ECONOMIC GROWTH AND THE BALANCE OF PAYMENTS CONSTRAINT: Implications for Cyprus's Prospective EMU Membership

Fast growing countries wishing to join a slow growing monetary union may experience growth costs since they have to rely on deflationary policies to tackle balance of payments deficits following the loss of their exchange rate policy. This paper provides evidence that the Cyprus economy is growing at a rate that does not exceed its balance of payments equilibrium growth rate. This suggests that, within EMU, the country will be able to maintain its current growth rate without any resulting balance of payments problems. Thus, there will be no need for deflationary policies that can have an adverse impact on economic growth.     

Electronic funds transfer at point of sale: a consumer viewpoint*

The first section examines the advantages and disadvantages of electronic funds transfer at point of sale (EFTPOS) as a payment method for consumers. The next section looks at the legal issues and especially at consumer problems arising from the use of wellestablished related technology, automated teller machines (ATMs). The third part sets out the European Commission's strategy for EFTPOS. Finally, the last section summarizes the consumer issues involved and suggests that an international legal framework is needed to deal with them.     

财政分权：转移支付、税收优惠与首位城市增长

中国的财政分权所带来的财权调整使得各省区地区间的经济发展差距发生一系列变化。本文基于中国27个省区2000-2012年的数据样本,通过构建空间面板模型研究了财政分权背景下转移支付和税收优惠对于首位城市规模增长的影响。结果显示,政府的转移支付政策对于抑制首位城市规模增加,平衡区域发展缺乏效率;对于中央政府财政依赖度越高的省区,其首位城市规模规模越大;省级政府对于外围城市偏向性的转移支付政策无法有效阻止首位城市的扩张。另外,首位城市能够借助相对优惠的税收政策进一步扩大规模范围。在此基础上,本文提出了相应的财政政策以及城市发展建议。     

转移支付与我国地区收入差距的收敛分析

转移支付是政府协调区域经济的重要政策手段,本文测算和分析1995年-2004年省区收入的收敛检验,并运用计量方法分析了1994年分税制改革以后转移支付与地区经济收敛的关系,得出的结论是:收入的收敛模式在全国范围内没有绝对收敛,也没有条件收敛,转移支付总体上没有达到缩小地区收入差距的效果,并且突出表现在中部和西部地区。此外本文还试图解释了现行转移支付不能缩小地区收入差距的原因,并给出相关的政策建议。     

财政转移支付与地方政府支出行为——基于中国地市面板数据的实证分析

本文运用一个简单的理论框架分析了转移支付对地方政府财政支出行为的影响效应,并实证检验了省以下政府间财政转移支付对地方政府财政支出行为的影响效应。分析结果表明：一般性转移支付与地方财政支出之间存在显著的替代效应,而专项转移支付与地方政府财政支出之间存在着显著的互补效应,并且地方政府并不存在反应过度问题。本文的政策建议是：从短期来看,中央政府通过一般性转移支付方式可以有效降低基层政府的财政债务负担,通过专项转移支付可以有效提高基层政府公共服务的供给数量和质量;从长期来看,应进一步完善分税格局,给予地方政府（特别是基层政府）更多与其事权相匹配的税权能力。     

支付结算体系的前沿理论研究

本文考察了有关支付结算体系的微观和宏观理论，认为国外的研究热点主要集中在以下五个领域：支付体系的成本与效率；消费者的支付选择行为；支付体系的技术安全与创新；跨境支付结算体系；支付结算体系的危机扩散；并对每个领域的前沿理论进行了重点剖析。     

Standing up for or against: A text-mining study on the recommendation of mobile payment apps

Mobile payment systems offer enormous potential as alternative payment solutions. However, the diffusion of mobile payments over the years has been less than optimal despite the numerous studies that have explored the reasons for its adoption. Consequently, there is an increased interest in exploring alternative actions for promoting its diffusion, especially user recommendation of the technology. This is because positive recommendations can enormously influence the decisions of potential consumers to use the technology while negative recommendations can increase resistance to it. The few extant studies in this domain have followed the traditional survey approach with hypothetic-deductive reasoning, thus limiting an understanding of factors outside their conceptual models that could influence recommendations. To address this shortcoming, this study uses a qualitative text-mining approach that explores themes from user reviews of mobile payment applications (apps). Using 5955 reviews from 16 mobile payment apps hosted on the Google Play store, this study applied the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) text-mining method to extract themes from the reviews that help to explain why users provide positive or negative recommendations about mobile payment systems. A total of 13 themes (i.e. ease of use, usefulness, convenience, security, reliability, satisfaction, transaction speed, time-saving, customer support, output quality, perceived cost, usability and trust) were generated from the LDA model which provides both theoretical and practical insights for advancing mobile payments diffusion and research.     

中国地方政府财政赤字成因分析

基于1996—2010年中国大陆省级政府的相关数据,利用面板模型,对地方政府财政赤字成因进行分析。结果显示,对于东中西部三个地区来讲,中央政府对地方政府的财力性转移支付、中央政府对地方政府的专项转移支付、地方政府预算内非税收入、地方政府预算外非税收入和地方政府各税种收入对地方政府财政赤字的影响程度和方向具有差异性。要缩减地方政府财政赤字规模,需完善财力性转移支付制度等相关财税制度。     

Why do stored value systems fail?

Stored value systems are the most recent form of electronic payment technology. They are meant to coexist with credit and debit technology, by primarily targeting the low value area of the transaction market. Being targeted at low value transactions, they are designed to have very low transaction cost. Stored value systems rely on creating a form of electronic value, on smart cards or as computer files. Such value can be bought (withdrawn) at any one time, and spent in arbitrary fractions at later times. When the technology emerged for its first implementations in the first half of the 1990s, it was much celebrated as a replacement for cash with many benefits over existing payment technologies. Many of these systems have subsequently been set up as trials, and the commercial rollout of some systems has started. However, actual usage of stored value systems is still low, much lower than was expected by the operators of the systems. Several years after the first trials were implemented, it is still unclear whether and when they will play a relevant role in the payments system market. And none of the trials that have been run can be considered a commercial success. This makes it necessary not only to assess the technology, but also the commercial future and user uptake of these systems. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Smart Card-Based Electronic Card Payment Systems in the Transportation Industry

Many products and services will soon be (or are already being) sold over the Internet or other networks. Paying for these with standard methods of payments, such as cash, checks, credit card, or debit card, may be ineffective or inefficient. For such cases, electronic card payment systems are more appropriate. Several things need to be considered when investigating electronic card payment system options, including: customer needs and benefits, developmental and operational cost, corporate benefits, continually changing technologies, critical mass of customers, security, standards of payment systems, and customer perception and comfort with new technologies. In this article, we analyze how smart card-based systems are used in mass transportation. Managers in mass transportation face the following questions: Do you develop your own electronic card payment system, do you wait for multifunctional cards that will be accepted across many industries to provide the functionality required in your market, or do you do nothing. The discussion here concentrates mainly on the transportation industry, where the transactions and payments are made on local area networks.     

Die Koalitionsvereinbarungen zur Energiewende

The new German grand coalition government has put energy and in particular the promotion of renewable energies at the centre of its policies. The existing system of generous feed-in tariffs for renewables has led to their remarkable expansion. However, this support system has come under criticism, not least because of the huge subsidies and transfer payments arising from it. German economists have variously proposed abandoning direct support for renewable energies and concentrating climate change policies on the European Union’s Emissions Trading System. After reviewing the problems and the proposed solutions, the author concludes that a piecemeal approach to fixing specific problems is more likely than a radical systemic reform.     

Empathic cultural consumers: Pay what you want in the theater

Pay what you want (PWYW) is an increasingly popular sales strategy in which consumers voluntarily decide how much to pay for a product or service. PWYW has often been described as an exercise in the “empathy economy,” where consumers' payment choices might be seen as empowered expressions of their tastes and preferences, and sellers have a stronger incentive for empathizing with them. Beyond their economic interest, PWYW experiences also deserve significant attention in the social sciences given that they challenge several key assumptions of rational choice and neoclassical economic theory, as well as conventional consumer behavior and pricing theories. This paper analyzes three plays performed at the Beckett Theater in Barcelona using PWYW with very profitable outcomes. Our analysis shows that socio-psychological factors, such as payments attributed to others and satisfaction with the play, are the best predictors of customer payments.     

Mobile Commerce

Abstract

To Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies, finding convenient and secure payment methods is crucial. While the most popular payment method in the United States is the credit card, the common methods in Japan are cash on delivery, transfer of payment into bank accounts, and postal money order. The paper presents such issues as why credit card payments have not become the mainstream payment method in Japan, the current situation of other payment methods, and the future mobile trend.     

收入不平等与最优个人所得税-转移支付再分配系统

本文构建了个人所得税、转移支付以及个人所得税-转移支付系统对于居民收入不平等的实际、最优和最大效应指标。运用中国省份数据分析,发现中国个人所得税正在加速恶化居民收入不平等,并且在对收入不平等的影响中发挥主要作用;转移支付对收入不平等有一定的抑制作用,但力量较弱,而且离最优指标"要求"越来越远;个人所得税-转移支付系统加剧了收入不平等,并且加剧程度越来越严重,最后提出了相应的政策建议。     

Payment formats and hedonic consumption

Payment formats have many important influences on consumer behavior. However, few studies have examined how the payment format affects hedonic consumption. This study explores how the transparency of the payment format (e.g., bonus points vs. cash) influences consumers’ willingness to pay, budget assignments, and consumption choices through differences in their perceived pain of purchasing (exchanging) hedonic and utilitarian options. Specifically, consumers who pay with highly transparent payment formats (e.g., cash), compared with consumers who pay with less transparent payment formats (e.g., store points, bonus points, and gift certificates), are willing to pay less, assign a lower budget, and are less likely to choose hedonic products. The perceived pain of purchasing (exchanging) a hedonic product plays an important mediating role on the influence of the payment format on hedonic consumption. However, the perceived pain of purchasing (exchanging) a utilitarian option plays a parallel mediating role only when people have paid for the less transparent payment format (e.g., buying store points) rather than when they accumulate the points through previous consumption events. The research findings provide insights that can benefit both theory and practice.     

The Impact of Electronic Payments for Vulnerable Consumers: Evidence from Social Security

Vulnerable consumers may face barriers to using electronic payments, especially consumers in “unbanked” households where no member has an account to receive payments. In March 2013, the US Social Security Administration transitioned exclusively to electronic payments, representing a large shift in payment mode mandated at the federal level. This study identifies the size and characteristics of the population impacted by this shift, by linking administrative data on Social Security payments to a nationally representative survey on the use of bank accounts and financial services. We find that the majority of unbanked Social Security recipients took up electronic payments well before the March 2013 deadline. The mandate does not appear to have increased the use of bank accounts. Instead, recipients used electronic payment cards. However, the transition to electronic payments was slowest among the most financially vulnerable households, suggesting a focus on these households as payment methods continue to develop.     

求贤若渴：创业型IPO企业如何聘请到具有多重兼任的独立董事？

具有多重兼任的独立董事由于积累了丰富的经验和较高的声誉成为企业争相聘请的对象,但是鲜有研究创业型IPO企业如何才能聘请到这些优秀的独董、他们又为何接受具有较高不确定性的企业提供的职位。文章在整合信号理论和独董任职动机的基础上,利用创业板IPO企业的数据,对创业型IPO企业选聘独董的机制进行了实证研究。结果发现：首先,IPO企业的企业声誉、社会关系和提供给独董的薪酬可以作为传递企业合法性和任职利益的信号,能够激发独董任职的声誉动机、关系动机和经济动机,从而帮助企业吸引到具有多重兼任的独董。其次,IPO企业具有的多个信号或独董的多个动机之间存在相互替代的关系,声誉、关系和薪酬对独董的吸引和激励在一定程度上是相互替代的。最后,随着上市日期的临近,IPO企业想要聘请到具有多重兼任的独董会越发困难;而且随着时间和情境的变化,企业的各种信号对独董的吸引和激励作用也会发生一定的变化。     

FinTech and the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from electronic payment systems

This paper investigates the effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on financial institutions and on consumers' adoption of Financial Technology (FinTech) for payments. This paper documents the following findings in Kenya. (1) The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption and increased the payment concentration of FinTech. We document an approximately 54% increase in mobile banking transactions, a 19.56% increase in mobile banking agents, and a 14.56% increase in the number of mobile banking accounts. (2) The use of all types of electronic payment cards declined significantly during the pandemic. (3) The pandemic magnified interbank contagion and liquidity risks and reduced both domestic and international electronic fund transfers via both the Real-Gross Settlement System and the Automated Clearing House. Overall, our results indicate that FinTech not only partially alleviated the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic during Q1 of 2021 but also accelerated consumers' adoption of FinTech and digital onboarding, especially in Q3 and Q4 of 2022.     

Helping workers understand and follow social media policies

While social media can have significant benefits for organizations, the social media presences and postings of employees can be problematic for organizations. This is especially true when employees have connections to co-workers and managers. Workers posting content deemed inappropriate or detrimental to the organization has led to a significant number of workers being fired for their social media behavior. To avoid such situations, organizations should create social media policies to guide employee content. Organizational implementation of social media policy is on the rise, but serious questions remain as to how to make it effective. One crucial question is how well employees know and understand their employer's policy. In this article, we discuss how to communicate social media policies to workers and help their understanding. To inform our recommendations, we draw on exploratory data from a sample of young adult workers regarding their knowledge of their own company's social media policies.