Price stability through price-level targeting or inflation targeting? A tale of two experiments

Price stability can be attained through price-level or inflation targeting. This paper compares the two monetary policy strategies from both a historical and a theoretical perspective. The Swedish experiment with price-level targeting in the 1930 occurred within a framework that lacked the accountability characteristic of New Zealand's current policy framework for inflation-targeting. Using a simple forward-looking rational expectations framework, we show that price-level targeting offers a better output-inflation variability tradeoff than inflation targeting in the forward-looking New Keynesian framework.     

韩国灾难管理体系研究——从“岁月”号事故看韩国灾难管理系统及政策

本篇文章探讨韩国灾难管理体系并分析体系内存在的问题,探索未来的灾难体系发展方向。并希望灾难频发的中国政府也能够借鉴韩国灾难管理体系,探索制定灾难政策的发展方向。     

Access regulation and the transition from copper to fiber networks in telecoms

In this paper we study the impact of different forms of access obligations on firms’ incentives to migrate from the legacy copper network to next generation broadband infrastructures. We analyze geographically differential access prices of copper (that depend on whether or not an alternative fiber network has been deployed in the area) and ex-ante access obligations for fiber networks. We discuss how these regulatory schemes fare in addressing the tension among different objectives, such as the promotion of static efficiency, fostering investments in new infrastructures, and avoiding unnecessary duplication of (fiber) networks.     

Mental Health Patterns and Consequences: Results from Survey Data in Five Developing Countries

The social and economic consequences of poor mental health inthe developing world are presumed to be significant, yet remainunderresearched. This study uses data from nationally representativesurveys in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Indonesia, and Mexico andfrom special surveys in India and Tonga to show similar patternsof association between mental health and socioeconomic characteristics.Individuals who are older, female, widowed, and report poorphysical health are more likely to report worse mental health.Individuals living with others with poor mental health are alsosignificantly more likely to report worse mental health themselves.In contrast, there is little observed relation between mentalhealth and consumption poverty or education, two common measuresof socioeconomic status. Indeed, the results here suggest insteadthat economic and multidimensional shocks, such as illness orcrisis, can have a greater impact on mental health than poverty.This may have important implications for social protection policy.Also significant, the associations between poor mental healthand lower labor force participation (especially for women) andmore frequent visits to health centers suggest that poor mentalhealth can have economic consequences for households and thehealth system. Mental health modules could usefully be addedto multipurpose household surveys in developing countries. Finally,measures of mental health appear distinct from general subjectivemeasures of welfare such as happiness.     

The determinants of FDI in Turkey: A Markov Regime-Switching approach

This paper considers movements of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in Turkey, and therefore, to understand the dynamics of FDI, runs several nonlinear FDI equations in which the basic determinants of FDI in Turkey are determined through Markov Regime-Switching Models (MSMs). The statistical properties of Markov Regime-Switching time series models are more desirable than those of conventional time series or panel regression models. Through these properties of MSMs, i) one can observe structural changes, if they exist, in FDI equations through time, ii) if, in fact, the true FDI regression equation follows a nonlinear relationship, MSMs fit data better than the linear models. This paper eventually follows maximum likelihood methodology of Markov Regime-Switching Model (MSM) to search for the possible structural changes in level and/or trends and possible changes in parameters of independent variables of FDI–MSM equations through the transition probabilities. In conclusion, this paper yields the outcome that Turkish FDI growth equation has significant structural changes in level and trend and that has significant coefficient shifts in explanatory variables. These explanatory variables are Turkish GDP Growth, Labor Cost, the Electricity Price Growth, the growth in average prices of High Sulphur Fuel Oil, Cooking Coal, Steam Coal and Natural Gas, Export Growth, Import Growth, Discount Rate and Country Risk Indexes for Turkey, US and EU, respectively, within the time interval from 1988 first quarter to 2010 second quarter.     

Drivers of CSR anchoring in transition economies: Evidence from Poland

We examine the drivers of corporate social responsibility anchoring in Poland, a country that has undergone a profound transition from a command economy to a free market system. We use a fine-grained theoretical framework to understand the influence of the interactions between regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive aspects of institutions with firm organizational factors on the diffusion of corporate social responsibility. We show that, in Poland, companies use their slack resources to adopt corporate social responsibility only when facing strong normative or regulative institutional pressures in their organizational fields. When such pressures are absent, companies prefer value-enhancing functions of their resources other than investing in corporate social responsibility. We propose a multilevel approach for studying drivers of corporate social responsibility and show how the importance of organizational-level drivers emerges clearly only if the interactions with institutional-level features are considered. The main policy implication of our study is that corporate social responsibility may establish in Poland, as well as in other Eastern Europe countries, provided that designed and formalized institutional processes reach relevant organizational fields. Furthermore, we find that, for business managers, employing financial slack for social responsibility projects may be perceived as institutionally legitimate or not depending on the type of institutional pressures prevailing in each organizational field.     

Strategic Human Resource Management as Ethical Stewardship

The research about strategic human resource management (SHRM) has suggested that human resource professionals (HRPs) have the opportunity to play a greater role in contributing to organizational success if they are effective in developing systems and policies aligned with the organization??s values, goals, and mission. We suggest that HRPs need to raise the standard of their performance and that the competitive demands of the modern economic environment create implicit ethical duties that HRPs owe to their organizations. We define ethical stewardship as a model of governance that honors obligations due to the many stakeholders and that maximizes long-term organizational wealth creation. We propose that if HRPs adopt an ethical stewardship framework and the qualities of transformative leaders, they will be more aware of their ethical duties to their organizations and more effective in helping their organizations to create increased wealth, achieve desired organizational outcomes, and establish work environments that are more satisfying to employees.     

Social-Centric Development of Multi-Agent Architectures

In the past few years, software applications have increased in complexity and in stakeholders' expectations principally due to new Internet-centric application areas, such as e-business, web services, ubiquitous computing, and peer-to-peer networks. Multi-agent systems (MAS) architectures have gained popularity for developing such software. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in software architecture during the past decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining frameworks for agent-based architectural design. Considering that MAS architecture is conceived as a society of software agents, this article overviews a social-driven design approach dedicated to build up agent-based systems. The approach is based on organizational structures and social patterns to define agent architectures notably in the context of e-business system design.     

The temporal behavior of scale economies within A banking firm

Examining the time path of the scale economies has not received much attention until recently. Moreover, the time path of scale economies for a given firm has not been studied in the banking literature at all. Examining scale economies, either from cross-sectional or panel data, based only on a single estimate ignores the dynamic behavior (both cost- and production-wise) of a banking firm as well as of the banking industry. We study the time-varying scale economies of commercial banking firms. We employ the Kalman-filter approach in estimating the translog cost function. The Kalman filter allows the parameters of the translog cost function and therefore the scale economies to be time dependent and varying. The estimation results indicate significant variation in inter- and within-firm scale economies over time for sample banks.     

Economic designs of single and double screening procedures

Summary Economic designs of single and double screening procedures for improving outgoing product quality based on two screening variables are presented for the case of one-sided specification limit. Two screening variables are observed simultaneously in single screening procedure and are observed sequentially in double screening procedure. It is assumed that the performance variable and the two screening variables are jointly normally distributed. Three quality cost functions — constant, linear, and quadratic — are considered. Cost models are constructed which involve screening inspection cost, and costs of accepted and rejected item. Methods of finding the optimal cutoff values are presented and a numerical example is given.