Sustainability and the reconstruction of academic finance

It is now widely acknowledged that tackling the ongoing global economic, social and ecological crisis will require to redefine simultaneously the existing criteria for the allocation of capital, the modalities of corporate governance, and the mission of organizations. The present special issue hence attempts to discuss new practices, remove existing epistemological obstacles to a paradigmatic diversification in finance, and carve out innovative paths for financial research.     

2008全球金融市场状况及预期

金融创新在全球经济一体化的背景下把全球金融联系在了一起是美国金融危机升级为全球金融危机的重要原因,这次金融危机给各国经济和金融市场造成了巨大损失,其负面影响在短时间内不会消除,并会不断向实体经济蔓延.由于当今全球经济一体化,中国不会成为金融危机中的安全岛,一系列的经济发展问题将会受到影响.     

Kalecki on money and finance

It is argued that Kalecki had a greater appreciation of the role of the monetary sector than has been generally recognized, and that Kalecki presented ideas which can be seen as now embedded in the structuralist post Keynesian analysis of endogenous money and in the circuitist approach. Six key features of Kalecki's monetary analysis are identified. The paper outlines Kalecki's dismissal of the ‘Pigou effect’ and the ‘Keynes effect’, and then discussion the relationship between the ‘principle of increasing risk’ and the nature of the supply of credit. It discusses interest determination in Kalecki's writings and the manner in which he distinguished different types of money.     

Firm productivity and agglomeration economies: evidence from Egyptian data

This paper attempts to shed the light on the nexus between firms’ productivity and economies of agglomeration in Egypt. Using a large dataset of firms in 342 firms’ four-digit activities in 27 regions (62,108 firms), we introduce three measures of agglomeration which are urbanization or firm diversification measured by the number of firms by governorate, localization and specialization measured by the average productivity by governorate and sector (generating externalities and knowledge spillovers) and finally competition measured by the number of firm operating in the same governorate and the same sector. We find strong evidence for the existence of agglomeration in Egypt after controlling for firm age, location, economic activity and legal status. In the Egyptian context, productivity spillovers gained from agglomeration measures outweighed the negative effects of competition implied by congestion. The latter is chiefly due to the lack of good infrastructure. When regressions are run by firm size, location and activity, our main findings show first that micro and small firms are more likely to benefit from localization and diversification compared to medium and large firms. Service firms benefit more from high level of diversification while manufacturing firms gain more benefits from knowledge spillovers and specialization in Egypt.     

Simple formulas for standard errors that cluster by both firm and time

When estimating finance panel regressions, it is common practice to adjust standard errors for correlation either across firms or across time. These procedures are valid only if the residuals are correlated either across time or across firms, but not across both. This paper shows that it is very easy to calculate standard errors that are robust to simultaneous correlation along two dimensions, such as firms and time. The covariance estimator is equal to the estimator that clusters by firm, plus the estimator that clusters by time, minus the usual heteroskedasticity-robust ordinary least squares (OLS) covariance matrix. Any statistical package with a clustering command can be used to easily calculate these standard errors.     

纳米TiO_2的表面处理方法及改性效果表征

分析了纳米 TiO_2 的团聚与分散机理 ,介绍了纳米 Ti O_2 的表面处理方法及表面处理效果的表征方法。     

我国区域金融结构转变与区域经济发展的实证分析

本文首先用格兰杰因果检验方法分析了我国区域金融结构转变与区域经济发展之间的关系,得出我国区域金融结构转变是被动的适应区域经济发展的结果,而不是导源于金融的自由化。然后针对分析结果提出优化我国区域金融结构的建议。     

赤道原则-国际金融公司政策的延伸

赤道原则是国际项目融资的环境与社会的最低行业标准。它的制订与执行由国际金融公司主导,它的核心内容基本上援引了国际金融公司的政策和指南,国际金融公司环境与社会政策的评审结果关乎着赤道原则的命运。国际金融公司也帮助赤道银行培训赤道原则专家,国际金融公司的政策与实践直接影响赤道原则的性质。它把自己定位为开发性金融规则的提倡者,是由于现实因素的推动,客观上提高了银行的公众形象,也提高了国际金融公司自身的形象。     

Sequential control of time series by functionals of kernal-weighted empirical processes under local alternatives

Motivated in part by applications in model selection in statistical genetics and sequential monitoring of financial data, we study an empirical process framework for a class of stopping rules which rely on kernel-weighted averages of past data. We are interested in the asymptotic distribution for time series data and an analysis of the joint influence of the smoothing policy and the alternative defining the deviation from the null model (in-control state). We employ a certain type of local alternative which provides meaningful insights. Our results hold true for short memory processes which satisfy a weak mixing condition. By relying on an empirical process framework we obtain both asymptotic laws for the classical fixed sample design and the sequential monitoring design. As a by-product we establish the asymptotic distribution of the Nadaraya-Watson kernel smoother when the regressors do not get dense as the sample size increases.Acknowledgements The author is grateful to two anonymous referees for their constructive comments, which improved the paper. One referee draws my attention to Lifshits paper. The financial support of the Collaborative Research Centre Reduction of Complexity in Multivariate Data Structures (SFB 475) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) is greatly acknowledged.     

State competition in higher education: A race to the top,or a race to the bottom?

How does competition affect higher education? This paper explores this question for public and private universities. Theory indicates that competition can push higher education policy in one of two different directions. On the one hand, competition may increase spending. For states, this would occur if states treat higher education as developmental; for private universities this would occur if they view spending as a means to attract students and prestige. On the other hand, competition may decrease spending if states treat higher education spending as redistributive, and competition may decrease spending by private schools if lower spending enhances their ability to attract students with low tuition. To determine which of these perspectives is most valid, we examine higher education policy choices in the 1980s and 1990s. We find that states appear to act as if higher education funding is redistributive while private schools appear to compete more on the basis of tuition than spending. These results demonstrate the important effects competition and governance structure have on higher education.Received: August 2001, Accepted: May 2002, JEL Classification: I2, I22, H72, I3