Political forecast cycles

A moral hazard model is used to show why overly optimistic revenue forecasts prior to elections can be optimal: Opportunistic governments can increase spending and appear more competent; ex post deficits emerge in election years, thereby producing political forecast cycles – as also found for US states in the empirical literature. Additionally, we obtain three theoretical results which are tested with panel data for Portuguese municipalities. The extent of manipulations is reduced when (i) the winning margin is expected to widen; (ii) the incumbent is not re-running; and/or (iii) the share of informed voters (proxied by education) goes up.     

公共危机中的政府协作治理能力*——中国省级新冠肺炎疫情防控的文本分析

协作治理，是应对公共危机形成的一种新的治理形式。本文使用文本分析法考察了2020年2月末各省区市政府在本次疫情应对政策中协作治理能力的四种关键机制：促进式顶层领导、开放式参与路径、明确的协作职责、透明信息披露的运用情形及运用效果。研究结果显示，30个省区市都在运用协作治理机制抗击疫情、恢复经济。四种机制的运用存在差异，整体上沿海地区运用协作治理机制更充分。进一步的分析显示政府协作治理机制的运用显著促进了各省份疫情中第三产业的经济恢复水平，原因在于其改善了省级层面经济恢复的市场环境。本文的研究结论表明，强大的政府协作治理机制有助于社会快速有效应对公共危机，也是优化市场环境的政府治理新途径。本文为政府协作治理的机制构成与实际效果提供了重要补充，在公共危机应对的背景下发展了政府治理的理论内容，为公共危机情境下政府职能转变思路提供了参考。     

Adverse effect of social media on generation Z user's behavior: Government information support as a moderating variable

Social media emerged as a primary source of information among young users, but its severe effect on mental state due to information overload, still an area of concern for the researchers. Generation Z users' addiction to the mobile phone/gadgets is increasing with a rise in social media and consequently their behavioral outcomes have transformed completely. Nowadays behavioral issues including stress, fatigue, ‘fear of missing out’ and ‘phubbing’, anxiety etc. rising each day but the relationship among these issues and information overload is less examined. The social media users are unable to filter the trustworthy information due to its enormous size and thus role of information support from government becomes essential. The current study extends the S-O-R theory exploring relationship between the stimulus of enormous information on the responses generated among the Generation Z such as social media fatigue, ‘fear of missing out’, ‘phubbing’ and anxiety. The findings from a sample of 319 users belonging to Generation Z suggest that social media platforms need to understand user's compulsive usage that is resulting into fatigue and consequently anxiety. The role of government information support on reducing fatigue and anxiety is found to be positive. The relationship between ‘fear of missing out’, ‘phubbing’ and anxiety is found significant and shows presence of partial mediation. The study offers significant theoretical and practical implications. It is significant for the service providers and social media platforms to advance interfaces with minimum fatigue for the users and offers information support to the users to reduce stress caused by information load.     

Terrorism and international economic policy

We add to the ongoing discussion regarding the policy consequences of terrorism by analyzing the effect of terrorism on international economic policy for a panel of 170 countries between 1970 and 2016. We find that countries resort to less liberal international economic policies when facing the threat of terrorism. This effect is especially relevant to smaller (less populated) countries. Our main finding is robust to an instrumental-variable approach. We argue that governments pursue less liberal international economic policies in response to terrorism to interrupt the organization and financing of terrorism, limit capital flight, stabilize public finances and signal political resolve.     

Financial returns to collecting rare political economy books

Rare books of political economy are eminently collectable. Using historical prices, I employ hedonic regressions to estimate financial returns to collecting the works of ten eminent political economists and develop a price index for this corpus of collectables. For the observation period 1975–2019, I find that in those 45 years investing in rare political economy books yielded an average annual real rate of return of 2.8%, which is well in line with the returns to collecting rare books of classical literature. Compared with other collectibles such as fine art, investing in rare books turns out to be financially more profitable.     

Unconventional monetary policy announcements and information shocks in the U.S.

We study unconventional policy shocks and information shocks associated with central bank announcements in the U.S. While unconventional policy shocks capture the direct influence of announced monetary policy actions, information shocks are associated with central bank information conveyed with the announcement. To disentangle these two types of shocks, we impose sign restrictions on high frequency changes in interest rates and stock prices around announcements. We find that information shocks lead to persistent declines in the 10-year government bond yield, whereas the actual unconventional policy shock induces only small interest rate responses. We also find that expansionary output effects of unconventional monetary policy are to some extent counteracted by the information shock.     

疫情防控常态化下的世界经济战略走向

新冠疫情的出现冲击了世界经济,从经济全球化和全球经济治理体系两个维度分析疫情对世界经济的影响以及世界经济未来走向,研究发现:(1)新冠疫情通过影响全球价值链、贸易投资和就业环境阻碍经济全球化进程,中美矛盾升级、原有治理体系规则未与时俱进和激进政策的不确定性对全球经济治理体系提出新的挑战;(2)新冠疫情强化了世界各国对人类命运共同体的认识,将人类命运共同体融入全球治理体系将是未来治理的重要趋势;(3)新冠疫情可能会使世界经济格局出现新的变化,而中国在此次疫情中高效率的抗疫举措将进一步提升自身在世界经济格局中的地位和参与度。     

“十四五”时期推进新旧动能转换的思路与策略

“十四五”时期是国际经济秩序重塑的关键期、新一轮科技革命和产业变革由孕育发展向形成高潮的关键过渡期、我国跨过高收入门槛的关键期和改革攻坚的关键时期,也是我国新旧动能接续转换的关键时期。加快新旧动能转换对于促进经济持续稳定健康增长、抢占新一轮科技革命机遇和实现高质量发展等意义重大,是我国转换发展方式、调整经济结构、建设现代化经济体系和实现体制机制转型的重要途径。必须深化对新旧动能转换内涵和特征的认识,厘清思路,明确新旧动能转换重点;深化体制机制改革,激发新旧动能转换活力;培育主体,做优做强一批新旧动能转换领军企业和优质中小企业;加快集群建设,形成一批新旧动能转换高地;创新优化要素支撑,夯实新旧动能转换基础;提升对外开放水平,拓展新旧动能转换空间。     

Does china income FSDs follow Benford? A comparison between Chinese income first significant digit distribution with Benford distribution

Since Benford’s law is an empirical phenomenon that occurs in a range of data sets, this raises the question as to whether or not the same thing might be true in terms of the Chinese income distribution data. We focus on the first significant digit (FSD) distribution of Chinese micro income data from the 2005 Inter-Census sample, which corresponds to 1% of Chinese population and other micro income data from the China family panel studies (CFPS) and Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). We use information theoretic-entropy based methods to investigate the degree to which Benford’s FSD law is consistent with the FSD of Chinese income data and our findings suggest consistency between the Chinese FSD income distribution and Benford’s distribution. The close connection between the two distributions has implications for the quality of the sample of Chinese micro data.     

Understanding sustainable development flexibility: An information perspective

Although flexibility has been considered critical in responding to uncertainty in a business environment, few studies have explored firms' flexibility in sustainable development. To understand the nature of firms that can respond better to uncertainty in their sustainable development practices, this study defines sustainable development flexibility and investigates the mechanism underlying its formation. The study proposes a conceptual framework on the interactions of managers' environmental attitude and cognitive style, as well as firms' information integration on sustainable development flexibility. A questionnaire survey was developed to test the corresponding hypotheses, and 241 valid responses were received from middle- and top-level managers in Chinese firms. The results show that (a) the higher the manager's environmental attitude, the higher the firm's information integration and greater sustainable supply chain flexibility, and (b) the more intuitive the manager's cognitive style, the greater the impact of environmental attitude on sustainable development flexibility.