How to improve government performance?

The article reviews Timothy Besley's book Principled Agents? The Political Economy of Good Government and considers application of the concepts and conclusions of the book to China.     

ON EMPLOYMENT CONTRACTS WITH ENDOGENOUS ON-THE-JOB SEARCH

We consider an equilibrium search model and employment contracts when workers have endogenous on-the-job search. When a firm tries to retain an employee by matching outside offers, variable search intensity leads to a moral hazard problem. We first consider workers with identical productivities. We derive an equilibrium where firms commit not to respond to outside offers and workers search less. Second, we investigate the case with heterogeneous workers and asymmetric information. Assuming that firms can commit to retain all workers irrespective of their ability, we establish conditions under which it is optimal to do so. This policy again reduces the incentive for active on-the-job search. We discuss an equilibrium where all firms use these so-called ‘pooling’ contracts.     

居民个人住房贷款风险分析及对策

我国的个人住房贷款风险源于借款人、贷款人、开发商及国家政策等四方面,因此,个人住房贷款应从加强政府监管、有效防范市场风险、建立住房预售风险分担机制着手,有效降低住房贷款风险,促进个人住房贷款市场的健康发展。     

The catering industry as a source of campylobacteriosis in Europe—A review

Thermotolerant species of Campylobacter are the causative agents of the human illness called campylobacteriosis. The number of confirmed cases of human campylobacteriosis in the European Union followed a significant increasing trend in the period 2008–2012, and continued to be the most commonly reported zoonosis with 214,779 confirmed cases in 2013; the notification of human campylobacteriosis is today mandatory in most European Member States. Recent reports from the European Food Safety Authority have identified catering (catering services, restaurants, hotels, pubs, bars) as the most frequently reported setting for Campylobacter infection (EFSA and ECDC, 2015). As can be evinced from the analysis of the scientific literature, the quality of raw meat has been identified as a parameter of fundamental importance, but the contribution of incorrect food handling procedures is by no means negligible. In fact, poor hygiene during poultry meat preparation as well as inadequate cooking and cross-contamination between raw meat and ready-to-eat food were found to be the main causes for the spread of campylobacteriosis related to the catering industry.     

房地产信托行业中道德风险的经济学研究

近年来,由于房地产和信托行业都进入了国家宏观调控的上升通道,房地产信托行业的投资者遭遇道德风险的形势变得更加严峻.本文从房地产信托的运作流程以及各相关参与主体各自不同的利益要求出发,站在投资者的立场,从经济学的各个角度对导致投资者在房地产信托中遭受巨大损失的道德风险进行了深入的研究;并简要地对治理房地产信托行业的道德风险提出了改进建议.     

失业保险,道德风险与激励机制研究

在简化的Lucas—Prescott（1974）的模型基础上，本文说明了失业保险中失业保险金对搜寻努力存在着负效用，并分别就无失业保险、完全失业保险、不完全失业保险、失业保险金过低等四种情况，分析了道德风险的产生机制以及克服道德风险的激励机制。针对失业保险中的道德风险问题，本文提出了相应的政策建议：失业期内单调下降的失业保险金支付方法，征收失业保险税或奖励再就业，对失业工人的搜寻努力进行监督和惩罚，执行劳动福利计划等。     

Human capital determinants of the survival of entrepreneurial service firms in Spain

The claim of this paper is that an entrepreneur’s human capital constitutes a key determinant of the survival time of new service industry companies created in Spain. To confirm this claim, a series of survival models has been specified and estimated for a sample of 237 Spanish service industry companies founded by one or more entrepreneurs between the years 2000 and 2004. We found that (1) both general and specific human capital have a positive impact on the survival time of a new firm and (2) human capital is accumulative, in the sense that the larger the number of entrepreneurs founding the company, the longer its survival time. We find that the specific aspects of human capital that are determinants of a company’s survival time are gender, previous work experience in the same activity or as the owner of a firm, and the number of partners. However, educational and training characteristics do not play a relevant role as regards a firm’s survival time. These facts suggest the presence of a gap between the objectives and results of current entrepreneurial-oriented training in Spain.     

Employee cost-sharing and the welfare effects of flexible spending accounts

Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) subsidize out-of-pocket health expenses not covered by employer-provided health insurance, making health care cheaper ex post, but also reducing the incentive to insure. We use a cross section of firm-level data to show that FSAs are indeed associated with reduced insurance coverage, and to evaluate the welfare consequences of this shift. Correcting for selection effects we find that FSAs are associated with insurance contracts that have coinsurance rates about 7 percentage points higher, relative to a sample average coinsurance rate of 17%. Meanwhile, coinsurance rates net of the subsidy are approximately unchanged, providing evidence that FSAs are only welfare neutral if we ignore distributional considerations and the deadweight loss of the taxes necessary to finance the subsidy. These results also suggest that FSAs may explain a significant fraction of the shift in health care costs to employees that has occurred in recent years.     

Pensions with endogenous and stochastic fertility

This paper studies the design of a pay-as-you-go social security system in an overlapping generations model where fertility is in part stochastic and in part determined through capital investment. If investments are publicly observable, pension benefits must be linked positively to the level of investment, and payroll taxes negatively to the number of children. The outcome is characterized by full insurance with all parents, regardless of their number of children, enjoying identical consumption levels. Without observability, benefits must increase, and payroll taxes decrease, with the number of children. The second-best level of investment, and the resulting average fertility rate, are less than their corresponding first-best levels.     

Log-concave probability and its applications

Summary. In many applications, assumptions about the log-concavity of a probability distribution allow just enough special structure to yield a workable theory. This paper catalogs a series of theorems relating log-concavity and/or log-convexity of probability density functions, distribution functions, reliability functions, and their integrals. We list a large number of commonly-used probability distributions and report the log-concavity or log-convexity of their density functions and their integrals. We also discuss a variety of applications of log-concavity that have appeared in the literature.Received: 31 December 2003, Revised: 22 March 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C40, D40, D80. Correspondence to: Ted BergstromWe thank Ken Binmore and Larry Samuelson for encouragement and suggestments.