What Blows in with the Wind?

The shift toward renewable forms of energy for electricity generation in the electricity generation industry has clear implications for the spatial distribution of generating plant. Traditional forms of generation are typically located close to the load or population centers, while wind‐ and solar‐powered generation must be located where the energy source is found. In the case of wind, this has meant significant new investment in wind plant in primarily rural areas that have been in secular economic decline. This article investigates the localized economic impacts of the rapid increase in wind power capacity at the county level in Texas. Unlike input‐output impact analysis that relies primarily on levels of inputs to estimate gross impacts, we use traditional econometric methods to estimate net localized impacts in terms of employment, personal income, property tax base, and key public school expenditure levels. While we find evidence that both direct and indirect employment impacts are modest, significant increases in per capita income accompany wind power development. County and school property tax rolls also realize important benefits from the local siting of utility scale wind power, although peculiarities in Texas school funding shift localized property tax benefits to the state.     

Elaborate Description and Research on the Lean Logistics

Following the success of the Toyota Production System in the world of automotive manufacture, the new business philosophy of lean principle is gaining ground in that industry and in many others, among them operation. This paper discusses the application of lean principles to the logistics system, and illustrates the concept of lean logistics. The use of socio-technical perspective to design the lean logistics system is also discussed.     

Lost or Still Here?

Nowadays every city in China is a big building site and is chang-ing with each passing day,and Jinan is no exception.Highbuildings,crossroads,wide avenues,large squares,biggardens...these are like dyes decorating a huge canvas.Wal-mart,Isetan,McDonald’s,Kentucky,UBC,Pizza Hutéthesecommon,fashionable,popular,cloned“symbol systems”pos-sessed by many cities are also percolating into this old city.The once-slow city rhythm is moving faster.The once-agedcity posture is growing younger.The …     

Race,Quality of Care and Patient Outcomes: What Can We Learn from the Department of Veterans Affairs?

The large and persistent differences in health outcomes between African Americans and whites have sometimes been attributed to differences in the quality of the facilities in which they receive care. A large body of literature documents systematically worse performance by facilities which serve a larger share of black patients. However, these estimates may be biased by unobserved variables which correlate with the racial profile of the clinic and also affect outcomes. This paper uses a unique dataset from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs system to examine the relationship between the quality of health care and the racial profile of the patient population in an equal-access health care system. An instrumental variable is used to overcome the omitted variable bias in the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates. Both the OLS and IV estimates show that increasing the proportion of visits by African–American patients results in improved outcomes for all patients treated at the clinic. The OLS results significantly underestimate the effect of increasing the proportion of black patients. Holding the overall clinic load constant and adding one hundred outpatient visits by African Americans in a year would result in a 0.5 percentage point decrease in 1-year mortality for the average patient in the clinic. Thus, contrary to results from the private health care sector, increasing clinic racial integration in an equal access system would benefit all patients.     

Can soft power help the IMF make the world more stable?

In an integrated world, one of the more intractable problems we have to deal with is how to ensure all countries undertake macroeconomic policies that are in the global interest even when these go against short-term domestic political compulsions. It is unlikely that countries will sign up to a common set of policy rules, nor is it probable that peer pressure alone will convince countries to co-operate. This paper argues that multilateral institutions have to do more to sell the global policy consensus to the influential public in each country, so that leaders are pushed by domestic constituencies to internalize the global good. Rather than solely a top down process of global policy-making, where grand summits make little progress, we also need a bottom up approach, where the summiteers will feel the pressure for global deals from their primary domestic constituencies.     

Can the Super-deduction of R&D Expenses Boost R&D Investment?

The super-deduction of research and development (R&D) expenses is at the core of the policy to stimulate enterprise innovation in China. This paper identifies whether firms are supported by the super-deduction policies for R&D expenses and uses the difference-in-differences method to investigate the impact of the policies on R&D investment. The results show that changes in policy in 2013 significantly increased the R&D investment of firms engaging in key state-supported technologies. Policy changes in 2016 significantly increased the R&D investment of firms engaging in non-key-state-supported technologies. Enterprises not only invested all their tax incentives in R&D activities but also increased their investment in self-raised funds. The super-deduction policy had different impacts on different industries, firms with different boards, and firms with different ownership. The policy significantly affected the manufacturing and construction industries, the Small and Medium Enterprise Board, and non-state-owned enterprises. Through a mechanism analysis, we found that the policy significantly reduced the user cost of R&D and increased the net cash flow of enterprises, which could raise a firm's R&D investment. It is necessary to increase policy support, expand the scope of super-deductible expenses, and increase the super-deduction rate based on industry classification according to the sensitivity of different industries to the policy.     

Can central bank communication effectively guide the monetary policy expectation of the public?

Central bank communication helps to optimize monetary policy. Therefore, it is essential to study whether central bank communication can effectively guide expectations via various communication methods. We study central bank communication in China using the events collected from its official websites and social media, and we divide them into formal and informal communications. We use the high-frequency quotation data of treasury bonds to identify monetary policy surprise caused by communication, which is measured by the target and path surprise. Then, we evaluate the forward-looking and backward-looking effectiveness of central bank communications. We show that central bank communications can help guide public expectations, but different topics and different forms of communication have heterogeneous effects. Forward guidance carries both potential benefits and drawbacks. It is worth noting that China's current central bank communications may have certain potential to be improved.     

Can non-renewable resources alleviate the knife-edge character of endogenous growth?

Standard endogenous growth models rely on the arbitrary assumptionthat the technology has exactly constant returns with respectto producible inputs. Can this knifeedge restriction be relaxedby including non-renewable resources as necessary inputs inproduction? In a one-sector optimal growth model, we find thatthe strain on the economy imposed by the need to extract successivelysmaller amounts of the nonrenewable resource can offset thepotentially explosive effects of allowing for increasing returnsto producible inputs. However, growth in per capita consumptionwill be unstable unless there is population growth. Thus, theknife-edge problem of (strictly) endogenous growth reappearsas an instability problem. But a ‘semi-endogenous’growth framework turns out to be an attractive alternative,relying on less restrictive parameter values, maintaining stability,and allowing a rich set of determinants of longrun growth.     

Reassessing the Effectiveness of Industrial Policy in Indonesia: Can the Neoliberals be Wrong?

—The neoliberal interpretation of the Indonesian state suggests that industrial policy was incoherent, subject to rent-seeking, and irrelevant to Indonesia's post-1966 development success. A more nuanced micro-historical analysis of the state's interventions demonstrates that this oversimplification misses political elite objectives to overcome the “ekonomi kolonial” by using the power of the state and selective intervention to create a strong, integrated, diversified, and outward-oriented industrial economy (“ekonomi nasional”). Empirical analysis presented here suggests that Indonesia has largely achieved this objective. It also suggests that industrial policy has been more important than the neoliberal argument permits.     

Can Reform Waves Turn the Tide? Some Case Studies using the Synthetic Control Method

A number of advanced economies carried out a sequence of extensive reforms of their labor and product markets in the 1990s and early 2000s. Using the Synthetic Control Method (SCM), this paper implements six case studies of well-known waves of reforms, those of New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Ireland and Netherlands in the 1990s, and the labor market reforms in Germany in the early 2000s. In four of the six cases, GDP per capita was higher than in the control group as a result of the reforms. No difference between the treated country and its synthetic counterpart could be found in the cases of Denmark and New Zealand, which in the latter case may have partly reflected the implementation of reforms under particularly weak macroeconomic conditions. Overall, also factoring in the limitations of the SCM in this context, the results are suggestive of a positive but heterogenous effect of reform waves on GDP per capita.     

What Do We Know About Economic Growth? Or,Why Don't We Know Very Much?

The last 10 years has seen an explosion in cross country econometric studies of growth, driven by two factors—new mathematical models of the growth process that lend themselves to econometric testing, and new data sets that make such testing possible. This paper looks at a selective review of these studies. It concludes that the results are disappointing in that no model has proven robust to trial by repeated regression. The paper suggests some reasons for this—including that the tested models tend to be ahistorical and over-simple in terms of their causal accounts. It concludes with possible lessons for econometric work in this area.     

Can Trade Facilitation Prevent the Formation of Zombie Firms? Evidence from the China Railway Express

Using data on firms listed on Chinese A‐share markets from 2009 to 2017, this paper applies the difference‐in‐difference model to test the effect of trade facilitation on preventing the formation of zombie firms. We find that the China Railway Express (CRE) significantly prevented the formation of such firms. Mechanism tests show: (i) the CRE has accelerated the speed of sales, which increased the overseas sales revenue of firms; (ii) the economies of scale and the capital accumulation effect caused by the CRE can help increase firms’ solvency and development ability. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the effect of the CRE on preventing the formation of zombie firms is mainly reflected in non‐state‐owned firms, firms in highly competitive industries, and firms in the eastern region of China. We suggest that China should continue to promote trade facilitation by expanding the CRE and strengthening the market's dominant role in preventing the formation of zombie firms. Disadvantaged firms should seize the development opportunities brought by the CRE.     

Can the World Cut Poverty in Half? How Policy Reform and Effective Aid Can Meet International Development Goals

Poverty in the developing world will decline by about one-half by 2015 if the trends of the 1990s persist. Most of this poverty reduction will occur in Asia, however, while poverty will decline only slightly in Africa. Effective aid could make a contribution to greater poverty reduction in lagging regions. Even more potent would be significant policy reform in these countries. We develop a model of efficient aid in which flows respond to policy improvements that create a better environment for poverty reduction and effective aid. We investigate scenarios of policy reform and efficient aid that point the way to how the world can cut poverty in half in every major region.     

Can Cultural Competency Speak to the Race Disparities in Methadone Dosage Levels?

Although national methadone treatment trends have improved substantially from 1988 to 2001, current research has found that African Americans still receive lower dosages of methadone treatment than their white and Hispanic counterparts, which has significant public health concerns. We sought to empirically examine whether the degree of cultural competency within an outpatient substance abuse treatment (OSAT) organization has influence on the methadone dosage levels received by African Americans in 1995 and in 2005. The 1995 and 2005 National Drug Abuse Treatment System Survey (NDATSS) provided a nationally-representative, stratified sample of 618 and 566 OSAT organizations, respectively, of which 121 and 140 affiliated methadone maintenance treatment programs, respectively, were analyzed. The organizations’ director and clinical supervisor were surveyed. Fixed-effects linear regression models were fitted with measures of cultural competency, client, and organizational characteristics to assess methadone dosage levels. Culturally-competent units have smaller numbers of methadone clients, greater percentages of clients who receive methadone dosages of less than 40 mg/d, smaller percentages of clients who receive methadone dosages of 80 mg/d or more, and provide a larger number of therapeutic and ancillary services during treatment than non-culturally-competent units. OSAT units with more African Americans are significantly more likely to have clients who receive dosages of less than 40 mg/d and are significantly less likely to have clients who receive dosages of 80 mg/d or more. There is no racial difference among culturally-competent unit clients who receive dosages of less than 40 mg/d, between 40 and 59 mg/d, between 60 and 79 mg/d, and 80 mg/d or more. However, among non-culturally-competent units, a racial difference exists among African Americans and other clients who receive these various dosage levels. Research indicating that African Americans receive lower dosages of methadone than their White and Hispanic counterparts may now be explained by whether these clients receive treatment in culturally competent organizations, rather than solely by arguments related to organizational differences in resources, experience and training of staff, staff bias and/or racism. Culturally competent organizations may seek a method of treatment that dissuades “replacing one drug for another,” while simultaneously treating the root cause of the addiction through the provision of comprehensive therapeutic and ancillary support services. Further research is needed to determine if cultural competency results in better substance abuse treatment outcomes for African Americans.     

Can international coproduction promote the performance of cultural products in the global markets? Evidence from the Chinese movie industry

This study investigates the effect of international coproduction on the performance of cultural products in the global markets. As a result of institutional barriers and cultural distances, coproduction, which allows a foreign producer to partner with the local firms, has emerged as a way of increasing cultural product performance in the global markets. Using the data on the Chinese movie market from 2012 to 2018, the authors find that international coproduction can promote movie performance and that the coproduction effect is mainly explained by the institutional variables. They further examine the heterogeneous effects and find that coproduction effect is stronger for culturally sensitive movies, and that the magnitude of the coproduction effect increases with the level of cooperation. They also confirm that the results are robust to different measurements of performance.

     

Can Financial Economics Cure Cancer?

Funding for early-stage biomedical innovation has become more difficult to secure at the same time that medical breakthroughs seem to be occurring at ever increasing rates. One explanation for this counterintuitive trend is that increasing scientific knowledge can actually lead to greater economic risk for investors in the life sciences. While the Human Genome Project, high-throughput screening, genetic biomarkers, immunotherapies, and gene therapies have made a tremendously positive impact on biomedical research and, consequently, patient lives, they have also increased the cost and complexity of the drug development process, causing many investors to shift their assets to more attractive investment opportunities. This suggests that new business models and financing strategies can be used to reduce the risk and increase the attractiveness of biomedical innovation so as to bring new and better therapies to patients faster.

     

Should We Be Afraid of Friedman's Rule?

Should one think of zero nominal interest rates as an undesirable liquidity trap or as the desirable Friedman rule? I use three different frameworks to discuss this issue. First, I restate H. L. Cole and N. Kocherlakota's (1998, Fed. Res. Bank Minn. Quart. Rev., Spring, 2–10) analysis of Friedman's rule: short run increases in the money stock—whether through issuing spending coupons, open market operations, or foreign exchange intervention—change nothing as long as the money stock shrinks in the long run. Second, two simple Keynesian models of the inflationary process with a zero lower bound on nomianl interest rates imply either that deflationary spirals should be common or that a policy close to the Friedman rule and thus some deflation is optimal. Finally, a formal baby-sitting coop model implies multiple equilibria, but does not support the injection of liquidity to restore the good equilibrium, in contrast to P. Krugman (1998, Slate, August 13). J. Japan. Int. Econ., December 2000, 14(4), pp. 261–303. CenER, Tilburg University; Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany; and CEPR Copyright 2000 Academic Press.Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E31, E41, E50, E51, E52.