Taxing tourism and subsidizing non-tourism: A welfare-enhancing solution to “Dutch disease”?

Using a combined analysis of a general equilibrium and a partial equilibrium, this study models the impacts of a combined policy tool based on taxing tourism and subsidizing non-tourism in a tourism-dependent destination. The results suggest that such a policy tool, while widely discussed in economics literature, may not be suitable for a tourism destination, as it might have adverse effects on local welfare.     

超额需求不连续时一般均衡分析的新路径

传统的证明一般均衡存在性的方法都必须以连续的超额需求函数为条件。本文提供一种新方法突破这一局限。一般均衡分析中的个人择优问题是一个非线性规划问题,本文用动态规划方法来处理这一非线性规划问题,从而就克服了不连续超额需求函数带来的困难。运用这一新方法,本文证明了超额需求函数不连续时的存在性。     

论保险职业教育中的特色英语教学

本文主要研究保险职业教育中的特色英语教学,突出两点:一是保险专业知识;二是保险职业英语技能。通过这两点的融合,从理论和实务两个方面,加强保险职业教育中特色英语教学。     

Optimal speculative trade among large traders

A collection of large traders holds heterogeneous prior beliefs regarding market fundamentals. This gives them a motive to engage in speculative trade with respect to market prices. Rather than assuming a particular institution or market for speculative trade, we take a mechanism-design approach by attempting to characterize the mechanism that maximizes the traders’ gains from speculative trade, subject to the incentive constraints that result from the traders’ ability to manipulate market prices. Within a stylized market model, we show that this mechanism affects price volatility without destroying ex-post efficient allocations. We also characterize the implementability of optimal speculative trade when the traders’ prior beliefs are private information. Financial support from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Grant No. 2002298 is gratefully acknowledged.     

A mixed blessing of lifespan heterogeneity

Human mortality data reveal that life expectancy in industrialized countries has been converging to a common value. Yet, significant variations in the distributions of adult life-table ages at death among some developed countries have also been observed. This paper, largely motivated by Japan’s mortality data, presents a general equilibrium, overlapping-generations model that assesses the welfare effects of the mean-preserving declines in the variance of the distribution of adult ages at death. Our quantitative exercise reveals that for a given value of the economy-wide life expectancy, the individual welfare effects due to switching from high to low-variance steady states are length of life-dependent, quite sensitive to the average economy-wide retirement age, and strongly influenced by associated changes in the labor supply, factor prices, and lifetime earnings.     

证券市场专业服务机构虚假信息民事责任的请求权基础

对于证券市场专业服务机构的虚假信息民事责任，《证券法》、《民法通则》、《合同法》以及司法解释都有相应规定，形成了对同一法律关系的特别法和普通法民事责任体系。应当优先适用特别法即《证券法》的有关规定，而当投资人无法依据《证券法》等特别法请求证券市场专业服务机构承担虚假信息民事责任时，就可以考虑适用作为一般法的《民法通则》等民事法律的有关规定来寻找合适的请求权法律基础，请求披露证券市场虚假信息的行为人承担民事赔偿责任。     

University - profession partnership in accounting education: the case of Sri Lanka

This paper analyses accounting education in Sri Lanka with particular reference to the university-profession partnership. In terms of the establishment of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Sri Lanka (ICASL) in 1959, the availability of accounting degree programmes in the university, and the on-going British influence in accounting, one might expect to find a vigorous accountancy profession in place, actively seeking to produce highly competent accounting professionals in adequate numbers suitable for its country's economic needs. However, such a situation would be misplaced. Over the past four decades ICASL has produced only 1800 qualified accountants in a country of 18 million population. Drawing upon a theoretical framework of professional accounting education, this paper explains the lack of a proper partnership between the university and the professional body over the last four decades in Sri Lanka, and speculates as to whether ICASL purposely exerts control over the supply of accountants by limiting the membership only to those who complete its own examinations.     

Asset prices in an exchange economy when agents have heterogeneous homothetic recursive preferences and no risk free bond is available

We study a pure exchange economy under incomplete markets where households have heterogeneous homothetic recursive preferences and lending and borrowing are precluded. We fully characterize the properties of the efficient allocations and the equilibrium asset price. The ownership distribution dynamics reveal the emergence of a dominant agent, who after some finite time, remains the only investor that increases asset holdings until asymptotically owning the entire wealth. Investors can be ranked according to a unique parameter that aggregates agents’ preference characteristics and we show how time discount rate, attitude towards risk and intertemporal substitution contribute to capital accumulation.     

Corruption and wage inequality?

Does corruption aggravate wage-inequality? We try to answer this question in terms of a general equilibrium model where both skilled and unskilled workers participate in corruption. Corruption in our model diverts resources from the productive sectors. Factor intensities within the productive sectors and between production and corruption activities determine the wage impact of corruption. Lower degree of corruption may increase wage-inequality although the size of the corruption sector definitely contracts.     

Comparing supply‐side specifications in models of global agriculture and the food system

This article compares the theoretical and functional specification of production in partial equilibrium (PE) and computable general equilibrium (CGE) models of the global agricultural and food system included in the AgMIP model comparison study. The two model families differ in their scope—partial versus economy‐wide—and in how they represent technology and the behavior of supply and demand in markets. The CGE models are “deep” structural models in that they explicitly solve the maximization problem of consumers and producers, assuming utility maximization and profit maximization with production/cost functions that include all factor inputs. The PE models divide into two groups on the supply side: (1) “shallow” structural models, which essentially specify area/yield supply functions with no explicit maximization behavior, and (2) “deep” structural models that provide a detailed activity‐analysis specification of technology and explicit optimizing behavior by producers. While the models vary in their specifications of technology, both within and between the PE and CGE families, we consider two stylized theoretical models to compare the behavior of crop yields and supply functions in CGE models with their behavior in shallow structural PE models. We find that the theoretical responsiveness of supply to changes in prices can be similar, depending on parameter choices that define the behavior of implicit supply functions over the domain of applicability defined by the common scenarios used in the AgMIP comparisons. In practice, however, the applied models are more complex and differ in their empirical sensitivity to variations in specification—comparability of results given parameter choices is an empirical question. To illustrate the issues, sensitivity analysis is done with one global CGE model, MAGNET, to indicate how the results vary with different specification of technical change, and how they compare with the results from PE models.