Accounting for growth in retail trade: an international productivity comparison

In this paper we argue that the standard approach for measuring output and productivity in the trade sector has become obsolete. The key problem is that changes in prices of goods purchased for resale are not accounted for. We outline a consistent accounting framework for measuring trade productivity and provide new estimates, taking into account purchase prices of goods sold in a double deflation procedure. We find strong productivity improvements in the UK and US compared to France, Germany and The Netherlands since the mid-1990s. This finding is robust for various productivity measurement models.

Technical Efficiency of Australian Wool Production: Point and Confidence Interval Estimates

A balanced panel of data is used to estimate technical efficiency, employing a fixed-effects stochastic frontier specification for wool producers in Australia. Both point estimates and confidence intervals for technical efficiency are reported. The confidence intervals are constructed using the multiple comparisons with the best (MCB) procedure of Horrace and Schmidt (1996, 2000). The confidence intervals make explicit the precision of the technical efficiency estimates and underscore the dangers of drawing inferences based solely on point estimates. Additionally, they allow identification of wool producers that are statistically efficient and those that are statistically inefficient. The data reveal at the 95% level that twenty-one of the twenty-six wool farms analyzed may be efficient.     

Another look at the identical tastes hypothesis on the analysis of cross-country alcohol data

A number of studies have appeared in the area of cross-country consumption comparisons, where a common system of demand equations is used to model the consumption patterns of all countries. Under this approach, tastes are taken to be the same internationally. Such an assumption of identical tastes was forcibly advocated by the dual Nobel laureates, Stigler and Becker, who argued that tastes neither change capriciously nor differ importantly between people. In this paper, we use the system-wide approach to demand analysis to analyse the alcohol consumption patterns of drinkers from 10 high-income industrialised countries and verify Stigler and Becker’s (Rev Econ Statist 59:113–118, 1977) hypothesis by testing whether pooling the data across countries is acceptable. We also present the implied demand elasticities for beer, wine and spirits for the 10 countries and discuss the use of these elasticities in policy-related applications.     

全球经济危机下黄金地位刍议

本文从黄金与纸质信用货币的关系入手,分析了黄金的财富避险功能,指出在经济危机中黄金的避险价值,并提出各经济主体应适当持有黄金,防范风险。     

我国企业内涵式与外延式发展的策略选择与优势比较

本文以2004～2006年由世界品牌实验室评选出的连续3年榜上有名的“中国500强最具价值品牌”的属于制造业的上市公司为样本,实证研究了内涵式与外延式成长模式对企业业绩和优势的影响,以及导致这些业绩和优势差异在不同方面的行为表现,以期为我国不同企业的成长模式选择及不同成长模式的实施提供决策参考。     

Experience curve models in the electricity supply industry

There has been much controversy over the use of the Experience Curve for forecasting purposes. The Experience Curve model has been criticised both on theoretical grounds and because of the practical problems of using it. An alternative model of experience effects due to Towill has certain attractions from the standpoint of theory. However, a rather deeper question is whether experience curve type models produce superior forecasts to those derived using extrapolative techniques.This paper examines these questions in the context of three time series taken from the electricity supply industry, viz: average thermal efficiency; works costs; and price of electricity. The two latter series require price deflation. Both the implied GDP consumption deflator, and a wholesale price index for fuel and electricity were used for this purpose. It is argued that because of the absence of substitutes and of the effects of competition, along with the high quality of data available on the electricity supply industry, these three series provide a favourable test of the experience curve approach to forecasting. The two experience curves performed on the whole markedly worse than the simpler extrapolative methods on the two financial series examined. For the average thermal efficiency series the Towill model and the Experience Curve model marginally outperformed the extrapolative methods.Overall, there was little support for using either the Experience Curve or Towill models. These are obviously more difficult to use than simple univariate models and do not provide significantly better forecasts. Moreover, the Towill model gave rise to considerable estimation and specification problems with the data used here.     

Firm Dynamics and Innovation in the Netherlands A comment on Baumol

There is a growing consensus that entrepreneurship in the Schumpeterian sense plays a significant role in generating sustained rates of productivity growth. Empirical evidence for the role is scarce, owing to the difficulty in finding appropriate measures for such entrepreneurship. This note shows new ways to integrate theory and evidence and reviews some recent empirical evidence on cross-country differences in innovative activity.     

Wage dispersion in Germany and the US: is there compression from below?

Wage compression from below is a common diagnosis for Germany compared to the U.S. We develop alternative hypotheses in order to identify the so-called accordion effect, i.e. reduced inter-quantile distances below the median especially for low skilled and other ill-paid groups. Our results are partly at odds with wide-spread beliefs. Using large micro data sources we find evidence of an accordion effect at the low end of the distribution for the U.S. The results for Germany, however, are contrary to what one would have expected in case of marked wage compression from below. For low-skilled workers of both genders and for female workers in general we find higher inter-quantile distances below rather than above the median. By contrast, there is strong evidence for the accordion effect if skilled male workers are considered.     

Doing R&D and/or Importing Technologies: The Critical Importance of Firm Size in Taiwan’s Manufacturing Industries

We analyze the relationship between firm size and innovation inputs in Taiwan. Two inputs are considered: R&D and technology imports. Building on an existing theoretical framework, we test this relationship by estimating bivariate Tobit models in twenty 2-digit industries, using a panel of 27,754 firms observed from 1992 to 1995. We find that, in all industries, R&D intensity and/or technology imports intensity depend strongly on firm size, following an “inverted-U” pattern. Moreover, we find that most industries are only “mildly Schumpeterian”. Finally, our results provide some empirical evidence for complementarity between R&D and technology imports in the innovation process.