设立国家级贫困县能提升当地农民收入水平吗——基于2007~2016年中国296个县面板数据的实证研究

中国自1986年实施贫困县制度以来，国家级贫困县的设立是否能够以及在多大程度上提升了当地农民实际收入水平，需要进行系统科学的实证检验。基于双重差分倾向得分匹配法（PSM-DID），利用2007~2016年全国6个省份296个县的面板数据进行实证研究发现，国家级贫困县的设立非但没能有效提升当地农民实际收入水平，反而对其有持续的负效应。进一步研究发现，贫困地区第二、三产业的发展能够有效提高当地农民实际收入水平，然而贫困县政策并未促进当地产业结构的优化；政府通过正向干预农产品价格能有效增加农民实际收入。从研究结论的政策含义讲，立足贫困户推进精准扶贫、通过招商引资带动有效投资，以及优化县域产业结构，对于提升贫困县的农民收入具有重要现实意义。     

Contagion between real estate and financial markets: A Bayesian quantile-on-quantile approach

We study contagion between Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and the equity market in the U.S. over four sub-samples covering January, 2003 to December, 2017, by using Bayesian nonparametric quantile-on-quantile (QQ) regressions with heteroskedasticity. We find that the spillovers from the REITs on to the equity market has varied over time and quantiles defining the states of these two markets across the four sub-samples, thus providing evidence of shift-contagion. Further, contagion from REITs upon the stock market went up during the global financial crisis particularly, and also over the period corresponding to the European sovereign debt crisis, relative to the pre-crisis period. Our main findings are robust to alternative model specifications of the benchmark Bayesian QQ model, especially when we control for omitted variable bias using the heteroskedastic error structure. Our results have important implications for various agents in the economy namely, academics, investors and policymakers.     

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。     

International Real Estate Investment and Urban Development: An Analysis of Korean Activities in Hanoi,Vietnam

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been recognised as a major influence upon urban development within emerging economies. As the focus of production shifted toward higher skills and advanced technologies, expatriate high-skilled employees of the Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) began to play a significant role in FDI projects and recipient cities begin to experience urban development associated with residential development and community services for the settlement of these expatriate staff. This research reports on the experience of Korean investment in real estate following earlier projects in manufacturing activity in the Hanoi Capital Region. Korean investors are currently the largest FDI source in Vietnam and Hanoi has been favoured by them. The purpose of this research is to examine that the urban impact of manufacturing FDI on a recipient city is magnified by its connections with Real estate FDI (RFDI) in a way that it spurs (1) intensified real estate development, (2) the creation of new urban cores, and (3) new commuting patterns. The clustering of Korea-specific residential development and service functions is a contribution to change in Hanoi. The Korean-built housing complexes have transplanted Korean-style housing design into gated communities and the residents continue their Korean life-styles with easy access to language-specific community facilities. This research sheds light on the coalescent nature of RFDI with overall FDI via flows of MNEs and expatriate staff that can generate direct and indirect spatial impacts at project, city and regional scales.     

Upzoning and value capture: How U.S. local governments use land use regulation power to create and capture value from real estate developments

The public sector can harness its authority to control land uses to secure valuable public benefits from real estate developments. This paper investigates how five major U.S. cities—Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle—are using their land use regulation powers to create and capture value for the public benefit. An analysis of the zoning and entitlement processes of the 20 largest real estate development projects in each city reveals that value has been captured from all 100 projects. Furthermore, these cities implicitly differentiated value capture into two distinct components: value creation and value capture. Among the 100 projects, cities created value for 90 projects by allowing greater density and height—a practice often referred to as “upzoning.” Distinguishing such upzoning incidences from traditional land use exaction tools is important because the added value gives local governments greater legitimacy in asking for public benefits. The experience of the five cities further revealed that value capture strategies can be customized to adapt to unique regulatory, political, and cultural contexts. Lastly, despite the fact that the majority of the upzoned projects increased density and height through project-specific negotiations, none of the cities had clear standards or evaluation frameworks for determining: how much value was created, what can be asked for in return, and who should benefit from the value captured. Cross-national scholarship on value capture can be leveraged to address these important questions.     

Relationships between absenteeism,conservation group membership,and land management among family forest owners

Absentee landowners, or those who do not live on their forestland, own approximately 117 million acres of private forestland in the U.S. Thus, their land management decisions and activities influence the flow of forest-based goods and services. We explore the question of whether absentee family forest owners are less active land managers than resident landowners and whether membership in conservation organizations is associated with higher levels of land management activity by absentee owners. To examine these questions, we administered a mail survey to randomly-selected family forest landowners in Indiana. While we found some support for the contention that absentee owners are less active forestland managers than resident owners, we also found they are not necessarily inactive landowners. We found absentee owners were less likely to have: inspected their forestland for invasive plants, pulled or cut invasive plants, used herbicides to kill invasive plants, reduced fire hazard, or grazed livestock than resident owners. Absentee owners were more likely to be enrolled in the Indiana Classified Forest and Wildlands Program, a preferential forest property tax program. Absentee owners who are members of a conservation organization were more likely than absentee non-member owners to have undertaken a variety of land management activities, including: undertaking wildlife habitat improvement projects, inspecting their forestland for invasive plants, pulling or cutting invasive plants, enrolling in the Indiana Classified Forest and Wildlands program, and obtaining a management plan.     

Environmental taxes,reforms and economic growth: an empirical analysis of panel data

This paper explores the relationship between environmentally related taxes and the economic growth rate. The analysis also investigates whether this relationship differs between countries that have implemented environmental tax reforms (ETRs) and those that have not. Using panel data from 31 OECD countries over the period 1994–2013, the paper finds that when we allow environmentally related tax revenues to interact with an initial level of real GDP per capita, the overall revenues of these taxes are negatively associated with the economic growth rate in the short and long term. Furthermore, we show that the higher the initial level of GDP per capita, the more environmentally related tax revenues can promote the economic growth rate. The analysis also reveals that the relationship between environmentally related tax revenues and economic growth varies between countries that have a mechanism to redistribute environmentally related tax revenues and those that do not.     

CORPORATE TAX AVOIDANCE: A LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH AGENDA

Tax avoidance can range from reduction of the corporate tax burden by legitimate use of tax rules to violation of tax laws. In this paper, we endeavor to synthesize the major findings of tax avoidance research from the accounting and finance literatures over the past ten years. We consider theoretical developments and the related empirical findings about the interconnected issues of measuring tax avoidance, and the possible causes and outcomes of corporate tax avoidance. We present some ideas for further research to examine underexplored topics regarding tax avoidance.     

Towards the Development of a Tax System Complexity Index

Reducing tax system complexity is a common goal amongst policymakers; yet there is no commonly agreed definition of complexity. This paper seeks to fill this gap, by proposing the construction of an index of tax system complexity, conceived as a summary indicator of the overall complexity of a tax system at a particular point in time. If adopted, such an index would not only enable assessment of the changing level of a country's tax system complexity over time, but may also facilitate comparisons of the relative complexity of different countries' tax systems in future.     

Hedging house price risk with futures contracts after the bubble burst

This paper extends the existing literature on managing house price risk. While previous work finds that a hedger would have reduced a large amount of variance in housing returns in Las Vegas, Nevada using Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) futures contracts, we show that neither static nor dynamic strategies would have maintained an effective hedge during the significant decline in housing prices. The inability to hedge house price risk using CME futures contracts ultimately calls into question the long-term viability of housing futures.