中小企业对申请贷款望而却步的原因分析

笔者利用世界银行投资环境调查的数据,实证分析了中小企业有信贷需求但对申请贷款望而却步的原因。实证结果表明:规模更大、盈利性更好、成长更快的企业不太可能出现对申请贷款望而却步的情况;银企关系是影响中小企业对申请贷款望而却步的重要因素;金融生态(法治环境和诚信文化等)对于银企关系效应的发挥具有显著的促进作用。     

“主体-技术”协同视角下的战略性新兴产业创新网络分类研究——以新能源汽车产业为例

本文以“主体-技术”协同视角来分析战略性新兴产业创新网络形成的内在机理和分类模式。在结合2-模网络理论基础上，从核心技术和创新主体两个维度出发，将战略性新兴产业创新网络分为单核心实验室型、单核心产业链型、单核心辅助型、单核心复合型、多核心实验室型、多核心产业链型、多核心辅助型和多核心复合型。同时，以中国新能源汽车产业为例，通过实证分析发现：除了单核心辅助型和多核心辅助型之外，其它6种模式均存在，并进一步对其创新网络的分类模式及相关特征进行了全面分析。     

Can negative interest rates really affect option pricing? Empirical evidence from an explicitly solvable stochastic volatility model

The profound financial crisis generated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011 have caused negative values of government bond yields both in the USA and in the EURO area. This paper investigates whether the use of models which allow for negative interest rates can improve option pricing and implied volatility forecasting. This is done with special attention to foreign exchange and index options. To this end, we carried out an empirical analysis on the prices of call and put options on the US S&P 500 index and Eurodollar futures using a generalization of the Heston model in the stochastic interest rate framework. Specifically, the dynamics of the option’s underlying asset is described by two factors: a stochastic variance and a stochastic interest rate. The volatility is not allowed to be negative, but the interest rate is. Explicit formulas for the transition probability density function and moments are derived. These formulas are used to estimate the model parameters efficiently. Three empirical analyses are illustrated. The first two show that the use of models which allow for negative interest rates can efficiently reproduce implied volatility and forecast option prices (i.e. S&P index and foreign exchange options). The last studies how the US three-month government bond yield affects the US S&P 500 index.     

Measuring Farm and Market Level Economic Impacts of Improved Maize Production Technologies in Ethiopia: Evidence from Panel Data

While it is often recognised that agricultural technology adoption decisions are intertwined and best characterised by multivariate models, typical approaches to examining adoption and impacts of agricultural technology have focused on single technology adoption choice and ignored interdependence among technologies. We examine farm‐ and market‐level impacts of multiple technology adoption choices using comprehensive household survey data collected in 2010/11 and 2012/13 in Ethiopia. Economic surplus analysis combined with panel data switching endogenous regression models are used to compute the supply shift parameter (K‐shift parameter), while at the same time controlling for the endogeneity inherent in agricultural technology adoption among farmers. We find that our improved technology set choices have significant impacts on farm‐level maize yield and maize production costs, where the greatest effect appears to be generated when various technologies are combined. The change in maize yield and production costs results in an average 26.4% cost reduction per kilogram of maize output (the K‐shift parameter). This increases the producer and consumer surpluses by US$ 140 and US$ 105 million per annum, respectively. These changes in economic surplus help to reduce the number of poor people by an estimated 788 thousand per year. We conclude that deliberate extension efforts and other policies that encourage integration of technologies are important for maize technologies to yield their full potential at both farm and market levels.     

Persistence and cyclical dependence in the monthly euribor rate

This paper analyses two well-known features of interest rates, namely their time dependence and their cyclical structure. Specifically, it focuses on the Euribor rate, using monthly data from January 1994 to May 2011. Two models are considered, one with fractional integration at the long run or zero frequency, and the other replacing the zero frequency with a cyclical one. The results indicate that the latter outperforms the former as well as other standard specifications. Future directions for research (such as nonlinearities, volatility behaviour, and multivariate models) are also discussed.     

Well-being effects of self-employment: A spatial inquiry

Our paper presents an empirical analysis of entrepreneurial well-being using a large-scale longitudinal household survey from the UK that tracks almost 50,000 individuals across seven waves over the period 2009–2017, as well as a number of exploratory case studies. We contribute to the existing literature by investigating how entrepreneurial well-being varies across locations along the urban-rural continuum, and across wealthy-deprived neighbourhoods. We use a Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) approach to compare the well-being outcomes of individuals who switch into self-employment from waged employment, and show that entrepreneurial well-being, in the form of job satisfaction, is significantly higher for those living in semi-urban locations, relative to those living in urban and rural locations. We argue that semi-urban locations provide an optimal combination of ease of doing business and quality of life. Our results also show that individuals in wealthy neighbourhoods who switch into self-employment experience higher job satisfaction than otherwise comparable individuals living in materially deprived neighbourhoods, although the latter experience greater levels of life satisfaction following the switch.