The 2020 Pandemic: Economic repercussions and policy responses

This paper analyses the economic and financial repercussions of the 2020 COVID‐19 pandemic. It argues that the pandemic has inflicted serious injuries to the labor force but has not damaged the physical capital stock. Therefore, the resolution policies of this crisis ought to be carefully tailored to supporting structural adjustments to the labor market. The analysis asserts that the impact of the pandemic crisis is exacerbated by the identification gap between the unobserved and the officially reported cases of COVID‐19. The gap increases financial risks, including market‐, credit‐, default‐, and foreign exchange risks.     

利用取土场废置高边坡进行景观提升改造的技术应用

对一县城道路入口处的废置取土场37m高边坡进行治理,并根据取土场现状地貌设计假山、人工瀑布、绿化设计等进行景观提升改造,通过优化绿地空间格局,完善公园的游览系统、服务设施、植物群落等方面,有效改善入城口区域城市风貌,同时也为周边的社区居民提供日常休闲、娱乐、游览和康体活动的公共空间,并充分发挥其作为南部新城区域中心森林氧吧的生态作用,形成稳定的、可持续发展的城市绿色生态系统。     

A field experiment to estimate the effects of anchoring and framing on residents’ willingness to purchase water runoff management technologies

Watersheds throughout the world have been severely polluted by nutrient-laden runoff that comes from industrial, agricultural, and residential sources. Efforts to reduce this runoff have focused on industrial and agricultural sources, while little attention has been paid to encouraging residents to reduce runoff from their properties. To study residents’ willingness to adopt landscaping practices that reduce runoff, we conducted a field experiment in the Delaware River watershed. In the experiment, over three hundred adults participated in a series of random-price auctions that revealed their willingness to pay (WTP) for five products that reduce nutrient runoff. To study how WTP can be influenced by attributes of the choice architecture, we randomized the starting bid values (anchors) and the way in which the external benefits of the five practices were framed. Compared to a neutral framing, a positive framing (using the product can improve water quality) increased average WTP by about one-third, while the estimated effect of a negative framing (failing to use the product can worsen water quality) was also positive, but smaller and not statistically different from zero. The estimated effect on average WTP from the anchor depends on how bids of $0 are modeled, but the results imply that higher anchors lead to higher WTP. Although we believe the magnitudes of our results should be considered suggestive and we recommend replications with higher statistical power, the results add to the evidence base that environmental programs can achieve policy-relevant gains in program performance through a series of small changes to the decision environment.     

浅谈新形势下如何稳定青年员工队伍

青年员工是保证企业可持续发展的生力军,构建稳定的青年员工队伍关系到企业的长远发展。随着社会经济的不断发展,青年员工的诉求日趋多元化。如何立足于新形势构建稳定的青年员工队伍是企业经营管理的重要内容。论文以新形势下青年员工队伍建设面临的机遇与挑战作为切入点,阐述影响青年员工稳定性的因素,最后提出稳定青年员工的具体对策,以期提升企业后备军的质量。     

区块链技术对企业战略联盟稳定性的影响

目前我国企业战略联盟凝聚力较差，战略联盟中的企业互不信任。探讨区块链技术在企业战略联盟中的潜力。首先概述了区块链的概念和特征，再将其概念化为一种颠覆性的创新形式。然后对文献进行结构性审阅，确定学者和专家讨论的关键主题和题目。在呈现数据分析结果之前，描述了以区块链技术为基础的战略合作的战略联盟模型，将为研究和开发区块链知识提供了有效建议。     

Intergenerational Earnings Inequality: New Evidence From Italy

Using an innovative dataset built by merging survey and administrative data, we provide new estimates of intergenerational earnings’ inequality between fathers and sons in Italy, extending previous evidence in several directions. We rely on the TSTSLS method to predict fathers’ earnings and compute intergenerational elasticities and imputed rank–rank slopes, trying to reduce estimation biases. Confirming previous evidence, we find that Italy is characterized by a high intergenerational inequality in cross-country comparison. Extending previous analyses, we show that the intergenerational association increases when sons at older ages and multi-annual averages of pseudo-fathers’ and sons’ earnings are considered. We also find that the intergenerational persistence differs across geographical macro-areas and is high also for daughters, especially when family earnings are considered. Furthermore, estimates where possible mediating factors of the parental influence are included among the covariates show that a high intergenerational association persists when sons’ education and occupation are controlled for.     

Do mutual fund flows affect the French corporate bond market?

We study whether investors’ withdrawals from mutual funds affect corporate bond prices. As mutual funds have become major players in the financial markets, they are likely to exert downward pressures on asset prices when facing investors’ redemptions, particularly in the less liquid markets such as corporate bonds. We use a novel dataset on the French bond funds and show that both flows in and out of mutual funds lead to a significant effect on the corporate bond yields. This effect is asymmetric as redemptions provoke a change in yields of greater magnitude than inflows. Moreover, all corporate bonds are not equally affected by investors’ withdrawals from funds: The more a bond is detained by funds, the higher the impact of redemptions on its yield. These three results are robust to various changes in econometric specifications.     

Fire sales by euro area banks and funds: What is their asset price impact?

The assets under management of investment funds have soared in recent years, triggering a debate on their possible implications for financial stability. We contribute to this debate assessing the asset price impact of fire sales in a novel partial equilibrium model of euro area funds and banks calibrated over the period between 2008 and 2017. An initial shock to yields causes funds to sell assets to address investor redemptions, while both banks and funds sell assets to keep their leverage constant. These fire sales generate second-round price effects. We find that the potential losses due to the price impact of fire sales have decreased over time for the system. The contribution of funds to this impact is lower than that of banks. However, funds’ relative contribution has risen due to their increased assets under management and banks’ lower leverage and rebalancing towards loans. Should this trend continue, funds will become an increasingly important source of systemic risk.     

Bank ownership type and temporal evolution of long‐term bank funding in the period 2005–2017

This study uses a large panel dataset of Western European banks to examine the determinants of bank funding stability. Banks are divided into three categories by bank ownership type; the ownership types in this study are commercial banks, cooperative banks and savings banks. Three sources of stable bank funding are investigated: customer deposits, equity, and long‐term liabilities. Furthermore, the sum of these funding components is used as a proxy variable for a bank's total available stable funding (ASF). A special focus is on the temporal evolution of these funding types. The regression results show that commercial banks’ funding became much more stable in the period 2005–2017. However, that funding remains, on average, less stable than does cooperative and savings banks’ funding. In addition, funding stability has remained at the pre‐crisis level in cooperative and savings banks, despite a steep dip in cooperative banks’ ASF during the sovereign debt crisis. Furthermore, banks substantially decreased financing from long‐term liabilities after the financial crisis, replacing it with customer deposits and equity.