The social costs of monopoly?

The essay recounts the contributions of earlier economists to the discussion of the social costs of monopoly. They largely duplicate more contemporary contributions.     

Trust, reputation and relationships in grazing rights markets: An experimental economic study

Trust is frequently a requirement for economic exchanges and the management of natural resources. Providing public information on past actions can promote trust through the formation of reputations. We developed an economic experiment to test whether a formal reputation mechanism could facilitate trusting relationships in the tradable grazing rights markets. Providing information to create formal public reputations for market participants did not increase the overall efficiency of the market. However, it did result in greater equality of income between partners, suggesting that participants showed more concern for their partners when they knew they would be rated. Even with public reputation information, bilateral relationships remained central to the market. Market failures in existing grazing rights markets may be better addressed by measures to increase communication between partners rather than simply relying on a formal reputation mechanism.     

东北三省新型农村养老保险制度推行中的难点分析

随着城镇化进程和农村老龄化速度的加快,农村传统的土地养老、家庭养老面临严峻挑战。新型农村养老保险制度对于转变农村养老方式、建设覆盖城乡居民的社会保障体系有着重要的现实意义。然而,作为一项规模宏大的社会系统工程,在其运行过程中,还存在一些亟待解决的问题或难点。本文选取农村人口比重较大的东北三省,意在分析"新农保"进展的基础上,总结目前东北3省在推行"新农保"过程中存在的难点,进而提出相应的对策建议。     

消费者在反垄断中的作用及政府角色的转换:基于中国房地产行业的研究

过去的反垄断研究主要集中于政府规制,消费者的作用被长期忽视。本文从中国房地产行业的实际情况出发,提出了新的反垄断理论,认为"消费者价格同盟"的存在和加强可以对垄断厂商起到很大的制约作用,而政府在这一过程中应当转换角色,从规制者转变为信息的提供者或监督者,以实现社会福利最大化或损失较小。     

社会流动视角下农民工返乡创业路径研究

鼓励农民工返乡创业是解决"三农"问题和农村剩余劳动力转移等社会经济问题,贯彻落实科学发展观的重要举措。本文以社会流动理论为基础,揭示了返乡农民工创业的上升式社会流动本质,进而对其外生创业路径,即改造传统农业、支持城镇建设和承接产业转移,以及内生创业路径,即人力资本投资和社会资本投资进行了深入分析。     

A functional approach for studying technological progress: Extension to energy technology

This paper extends a broad functional category approach for the study of technological capability progress recently developed and applied to information technology to a second key case—that of energy based technologies. The approach is applied to the same three functional operations—storage, transportation and transformation—that were used for information technology by first building a 100 plus year database for each of the three energy-based functional categories. In agreement with the results for information technology in the first paper, the energy technology results indicate that the functional approach offers a stable methodology for assessing longer time technological progress trends. Moreover, similar to what was found with information technology in the first study, the functional capability for energy technology shows continual—if not continuous—improvement that is best quantitatively described as exponential with respect to time. The absence of capability discontinuities—even with large technology displacement—and the lack of clear saturation effects are found with energy as it was with information. However, some key differences between energy and information technology are seen and these include:

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Lower rates of progress for energy technology over the entire period: 19-37% annually for Information Technology and 3-13% for Energy Technology.

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Substantial variability of progress rates is found within given functional categories for energy compared to relatively small variation within any one category for information technology. The strongest variation is found among capability progress among different energy types.

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More challenging data recovery and metric definition for energy as compared to information technology.

These findings are interpreted in terms of fundamental differences between energy and information including the losses and efficiency constraints on energy. We apply Whitney's insight that these fundamental differences lead to naturally modular information technology artifacts. The higher progress rates of information-based as opposed to energy-based technologies follows since decomposable systems can progress more rapidly due to the greater ease of independent as opposed to simultaneous development. In addition, the broad implications of our findings to studies of the relationships between technical and social change are briefly discussed.     

Knowledge management in technology-focused firms in emerging economies: Caveats on capabilities,networks, and real options

In mature economies, technology-focused industries and the management of knowledge are widely viewed as critical to success. Increasingly, in emerging economies technology-focused industries and the management of knowledge are also viewed as important. To date, however, little is known about such activities in emerging economies. Particularly, it is not understood how knowledge management can impact efforts for corporate renewal in such environments. The literatures of the resource-based view of the firm, social capital/network theory, and real options theory are vital to providing insights for technology-focused industries and the management of knowledge in mature economies. In this paper we focus on the caveats when applying such theoretical foundations to emerging economies. To illustrate these issues we will draw on the largest emergent economy in the world, China.

The valuation consequences of voluntary accounting changes

Firm management typically claims that voluntary accounting method changes (VACs) are made to enhance the informativeness of earnings by better matching accounting practices with economic reality. In contrast, skeptics argue that managers adopt new accounting procedures to opportunistically manage earnings and influence their firm’s stock price. In this paper, we investigate these alternative motives for VACs. Specifically, we investigate whether VACs cause equity prices to deviate from their fundamental values in the short-term by studying the long-run stock-price performance for a sample of firms that voluntarily change accounting methods. In addition, we investigate changes in earnings informativeness by examining the behavior of earning response coefficients and the relationship between earnings and future cash flows in years surrounding the VAC event. In contrast to prior research, we find little evidence that a strategy based solely on the earnings effect of a VAC can generate abnormal returns. While we find weak evidence of post-VAC abnormal returns for extreme VACs, this result appears to be driven by the accruals anomaly documented in Sloan [Sloan, R. G. (1996). The Accounting Review, 71, 289–315]. Our evidence further suggests that earnings informativeness is not significantly altered by voluntary changes in accounting methods. Taken together, our evidence suggests the market recognizes the financial statement effects of alternative acceptable accounting methods and efficiently processes the valuation implications of VACs.

Premium setting and bank behavior in a voluntary deposit insurance scheme

This study analyzes the effect of premium rates on banks’ incentives to join a deposit insurance scheme and their incentives to invest in risky projects under a voluntary deposit insurance scheme. We find that in order to maximize social welfare, the insurance agency must either set the premium rate to be low so as to attract all banks to join the insurance scheme, or not to have the deposit insurance at all. However, the low premium rate in the voluntary scheme does not balance the budget of the deposit insurance. We also show that in the compulsory deposit insurance scheme, however, it is possible to impose an optimal premium rate that can balance the insurance agency’s budget and achieve the highest social welfare. The results also present the dominance of the compulsory scheme over the voluntary scheme in terms of maximizing social welfare and balancing the budget.