Effects of consumer cohorts and age on meat expenditures in the United States

Meat demand is likely influenced by the birth cohort and age of the individual. In this study, we examine the demand for beef, pork, poultry, and other meat in the United States using the 1984–2012 Consumer Expenditure Survey and the almost ideal demand system with the incorporation of age, period, and cohort (APC) effects. We find that the model with APC effects performs better than the models without APC effects. The results indicate that cohorts born in earlier time periods are expected to purchase significantly less poultry compared to cohorts born in later time periods, when they are measured at the same age. Over the life cycle, purchase of poultry is expected to increase with age while the opposite is true for red meat. We also find that the own-price elasticity for beef is highest among the products examined, while the own-price elasticity for other meat is lowest and the inclusion of APC effects increases the absolute value of the own-price elasticities for beef, pork, and poultry, but reduces the own-price elasticity for other meat. Our forecasts indicate that the aggregate poultry purchase will continue to increase until 2022, while the aggregate purchase of red meat will slightly increase until 2017, but will either decrease or stay at same level from year 2017 to 2022.     

房价上涨如何影响了工业产出

为探究房价上涨对工业生产的作用机制,首先基于理论视角对房价如何影响房地产投资、劳动力成本进而影响工业产出进行了论证,基于2003年~2017年全国时间序列数据,构建VAR模型实证检验了房价上涨对工业产出的影响机理。结果表明:房价上涨对工业产出具有"先促进,后抑制"的作用;房价上涨,一方面通过促进房地产投资增长抑制工业产出,另一方面通过提高工业企业劳动力成本抑制工业产出;短期内工业产出对房价的冲击响应较为灵敏且强烈,但长期来看房地产投资、劳动力成本的影响力会逐渐显现,且房地产投资最终成为了解释工业产出的主导因素。     

Rural school access and the agricultural transformation

Improving children's access to primary and secondary education is a strategic goal for many global development agencies and government policymakers. Nevertheless, there is relatively little research examining how changes in rural school supply affect future labor markets. We leverage variation in the timing and location of secondary school construction in Southern Mexico to identify the effects of school supply on labor outcomes. We find that school construction increases expected education for school-aged children by about 4 years and raises the share of years working in the nonagricultural sector between the ages of 18–22 by 29.8 percentage points. The magnitude of the effects on share of years doing nonagricultural work is smaller for individuals from homes where an indigenous language is spoken. Our findings indicate that rural school construction in less-developed countries can accelerate the transformation from agricultural to nonagricultural economies, but there may be heterogeneous effects across socioeconomic groups and ethnicities.     

人工智能技术变革对国际贸易的影响

人工智能技术的快速发展正催生第四次工业革命,可能引发全球价值链深度重构和世界经贸格局重大变革。世界主要经济强国将发展人工智能技术作为争夺新一轮产业竞争优势的重要战略抓手。本文基于全球价值链视角研究人工智能技术变革对国际贸易的影响,我们发现人工智能技术变革可能推动国际贸易规模扩大,提升服务贸易份额,并促进国际贸易交易模式平台化、小宗化,可为中小企业创造更多参与国际贸易的机会。然而,人工智能技术变革也可能通过降低企业劳动力需求从而对我国等发展中国家的出口拉动型增长模式造成严重的潜在威胁。为应对人工智能技术变革,我国应部署并强化对人工智能产业发展的政策支持,加快培育制造业国际竞争新优势,大力推动先进制造业与现代生产性服务业深度融合发展,全面促进"中国制造"攀升全球价值链中高端。     

亚当·斯密农业发展思想研究

经济学之父亚当·斯密的传世名著《国富论》包含了非常丰富的经济发展思想,在《国富论》中,亚当·斯密重点对制造业、商业等城市经济进行阐述的同时,对农村、农业的发展也提出了自己的见解。虽然这些见解零散地分布在《国富论》的各篇章中,且距今已有二百余年,但是这些看似零碎的见解却包含着博大精深的农业发展思想,对现今我国的农村、农业发展仍然有着很强的指导和借鉴意义。     

农村劳动力流动对脱贫的影响文献综述

关于农村劳动力流动与贫困之间的关系一直是社会各界广泛关注的焦点。本研究通过对相关文献的梳理，针对劳动力外出务工的减贫效应，从贫困缓解论、贫困加剧论以及不确定论三方面进行概述，重点分析劳动力流动对我国农村贫困的影响及机制。结果表明，农村劳动力外出务工通过提高农户非农收入和改善整个社会的资源配置效率在收入维度上对农村贫困具有一定减缓作用，但同时，受农村劳动力过量流失的影响，外出务工在农户生活照料及社会保障等多维贫困上并未表现出显著作用，甚至存在一定负面影响。因此，应把握好劳动力外出之度，促进劳动力就近就业，同时加强对农村留守人员的社会保障，以实现多维脱贫、乡村繁荣。     

Labor migration and the decoupling of the crop-livestock system in a rural mountainous area: Evidence from Chongqing,China

Massive out-migration of rural labor force brings both challenges and opportunities to crop-livestock integrated production system (crop-livestock system) in smallholder economy. Compared with previous researches that have paid major attention to the effect of labor migration on either crop production or livestock husbandry, this study considers the mediating role of crop production in predicting the effect of labor migration on livestock raising. Our econometric estimation based on a 2012 survey of 974 rural households in Chongqing, a mountainous region of China, showed the following. (1) The massive migration of rural labor force had led to significant increase in farmland abandonment and considerable changes in the pattern of livestock raising. (2) The livestock raising number per household began to differentiate, with the livestock system separating from the traditional crop-livestock system and becoming a specialized business. (3) In terms of the pathways through which rural labor migration exerts impact on livestock raising number, though the increased opportunity costs of rural labor greatly reduced farmers’ willingness to raise livestock, the decoupling of the crop-livestock system partly alleviated the declining trend in the livestock raising number because of the availability of household labor force freed from cropping via farmland abandonment. These findings have important policy implications for rural development and agricultural restructuring in mountainous areas of China, and provide references for other developing countries.     

General existence of competitive equilibrium in the growth model with an endogenous labor–leisure choice

We prove the existence of competitive equilibrium in the canonical optimal growth model with elastic labor supply under general conditions. In this model, strong conditions to rule out corner solutions are often not well justified. We show using a separation argument that there exist Lagrange multipliers that can be viewed as a system of competitive prices. Neither Inada conditions, nor strict concavity, nor homogeneity, nor differentiability are required for existence of a competitive equilibrium. Thus, we cover important specifications used in the macroeconomics literature for which existence of a competitive equilibrium is not well understood. We give examples to illustrate the violation of the conditions used in earlier existence results but where a competitive equilibrium can be shown to exist following the approach in this paper.     

Analyst coverage and lawsuit risk

In this study, we use a unique, hand-collected dataset of employee lawsuits and study the impact of analyst coverage on labour relations. We find that an increase in analyst coverage lowers the work-related litigations. In addition, we show that an increased number of analysts lowers the litigation cost, measured by settlement fees and attorney fees. Our results suggest analysts have an important impact on employee relations. Our research enriches the literature on employment practices and analyst coverage.