Thomas Hodgskin,Rational Optimist

Long considered a ‘Ricardian socialist’, Thomas Hodgskin is rarely read as the perceptive observer of the Industrial Revolution that he was. His most famous pamphlet, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital, has been interpreted as anticipating some central tenets of Marxism. If we abandon this well‐established interpretation, however, we can better appreciate Hodgskin's acute reading of the process of industrialisation unfolding before his eyes. Unlike most socialists, Hodgskin had no sympathy for machine breakers and actually understood the importance of the entrepreneurial function. Moreover, he thought mechanisation and improvement in the tools available for workers would not dispossess them but, on the contrary, would raise their living standards. Hodgskin's ‘optimism’ shows that in the 1820s someone who was deeply concerned with the future of the working classes could nonetheless develop a reasoned sympathy for industrialisation — rather than merely oppose technological innovation and long for a mythical past.     

债务违约、社会责任与政府支持

转型期中国，地方国有企业作为地区经济发展的一股中坚力量，当其发生债务违约时，作为实际控制人的地方政府究竟是否愿意提供支持，会优先选择哪些企业提供支持，政府的支持行为是否会影响到信贷资源的配置效率呢?为得到验证，文章选取2007-2016年沪深A股地方国有上市企业作为研究样本，实证分析了地方国企发生债务违约后，地方政府的支持行为及其对信贷资源配置效率的影响。研究结论表明：第一，地方国企发生债务违约后，地方政府会提供更多的"支持"，且支持额度与债务违约额呈显著正相关关系；第二，债务违约前，承担了更多社会责任（环保投资、捐赠以及就业等）的地方国企，在债务违约后可相应地获得更多的地方政府支持；第三，违约企业，尤其是得到更多政府支持的违约企业可获得更多的信贷资源，而其经营业绩却往往更差。由此表明政府干预一定程度上降低了信贷资源配置效率。     

Hi-tech start-ups: legitimacy challenges and funding dynamics

Studies on the legitimacy challenges faced by hi-tech start-ups are still scarce, leaving room for research, and policymaking debate. Legitimacy issues may become difficult to face for hi-tech firms in comparison with other start-ups, because they work in an extreme environment where the technological challenges are at the edge of the scientific possibility. The paper proposes a conceptual model to grasp the relevance of three legitimacy drivers of the hi-tech start-ups for investment decisions. We investigated the ability of 30 hi-tech start-up firms to obtain financial resources from the US investors, employing a set-theoretic approach and carried out fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Our findings clarify that the funding decisions of US investors are driven by the location of headquarter and R&D of hi-tech start-ups and by the educational experience of the founders. Our study has significant theoretical, practical, and policymaking implications.     

Financial development and economic growth: long‐run equilibrium and transitional dynamics

We analyze the impact of financial development on economic growth. Differently from previous studies that focus mainly on balanced growth path outcomes, we also analyze the transitional dynamics of our model economy by using a finance‐extended Uzawa–Lucas framework where financial intermediation affects both human and physical capital accumulation. We show that, under certain rather general conditions, economic growth may turn out to be non‐monotonically related to financial development (as suggested by the most recent empirical evidence) and that too much finance may be detrimental to growth. We also show that the degree of financial development may affect the speed of convergence, which suggests that finance may play a crucial role in determining the length of the recovery process associated with exogenous shocks. Moreover, in a special case of the model, we observe that, under a realistic set of parameters, social welfare decreases with financial development, meaning that even when finance positively affects economic growth the short‐term costs associated with financial activities more than compensate their long‐run benefits.     

A hybrid information approach to predict corporate credit risk

This study proposes a hybrid information approach to predict corporate credit risk. In contrast to the previous literature that debates which credit risk model is the best, we pool information from a diverse set of structural and reduced‐form models to produce a model combination based on credit risk prediction. Compared with each single model, the pooled strategies yield consistently lower average risk prediction errors over time. We also find that while the reduced‐form models contribute more in the pooled strategies for speculative‐grade names and longer maturities, the structural models have higher weights for shorter maturities and investment grade names.     

Hispanic Ethnicity,English‐Skill Investments,and Earnings

Analyzing synthetic cohorts in the 1980 and 1990 Public Use Microdata Samples, we find that Mexican‐Americans and other Hispanics acquired English fluency at a faster pace than Puerto Ricans and Cuban‐Americans during the 1980s. Additional results indicate that English‐skill investments differently influenced the earnings distributions of these ethnic groups.     

Output-inflation tradeoffs in 34 countries

This article examines the responsiveness of real output to the variability of inflation and aggregate demand. In the manner of Lucas (1973), estimates of the output-inflation tradeoff are computed for a large sample of countries. This measure is then correlated with the variances of the inflation rate and the growth rate in nominal income. Because differences in inflation variance (and hence the tradeoff) are viewed as the outcomes of differences in demand variance, correlations between these two variables are also reported. Cross-time and cross-country results provide a good measure of support for Lucas and the notion that attempts to exploit the tradeoff weaken it.