Capital Flows to Latin America (2003–17): A Critical Survey from Prebisch’s Business Cycle Theory

ABSTRACT

The economic literature on capital flows to developing countries has shared two important commonalities since the 1990s. Published works (whether they focus on the external situation or stress the domestic determinants of capital flows) tend to assume a beneficial effect of capital inflows, which leads to an improvement of peripheral institutions, whose deficiencies are ostensibly the main cause of economic turmoil and/or failure in attracting capital flows, in continuity with New Institutional Economics. In doing so, mainstream economists deliberately overlook the asymmetric characteristics of the international monetary system and the persisting hegemony of dollar. Raul Prebisch’s pioneering work on business cycles in Latin America provide an alternative view, one capable of amending the existing mainstream literature. On the one hand, Prebisch stressed the destabilizing role of capital inflows on Latin American economies, particularly short-term speculative capital. On the other hand, Prebisch designed a set of counter cyclical monetary policies in order to contrast capital volatility, particularly during downturns. An analysis of stylized facts shows that, when correctly updated, Prebisch’s theory has remarkable explanatory potential when applied to Latin America’s current economic and financial situation.     

科技企业孵化器何以激活区域创新——风险投资与孵化基金的中介作用

完善创新生态系统、提升区域创新能力是我国科技企业孵化器建设的重要目标。基于2013-2018年中国（内地）30个省份面板数据，采用面板数据模型实证检验科技企业孵化器是否促进了区域创新能力提升，并基于中介效应模型探讨风险投资和孵化基金在其中的间接作用。结果发现：①科技企业孵化器建设显著提升了区域创新水平，但主要增加的是实用新型和外观设计专利申请授权数总量，对发明专利申请授权数并没有显著促进作用。上述结果在剔除直辖市样本、采用随机效应模型及空间计量模型的稳健性检验后依然成立；②通过中介效应模型检验发现，区域风险投资和孵化基金集聚效应是科技企业孵化器影响区域创新水平的主要机制；③科技企业孵化器对区域创新的影响在不同区域间差异较大，在东部地区的创新激励效应更加显著，而且政策工具强度对科技企业孵化器与区域创新水平的关系具有正向调节作用。     

社会网络视角下的创客资本研究

揭示创客资本的内涵与特征，有助于深层次挖掘创客与经济社会发展之间的关系。运用关键词共现、社会网络分析和扎根理论方法，对148篇文献、21位由创客与众创空间负责人等构成研究对象的访谈资料和网络文本资料展开分析。社会网络分析发现互联网、数字经济、分享经济等是创客发展的重要驱动力，创客可借助众创空间社会网络跳出时空局限，运用网络资源参与大众创新活动，并与社会网络形成价值共创关系，推动协同创新和平台生态系统构建；扎根理论分析结果表明，创意制造、开放协同、网络共生、边际非稀缺是创客资本的4个核心特征，并印证了社会网络分析结果。基于上述分析结果，进一步基于社会网络理论界定了创客资本的内涵，提出未来需要深度挖掘创客资本与网络场景之间的交互机制及其结果效应。     

Application of bootstrap re-sampling method in statistical measurement of sustainability

Sustainability is of essential interest for many organizations and is defined as the ability to maintain existing resources at a certain rate or level when encountered with barriers. Factors affecting sustainability are categorized as enablers (capacities) and barriers (challenges) that have positive and negative effects on sustainability, respectively. To evaluate the status of sustainability, organizations need a measurement method to account for all the aspects of the sustainability classified into social, economic, and environmental tiers. Previously many researchers have provided indexes and measure specific to the studied field, which is not applicable to other areas. Furthermore, the proposed methods fail to cover all the aspects of sustainability. This study investigates a statistical method to measure the sustainability and the application of the bootstrap re-sampling method in order to overcome the problem with normality assumption when the sample size is not large enough and thus develop a more realistic stochastic model. The Bootstrap re-sampling method enables the unbiased estimation of population parameters such as mean and standard deviation. The proposed method is evaluated by comparing its results with those found in the literature.     

资本市场开放与股权资本成本——基于沪港通、深港通的实证研究

本文基于沪港通和深港通研究资本市场开放对中国内地股权资本成本的影响。研究发现,受政策风险和市场环境等因素所限,沪港通在初始阶段并未对沪市公司的股权资本成本产生显著影响,但随着政策进一步完善、市场逐渐稳定和交易不断活跃,其对股权资本成本的降低效果于实施两年后开始显现;深港通建立在沪港通的制度基础和运行经验上,其在开通后显著降低了标的公司的股权资本成本。本文还进一步分析了资本市场开放影响股权资本成本的竞争渠道和信息渠道,发现深港通对股权资本成本的降低作用主要集中在投资者竞争程度较高,或是公开信息质量较高、信息不对称程度较低的股票样本。     

我国“一带一路”沿线地区风险投资时空分布及影响因素研究

深入分析我国“一带一路”沿线地区风险投资时空格局及影响因素，有助于促进创新创业与企业发展、提高区域科技创新水平。运用空间分析方法和空间计量模型，对2003-2018年我国“一带一路”沿线139个城市风险投资的时空分布特征及影响因素进行分析，结果表明：①沿线地区的风险投资发展具有不均衡性，呈现为沿海高、西部低的分异格局；②风险投资的全局自相关系数均为正，呈现出明显的空间集聚特征；③风险投资机构数、国家高新区数量、风险投资退出、政府引导基金发展、财政科技支出对区域风险投资具有显著促进作用，环境污染对风险投资有一定抑制作用。随着ESG投资理念逐渐获得认可，沿线地区可以通过提升绿色发展水平促进风险投资发展。     

Capital market integration in ASEAN: A non-stationary panel data analysis

Motivated by the establishment of ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) at the end of 2015, we examine saving-investment relationship in various subgroups of ASEAN to assess their capital market integration. The results from second generation panel unit-root and cointegration tests that account for cross-sectional dependence as well as estimates of long-run saving-retention rate provide some evidence of market integration in ASEAN. The analysis of short-run dynamics suggests that capital mobility in ASEAN during 1980–2014 appears similar to that in OECD countries during 1970–1999. More importantly, across different panel estimators and subgroups of membership, there is considerable heterogeneity among the member countries. The saving-investment association is very weak, thereby implying very high capital mobility, in more developed members such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei; the association is very strong, implying very low capital mobility, for much less developed members such as Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. The results call for renewed effort to develop capital markets in less developed nations and integrate them with the rest of the membership in ASEAN. In this paper, we also address several major shortcomings of the original Feldstein-Horioka framework.     

Incorporating active adjustment into a financing based model of capital structure

The conventional partial adjustment model, which focuses on leverage evolution, has difficulty identifying deliberate capital structure adjustments as it confounds financing decisions with the mechanical autocorrelation of leverage. We propose and estimate a financing-based partial adjustment model that separates the effects of financing decisions on leverage evolution from mechanical evolution. The speed of adjustment (SOA) is firm-specific and stochastic, and active targeting of capital structure has a multiplier effect that depends on the size of financial deficit. Overall, we find expected SOA from active rebalancing (30%) more than doubles what is expected from mechanical mean reversion alone (13%).     

Can welfare be measured with a preference-satisfaction index?

Welfare in economics is generally conceived of in terms of the satisfaction of preferences, but a general, comparable index measure of welfare is generally not taken to be possible. In recent years, in response to the usage of measures of subjective well-being as indices of welfare in economics, a number of economists have started to develop measures of welfare based on preference-satisfaction. In order to evaluate the success of such measures, I formulate criteria of policy-relevance and theoretical success in the context of preference-satisfaction measures of welfare. I present a detailed case study of the methodological choices put forward in a prominent generalized proposal for measuring welfare through preferences recently published in the American Economic Review. I contrast this with an alternative welfare measure which also uses preferences to weight aspects of welfare: the ICECAP-A measure. I assess the methodology of both approaches in detail and argue that the two goals of a preference measure of welfare can only be satisfied at the expense of making a measure prohibitively costly.     

一种基于预测值量测转换的卡尔曼滤波跟踪算法

在雷达目标跟踪中，系统量测信息通常在球坐标系下获得。为了采用经典卡尔曼滤波算法实现有效目标跟踪，通常采用量测转换方法将非线性量测信息转换到直角坐标系中。针对传统量测转换方法基于量测值计算转换误差统计特性而导致的估计结果有偏问题，提出了一种基于预测值的量测转换方法，并将其与卡尔曼滤波算法相结合，获得了一种基于预测值量测转换的卡尔曼滤波跟踪算法。仿真结果表明，与现有的基于量测转换的卡尔曼滤波算法相比，该算法能在不提高运算量的情况下有效改善目标跟踪效果，跟踪精度提升约20%。