Direct intervention or indirect support? The effects of cooperative control measures on farmers’ implementation of quality and safety standards

In recent years, labor-intensive agricultural products from developing countries have exhibited inferior performance in international trade due to quality and safety incidents, among which pesticide residue is a major issue. Aiming to improve food quality and safety in the context of cooperatives, we introduced three categories of control measures: outcome control, process control and social control. Based on the Pre-Harvest Interval Standard (PHIS), we selected three indices, farmers’ implementation rate of PHIS, absolute distance to PHIS and relative distance to PHIS, to evaluate appropriateness of pesticides use, reduction of pesticide residue and safety improvements of agricultural products. By using random sampling survey data, we empirically analyzed the marginal effects of control measures and their combinations on food quality and safety standards. The empirical results show that implementing process control, namely, unified production standards or supply of unified agricultural inputs, can comprehensively improve farmers’ implementation rate of PHIS, absolute distance and relative distance to PHIS respectively by 34.9%, 3.2 days and 46.0% on average. While the effects of outcome control (safety inspection) and social control (bonus-penalty incentive or training) are restricted to other measures. Therefore, we suggest cooperatives should take farmers’ features, implementation conditions and the effects of control measures into consideration in order to make a sustainable management plan for improving food quality and safety and enhancing competitiveness in international markets.     

黑龙江森工林区接替产业发展评价

运用熵权灰色关联分析法对黑龙江省森工林区所辖4个林业管理局2012—2017年养殖业、绿色食品等5个接替产业综合发展水平进行评价,并运用耦合协调度模型测算接替产业的均衡水平。结果表明:不同林业管理局的5个接替产业均呈波动发展状态;伊春林业管理局的优势接替产业是养殖业、绿色食品、北药开发和工业,牡丹江林业管理局的优势接替产业是绿色食品,合江林业管理局的优势接替产业是服务业,松花江林业管理局没有显著的优势接替产业;接替产业的综合发展水平偏低导致其均衡水平不高,总体上由初步协调向中度协调发展。因此,各林业管理局应继续发展具有优势的接替产业,同时扶持相对薄弱的接替产业,并开发与引进新的接替产业。     

Life insurance decisions under recursive utility

In this paper, we generalize recursive utility to include lifetime uncertainty and utility from bequest. The generalization applies to discrete-time as well as continuous-time recursive utility, and it is an important step forward in the development of recursive utility. We formalize the problem of optimal consumption, investment, and life insurance choice under recursive utility, and we state a verification theorem with a generalized Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. Our generalization of recursive utility allows us to study optimal consumption, investment, and life insurance choice under separation of (market) risk aversion, elasticity of inter-temporal substitution, and elasticity of substitution between bequest and future utility. The separation gives rise to hump-shaped consumption patterns as observed in realized consumption.     

基于G1法的飞行签派员资质能力评估

为了强化飞行签派员的人员资质管理,提升签派员的运行控制能力,保证民航行业持续稳定安全,结合法规和国航西南分公司运行控制中心的考核制度,从知识、技能、从业经验、专业任职资格、业绩成果及工作态度等6个方面构建了飞行签派员能力评估体系,采用G1法确定指标权重并进行综合打分,以国航"7·10"误关组件导致座舱失压后继续飞行事件为例,对评估指标进行实例验证,为航空公司评估飞行签派员资质能力提供了一套实际可用的量化指标和系统化评估方法。     

Bayesian selection of technology assumptions for the transformation from supply-use to input–output tables

ABSTRACT

In the construction of input–output models from supply-use tables, technology assumptions disambiguate how an industry uses inputs in the production recipe of multiple outputs. This paper uses Bayes' theorem to select technology assumptions, taking into account empirical observations. The paper presents a formulation to explore hybrids between product and industry technology assumptions in product-by-product tables. We then present Markov chain Monte-Carlo techniques to implement the Bayesian method for selecting technology assumptions. We apply the method in a case study using Eurostat supply-use tables of 2004 and 2005, exhibiting a volume of secondary products of less than 13%, and 59 products and industries per country. The results show that the choice of technology is not important, given that there is no strong evidence in favour of any of them.     

Private benefits from control block trades in the Spanish stock exchange

A control block trade can be explained by the expectation of financial gains, shared by all shareholders, or by the expectation of private benefits, exclusive to the buyer and possibly at the expense of other shareholders’ rents. The market for corporate control contributes to social welfare when it improves the efficiency of the allocation of resources. When the objective of a block transaction is private benefits, social welfare may be negatively impacted as minority shareholders could withdraw from the market. Therefore the estimation of private benefits would allow the efficiency of the market for corporate control to be assessed. Specifically, the aim of this paper is to calculate private benefits in the Spanish market for partial control. Using a sample of partial control transactions over the period 1990–2016, we find that the median of private benefits is negative, therefore it appears that there is no inefficient use of resources in the Spanish partial control market as a whole, however private costs are detected. The variability of private benefits is explained in a significant way by variables related to the control structure of the target firm, such as the controlling position of the buyer after the transaction, the contestability of control and the cross-shareholdings between the buyer and large shareholders. Performance and the size of the firm are significant as well.     

Return of the inoperability

There has been unrest in the research community investigating the inoperability of an economic system under disaster situations. The inoperability input–output model (IIM), which is very popular in the risk management field, has become a center of argument, particularly from the input–output researchers, that IIM is a straightforward application of the standard Leontief input–output model. This paper revisits the concept of inoperability, rather than IIM, and proposes its new role in disaster impact analysis using a conventional tool, i.e. the RAS method, for illustrating how the inoperability of an economic system in the aftermath of disaster can be evaluated. The proposed framework is employed to examine the inoperability of industries resulting from the 1995 Kobe earthquake. The findings of the analysis reveal the usefulness of inoperability concept that can even incorporate resilience (gained operability) using the proposed framework of this paper.     

Time-varying inter-urban housing price spillovers in China: Causes and consequences

The spatial spillovers of housing prices across regions are well documented by a large body of previous studies. This paper tries to investigate the dynamic (time-varying) evolution of spatial interactions and their underlying driving factors intensively. Using a recently developed Generalized Autoregressive Score (GAS) model, this paper examines the time-varying spatial spillovers of housing prices in 70 major and median cities of China from 2006 to 2019. We find that the GAS model can well capture the impact of time-varying critical events of Chinese real estate market on the whole. However, different regions display heterogeneous variation patterns over time. Further investigation shows that inter-regional labor mobility and trades are two major channels, accounting for 1.25% and 2.58% of the monthly standard deviations of spatial spillover effects from one city to another, respectively. We also characterize and distinguish between three time-varying patterns of spatial spillovers within different regions of China. Our results shed lights on the understanding of spatial spillovers across regional real estate markets across different city network structures within China.     

Drivers of management control systems in tourism start-ups firms

This study examines the use of Management Control Systems (MCS) in travel and tourism start-ups. The study empirically examines 176 European tourism start-ups; data are collected via an online survey of start-up CEOs, and supplemented by financial statements of early-stage tourism firms. The results show that travel and tourism start-ups use formal systems for management control. We observe a relationship between the usage of these systems with specific internal and external environment characteristics. Finally, the results show that the historical financial performance of travel and tourism start-up firms affects MCS usage.     

Optimal investment with vintage capital: Equilibrium distributions

The paper concerns the study of equilibrium points, or steady states, of economic systems arising in modeling optimal investment with vintage capital, namely, systems where all key variables (capitals, investments, prices) are indexed not only by time but also by age. Capital accumulation is hence described as a partial differential equation (briefly, PDE), and equilibrium points are in fact equilibrium distributions in the variable of ages. A general method is developed to compute and study equilibrium points of a wide range of infinite dimensional, infinite horizon, optimal control problems. We apply the method to optimal investment with vintage capital, for a variety of data, deriving existence and uniqueness of equilibrium distribution, as well as analytic formulas for optimal controls and trajectories in the long run. The examples suggest that the same method can be applied to other economic problems displaying heterogeneity. This shows how effective the theoretical machinery of optimal control in infinite dimension is in computing explicitly equilibrium distributions. To this extent, the results of this work constitute a first crucial step towards a thorough understanding of the behavior of optimal paths in the long run.