The European Commission's approach to mergers involving software-based platforms: Towards a better understanding of platform power

The European Commission’s digital single market policies are increasingly concerned with the impact of so-called ‘platforms’ on competition in the internal market. Whereas the European Commission acknowledges the contributions of platform companies to innovation, it also sees actual and potential damages occurring from their powerful position. As such, the European Commission aims to strengthen the enforcement of its competition law rules in this area. The main research question is how the European Commission has been evaluating the competitive effects of platforms under merger control and whether its approach is adequate to address the manifold concerns related to platforms and competition. Based on a case study analysis, we conclude that the European Commission (1) recognises the platform circumstance, their essential intermediary role in the digital industry and the importance of maintaining fair competition; (2) its analysis has been slowly evolving becoming more granular; (3) platforms’ behaviour and not their size per se is most often the central concern; (4) the proposed Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act packages tackle platform concerns identified in the European Commission’s ex-ante analysis, signalling that its analysis seems to have inspired their creation.     

GDP manipulation,political incentives,and earnings management

Political decisions often affect macroeconomic activity, which triggers effects on corporate decisions. Using satellite night light data to proxy for economic activity, we show that manipulation of GDP figures is associated with earnings management by local companies, especially when local politicians face more promotion pressure. We show that local politicians seeking career advancement exchange favors with local companies and pressure them to inflate earnings to increase local GDP numbers. Our findings illustrate how the macro-level political agenda and GDP manipulation can affect micro-level corporate earnings management.     

绥芬河自贸片区贸易便利化实践研究

本文介绍了绥芬河自贸区开辟铁路互贸交易点、赋予农村农业合作社开展互市贸易经营权、拓展互贸商品进口准入国范围、创新俄籍自然人从事互贸业务规范化管理模式、培育互市贸易新业态新模式、金融外汇结算等制度创新的主要做法和实践效果,提出了贸易便利化要找准政策切入点、因时制宜、助力特色产业优化升级、加强内外联动、引领投资便利化、优化金融服务、注意防范风险等对策建议。     

Beating the market with a bad predictive model

It is a common misconception that in order to make consistent profits as a trader, one needs to possess some extra information leading to an asset value estimation that is more accurate than that reflected by the current market price. While the idea makes intuitive sense and is also well substantiated by the widely popular Kelly criterion, we prove that it is generally possible to make systematic profits with a completely inferior price-predicting model. The key idea is to alter the training objective of the predictive models to explicitly decorrelate them from the market. By doing so, we can exploit inconspicuous biases in the market maker’s pricing, and profit from the inherent advantage of the market taker. We introduce the problem setting throughout the diverse domains of stock trading and sports betting to provide insights into the common underlying properties of profitable predictive models, their connections to standard portfolio optimization strategies, and the commonly overlooked advantage of the market taker. Consequently, we prove the desirability of the decorrelation objective across common market distributions, translate the concept into a practical machine learning setting, and demonstrate its viability with real-world market data.     

Are Indian Subcontinent remittance markets connected to each other?

Indian subcontinent countries are some of the largest exporters of labor, and thus, largest receivers of remittances. Having many characteristics in common, their labor markets may be connected due to labor substitution and complementarity. We study the interactions of remittance inflows into India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka via the Diebold-Yilmaz method. We find a low degree of spillovers across countries. In other words, the dynamics of remittance inflows in each country are largely explained by internal factors, not due to spillovers from other countries. That indicates that international remittance inflows in countries in the Indian Subcontinent that we consider in this study are essentially independent. We also find that the dynamic connectedness tends to fall over time in the aftermath of the 2008–2010 financial crisis, which is reversed after 2014. The initial decline probably happened due to the recovery in the labor receiving economies whereas the increase after 2014 probably reflects the jitters felt in all economies. We conclude that spillover of four countries’ remittance inflows is time-varying.     

民族地区农产品批发市场竞争力评价研究

参与主体、设施与服务、商品、环境是影响民族地区农产品批发市场的竞争力因素.通过构建民族地区农产品批发市场竞争力评价指标体系,采用模糊综合评价方法,结合实证分析,提出培育壮大市场主体,加快农产品批发市场发展;完善农产品市场信息系统,加强民族地区商品市场一体化建设;发挥政府宏观调控职能,规范农产品市场建设与管理等提升民族地区农产品市场竞争力的措施.