经济条件、人口特征和风险偏好与城市家庭的旅游消费——基于国内24个城市的家庭调查

旅游者的旅游消费支出对旅游产业的发展至关重要。它是旅游者的经济条件、人口特征和行为特征等因素共同作用的结果。但国内现有的研究由于多采用宏观数据,缺少描述旅游者人口和行为特征的微观数据,对旅游消费支出的影响因素分析有失偏颇。文章采用2010年对中国24个城市的居民家庭进行调查收集到的旅游消费数据,综合考虑家庭的经济条件、人口特征和行为特征,以家庭为单位,采用广义线性模型定量研究了影响家庭旅游消费支出的影响因素。研究表明:除家庭资产和收入外,家庭对收入的预期显著影响家庭的旅游消费,这解释了旅游产业对宏观经济的变动比较敏感的原因。它折射的宏观经济意义是显而易见的:当经济不景气时,旅游业可能是率先遭受冲击的产业。反之,当经济向好发展时,旅游业也往往蒸蒸日上。以户主年龄作为代理变量,调查还发现城市家庭的旅游消费与家庭生命周期密切相关,当户主年龄在25~34岁时家庭旅游消费支出达到高峰。此外家庭的风险偏好也显著影响家庭的旅游消费支出。借鉴美国消费金融调查用分类变量测度风险厌恶的方法,文章发现风险厌恶程度越高的家庭越愿意将大部分收入用于储蓄,从而相应地减少旅游消费支出。由于家庭承受的风险多数无法对冲,因此提高风险厌恶程度较高的家庭的旅游消费,恐怕单靠旅游产业自身还无法解决,需要保险业等相关产业共同努力来创造一个较好的旅游产业发展环境。     

The power of design: How does design affect consumers’ online hotel booking?

Emphasizing experiential appeals to consumers through design is most notable in the emerging lifestyle hotel segment of the lodging industry. This study identifies which lodging design mechanisms evoke consumer responses and provides a novel understanding of the relationships among consumer perception of hotel product/service design and booking intention by incorporating consumer emotional arousal and quality expectations in a theoretical model. The findings of this study suggest that aesthetics and symbolism in hotel design shape booking intention through emotional arousal and quality expectation. The functional dimension of design affects booking intention only through quality expectation. The findings will be particularly meaningful to the lodging industry because online booking requires both emotional and cognitive responses on the part of consumers.     

Deconstructing credibility: The breaking of monetary policy rules in Brazil

Can political interference deconstruct credibility that was hardly-earned through successful stabilization policy? We analyze the recent switch in the conduct of monetary policy by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB). Brazil is the largest Emerging Market Economy to formally target inflation, having adopted the Inflation Targeting (IT) regime in 1999. In the early years of IT, the BCB engaged in constructing credibility with price setting agents and succeeded to anchor inflation expectations to its target even under adverse conditions such as exchange rate crises. We argue that this effort to maintain IT rules-based policy ended in 2011, as a new country president and BCB board came to power. We then discuss the consequences of this credibility loss. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) we provide strong empirical evidence of the BCB’s shift toward looser, discretionary policy after 2011; (ii) preliminary evidence suggests that this shift has affected agents’ inflation expectations generating social and economic costs.     

Redistribution effects of inflation

This note discusses Lee Ohanian׳s paper on “Monetary policy in the midst of big shocks”. In particular, it asks what would happen if assumptions are changed so inflation have redistribution effects. Evidence on nominal positions suggests that such effects can be quantitatively important.     

Forecast combinations under structural break uncertainty

This paper proposes two new weighting schemes that average forecasts based on different estimation windows in order to account for possible structural change. The first scheme weights the forecasts according to the values of reversed ordered CUSUM (ROC) test statistics, while the second weighting method simply assigns heavier weights to forecasts that use more recent information. Simulation results show that, when structural breaks are present, forecasts based on the first weighting scheme outperform those based on a procedure that simply uses ROC tests to choose and forecast from a single post-break estimation window. Combination forecasts based on our second weighting scheme outperform equally weighted combination forecasts. An empirical application based on a NAIRU Phillips curve model for the G7 countries illustrates these findings, and also shows that combination forecasts can outperform the random walk forecasting model.     

Money,random matching and endogenous growth: A quantitative analysis

In this study, we develop a search-and-matching monetary growth model to analyze the effects of inflation on economic growth and social welfare by introducing endogenous economic growth via capital externality into a two-sector search-and-matching model. We find that the channel through which inflation affects economic growth in the search-and-matching model is different from the traditional cash-in-advance model. To facilitate the calibration, we obtain an empirical estimate of the effects of inflation on economic growth using panel regressions. In the simulation analysis, we quantitatively evaluate the welfare effect of inflation in the search-and-matching endogenous growth model and compare it to a search-and-matching exogenous growth model. We find that the welfare effect of inflation is nonlinear in the endogenous growth model whereas it is linear in the exogenous growth model. Furthermore, we find that the welfare cost of inflation under endogenous growth is up to four times as large as the welfare cost of inflation under exogenous growth.     

A composite measure of performance–expectation and performance-only measures

Performance–expectation measures and performance-only measures of service quality have been widely used in the literature. However, either of the two measures is not sufficient to explain customers’ evaluation of service quality and satisfaction. Their assumptions are too restrictive to explain the evaluation processes. From an analytic perspective, this paper derives a composite measure integrating both measures for service quality. The previous measures are nested in the composite measure. Due to this feature, the composite measure is more flexible than the previous measures. It can account for conflicting theories and empirical findings supporting each of the two measures. Furthermore, the composite measure allows us to interpret the link between service quality and customer satisfaction more intuitively.     

The design and communication of systematic monetary policy strategies

The efficacy of central bank communications is inextricably linked to the characteristics of the monetary policy framework. Therefore, this paper presents a set of fundamental principles regarding the joint design of monetary policy strategy and communications. The practical implications of these principles are illustrated by considering a number of significant policy challenges faced by central banks in the advanced economies.     

营业厅的客户服务期望管理

本文旨在通过对营业厅这一服务界面中客户服务期望的探讨,提出营业厅客户服务期望管理的思路和实施手段,为服务型企业获得更高的客户服务质量评价提供镜鉴。     

How credible is inflation targeting in Asia? A quantile unit root perspective

This article examines the dynamic behavior of the inflation rate for eight Asian countries using a quantile unit root test. We advocate a three-way definition of inflation targeting based on perfect, imperfect and zero credibility and advance the analysis by incorporating a fully-fledged adoption of inflation targeting. In doing so, we offer new insights by showing that the credibility of inflation targeting and the alternative monetary policy frameworks in Asia are imperfect, except for Malaysia and South Korea under a fully-fledged adoption of inflation targeting. In contrast to past studies that focus on the mean-reversion in inflation rates, we also consider trend-reversion and find that Asian inflation targeting countries have been building up their monetary policy credibility more than the non- inflation targeting countries in terms of a faster rate of decline in inflation rate changes. Our results generally indicate the presence of mean reversion at the lower quantiles only. Where stationarity is present, we find evidence of a varied speed of adjustment process across the quantiles. Finally, we determine the threshold levels whereby inflation becomes stationary and demonstrate that Asian inflation rates generally display stationary behavior during periods of inflation declining or slowing down.