感具有显著影响;但受教育程度、户口类型以及他们是否能够享受城镇居民医疗保险的影响却并不明显。     

教育对农村居民收入流动性的影响

本文基于CHNS数据建立一个多项Logit模型，分析教育等因素对农村居民收入流动性的影响。总体上，教育对于农村居民的收入流动性具有重要的影响，教育程度越高，收入向上流动的可能性越大；不过在更具体的层面上，虽然较高的教育程度可以有效阻止农村居民收入的下滑，但高中及以上教育程度对收入向上流动的影响却没有对向下流动的影响显著。     

教育对中国居民收入的影响分析——基于分位数回归和收入分布的考察

教育作为人力资本形成的最主要因素,影响着收入分配,但教育对不同收入水平人群的效应并不相同。本文采用分位数回归方法估计教育回报率,以分析教育对收入水平的影响,并通过考察教育扩张引起的收入分布位置和形态的变化来分析教育对收入不平等的影响。研究结果表明,性别、城乡、单位所有制类型以及职业类型对各分位点上的教育回报率影响显著;受教育程度提高使收入分布位置右移、离散程度增加,教育扩张加剧收入不平等;而右偏程度减小又减弱收入不平等程度;总体上说教育对收入不平等的影响作用被削弱了。     

新农村建设与城镇化背景下农村流动人口的就业--基于流动人口数据库的实证研究

文章基于新型城镇化与新农村建设的背景,选择农村流动人口作为研究对象,通过中国收入分配研究院所提供的中国家庭收入调查(CHIP)数据库,将城镇化水平指标和个体劳动者的户籍类型纳入分析框架,构造个体就业的计量模型,针对安徽、广东、河南等9个省份的调查数据,详细考察了农村流动人口个体层面的特征变量（主要包括性别、年龄、婚姻状况、受教育程度、工作经验、子女数量等）以及劳动力市场条件（如城市经济发展水平、城镇化水平、市场分割率、生活成本等）对农村流动劳动力的就业影响,报告了伴随着大规模的人口迁移与流动,流动人口就业对社会保障、公共服务方面形成的压力与挑战,特别是农村流动就业人口的“非正规化”矛盾愈加突出,文章对改善农村流动人口就业环境也提出了一些对策建议,希望对我国今后新农村建设和城镇化建设工作不断完善能产生积极影响。     

我国中老年人健康需求实证研究——基于性别和城乡的分析

对健康需求的研究,国际通行的方法是基于人力资本理论的Grossman健康需求模型.本文采用中国健康与养老追踪调查( CHARLS 2008)的数据,运用Probit排序选择模型对影响我国中老年人健康需求的因素进行了实证分析.研究发现,整体上看,收入和年龄对健康水平的影响符合Grossman模型的预测,且影响显著,相比之下,教育的影响不明确而且不显著,稳定的婚姻状况和青少年时期健康的体魄对中老年的健康有显著的正向作用.在性别差异方面,教育对女性健康的影响更大,而年龄和收入对男性健康的影响更大.在城乡差异方面,年龄对城镇居民的健康影响更显著,收入对农村居民的健康影响更大.这些经验发现可以作为配置医疗卫生资源的依据.     

职业流动与行业收入决定分析

本文从行业不同类型的职业流动①出发,考虑行业垄断和所有制因素,分析了垄断行业和竞争行业的收入决定差异问题。研究发现在工资方程中加入不区分流动类型的单纯职业流动变量无法甄别其对两个行业不同的收入影响效应。当区分同行业和跨行业职业流动类型后发现职业流动表现出行业分割和所有制分割的特征,且在国有垄断行业最为显著;区分自愿流动和被动流动的实证分析进一步验证了这一结论:一直留在国有垄断行业的劳动者获得了较高的收入溢价,但行业属性对非国有垄断行业影响有限;竞争行业中则只有被动流动的劳动者受到了显著的收入损失。结果表明,垄断因素本身对行业收入决定的关键性作用需要借助所有制因素及其与经济政策相互渗透而产生的体制性流动障碍才得以发挥,经济体制改革没有使国有垄断行业走向市场化,而其他行业则趋向市场竞争性。     

新生代农民工的教育培训、就业收入相关性分析——基于西北地区新生代农民工市民化问卷调查

文章通过对西北地区新生代农民工的教育培训及就业收入情况进行统计分析,说明教育培训与就业收入之间存在较强的相关性。分析结果证实,教育培训总体上对新生代农民工的稳定就业、收入提升及向上职业流动有正面影响;但是高中文化程度的农民工在获取收入方面,与初中文化程度的农民工相比并不具有显著优势。因此,政府在制定相关人力政策时,应考虑到这一实际情况。     

关于塑料袋收费制度的实证研究——以杭州为例

使用条件价值评估法和杭州地区五个主城区316个消费者的调查数据,评估杭州地区消费者对塑料袋收费制度的认知程度、接受程度和支付意愿（WTP）。结果显示,对普通塑料袋支付意愿有显著性影响的因素依次是家庭月收入、受教育程度、接受程度、环境行为及预期;对可降解塑料袋支付意愿影响显著的因素依次为家庭月收入、接受程度、年龄、环境行为及预期、受教育程度。     

Pleasure and belief in Hume's Decision Process

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce explicitly pleasure and belief in what aims at being a Humean theory of decision, like the one developed in Diaye and Lapidus (2005a). Although we support the idea that Hume was in some way a hedonist – evidently different from Bentham's or Jevons' way – we lay emphasis less on continuity than on the specific kind of hedonism encountered in Hume's writings (chiefly the Treatise, the second Enquiry, the Dissertation, or some of his Essays). Such hedonism clearly contrasts to its standard modern inheritance, expressed by the relation between preferences and utility.

The reason for such a difference with the usual approach lies in the mental process that Hume puts to the fore in order to explain the way pleasure determines desires and volition. Whereas pleasure is primarily, in Hume's words, an impression of sensation, it takes place in the birth of passions as reflecting an idea of pleasure, whose “force and vivacity” is precisely a “belief”, transferred to the direct passions of desire or volition that come immediately before action. As a result, from a Humean point of view, “belief” deals with decision under risk or uncertainty, as well as with intertemporal decision and indiscrimination problems.

The latter are explored within a formal framework, and it is shown that the relation of pleasure is transformed by belief into a non-empty class of relations of desire, among which at least one is a preorder.     

Globalization,Neoliberalism and the attack on social security

Neoliberal political movements advocate privatization of public pension systems. Globalization imposes pressure on nations to conform to neoliberal policy views with respect to the design and structure of social insurance, including public pension systems. The paper begins with an investigation of the economic, ethical and ideological dimensions of the privatization debates in the U.S.; it argues that privatization advocates may be largely moved by ideology, since the other reasons advanced appear weak or unfounded. The second part discusses the history of Social Security, the purposes for its creation, and some of its economic effects. Differences between public and private pension systems are considered. A brief international comparison of some aspects of public pension system finance and benefit structures is presented. The final section considers the ethical, macroeconomic and distributional implications of privatization, prefunding and payroll tax funding, and argues for a pay as you go system financed with income taxes. In order to promote equity, economic security, community, and social cohesion, public pension systems should be universal in coverage. In order to reduce the inequality, income insecurity, and aged poverty generated by market economies, public pension systems ought to be progressive: benefit/contribution ratios should be inversely proportional to income, and progressive income taxes should finance the system. To promote economic growth, the systems should be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, and should not be prefunded except for an emergency reserve. The fiscal policy recommendations partially depend upon the theory developed by Abba Lerner in the 1940s, and recently advanced by Wynne Godley and Randy Wray: Lerner's “principle of functional finance.”     

Interest on reserves and inflation

The payment of interest on reserves has been a common practice in inflationary economies. This policy may seem paradoxical since it involves returning part of the seigniorage, generated by the inflation process, with the intention to finance the fiscal deficit. This paper argues that the motivation for this policy can be captured by the discretionary regime, where the policymaker pays interest on reserves because he is concerned with the erosion of real liquidity by inflation, which is in part beyond his control. However, this policy is an unlikely outcome in the commitment regime, where the policymaker is in full control of inflation.     

Neurally reconstructing expected utility

While the concept of “expected utility” informs many theories of decision making, little is known about whether and how the human brain might compute this quantity. This article reviews a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) experiments designed to localize brain regions that respond in anticipation of increasing amounts of monetary incentives. These studies collectively suggest that anticipation of increasing monetary gains activates a subcortical region of the ventral striatum in a magnitude-proportional manner. This ventral striatal activation is not evident during anticipation of losses. Actual gain outcomes instead activate a region of the mesial prefrontal cortex. During anticipation of gain, ventral striatal activation is accompanied by feelings characterized by increasing arousal and positive valence. These findings affirm the role of emotion in the anticipation of incentives, and may provide an initial step towards a neural reconstruction of expected utility.     

Duplication, Growth and ‘Total Return Economics’

Maintenance consumption is an expense recovered in product prices, yet also a source of taste satisfaction which must be exhausted, rather than reinvested, from the capital affording it. This riddle is solved in the duplication rules: the cost of maintenance consumption is recovered in pay and prices, but an equal flow is exhausted from the human capital of the worker earning the pay. The rules impact tradition in several ways. If output is defined in principle as value added, then it cannot also be described as consumption plus net investment without double-counting the maintenance consumption recovered in prices. Also rate of return in the stationary state is not zero, but is the rate sufficient to offset the exhaustion of individual human capital. The rules lead to new insights into economic return, and support an argument that all growth at the scale of closure is due to productivity gain rather than to thrift.     

John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution

Although he was much influenced by David Ricardo when he wrote the classical part of his Principles , John Stuart Mill was not a Ricardian when he penned his theories of wealth and distribution. They are based on a triple foundation. First, a belief that economics is a moral discipline. Second a theory of custom-driven human behavior. Third, an empirically formed conviction that the institutions of state, education and business cooperate to structure the distribution of income. On the basis of these presuppositions, Mill formulated 1) an institutional theory of the formation of human and non-human wealth and 2) an even more institutional theory of distribution demonstrating how the aforementioned institutions malignantly skew the distribution of income to the advantage of the propertied classes and to the extreme disadvantage of the working class. As a social economist, Mill recommended institutional reforms designed to eradicate the poverty of the working class.     

Forecasting the price of gold

This article seeks to evaluate the appropriateness of a variety of existing forecasting techniques (17 methods) at providing accurate and statistically significant forecasts for gold price. We report the results from the nine most competitive techniques. Special consideration is given to the ability of these techniques to provide forecasts which outperforms the random walk (RW) as we noticed that certain multivariate models (which included prices of silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium, besides gold) were also unable to outperform the RW in this case. Interestingly, the results show that none of the forecasting techniques are able to outperform the RW at horizons of 1 and 9 steps ahead, and on average, the exponential smoothing model is seen providing the best forecasts in terms of the lowest root mean squared error over the 24-month forecasting horizons. Moreover, we find that the univariate models used in this article are able to outperform the Bayesian autoregression and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, with exponential smoothing reporting statistically significant results in comparison with the former models, and classical autoregressive and the vector autoregressive models in most cases.     

Simulating the Effect of Regulatory Systems in a Fishery, An Application to the French Driftnet Albacore Fleet

With a thin economic component, most bio-economic models of fisheries failto assess the effects of the regulation systems on firms. In order to analysethe short term consequences of different management schemes, a simulationmodel is applied to the French driftnet albacore fleet: licence allocation withdriftnet regulation, individual quotas, and individual transferable quotaswithout any input control. Vessel technology is estimated by using the datacollected, and groups of vessels are distinguished according to criteria ofperformance. We present the adjustment within firms and between groupsunder different scenarios (limited entry with and without driftnetregulation, individual quotas and individual transferable quotas allocation),and we compare their results in terms of quasi-rent value and otherindicators such as hake harvests or dolphin by-catches.     

Knowledge as a Path-Dependence Process

By following a new approach proposed by Cognitive and Neuroeconomics, this paper presents and extends that part of Hayek's theory concerning knowledge in path-dependent terms, and shows that this is a fertile theory, opening new lines of inquiry for contemporary economics. In his theory of knowledge Hayek shows that the dynamics of economic change is path-dependent, in a different and more profound way than in the rest of the path-dependent literature. This literature deals with an important controversy, which will be also discussed and its specific and original meaning will be highlighted. As it will emerge, knowledge as a path-dependent process is consistent with cognitive theories of perception and learning and it plays a more important role than is traditionally assumed. Path-dependence is in fact always present in the cognitive dimension of perception and in individual decision-making processes, as well as in the processes of organizational innovation, and even in the macro-dimension of institutional change. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.