Making Welfare Work: The Politics of Reform

Welfare reform, if it is to be successful in the longer–term, needs to be based on a carefully thought out political strategy. The new political arithmetic, where the poor are an electoral minority, and many working class voters have rising aspirations, requires welfare reform to appeal to the interests of the majority. While welfare reform similarly must work with rather than against the grain of human nature, self–interest has to be harnessed in a way which builds an inclusive programme. The Government's drive towards ever greater means–tested provision looks good in year one. The penalties means–tests impose on working, saving and honesty become apparent only later with an ever–growing proportion of the population having to think about how best to work this system. Equally importantly, this drive to even greater means–tested dependency is set to blow apart some of the key characteristics which underpin a common citizenship.     

建设开放的组织工作系统:四川省的经验

2003年初以来,四川省委组织部在组织工作和组织系统自身建设问题上提出并实施了“建设开放的组织工作系统”这一战略举措,多方面改变了组织工作的传统做法。近几年的实践证明,这项措施给四川省的组织工作带来了极大的生机和活力,同时,这项措施的开放特性也得到了广大干部群众的满意和认可。     

Macroeconomic Policy Making,Exchange Rate Adjustment and Current Account Imbalances in Emerging Markets

Given a series of crisis events after 2007 the discussion about the adjustment channels of current account imbalances has been revived. We examine the role of exchange rates vs macroeconomic policies as determinants of current accounts for a set of 86 mainly emerging market economies between 1990 and 2013 to identify adjustment channels for global imbalances. We find that nominal exchange rates are not the main determinant of current account positions. Instead, depending on the region, monetary and/or fiscal policies are identified as the main driving force of current accounts. For East Asia and the oil exporting countries sterilization policies, i.e. relatively tight monetary policies, are the main determinants. In contrast for many European periphery countries fiscal policy stances are at the core of current account positions. Only for the Latin American countries does the exchange rate play a significant role as determinant of current account positions.     

Making EMU Work: Some lessons from the 1990s

This paper investigates what lessons may be learned from Europe's convergence process of the 1990s. The paper challenges the conventional focus on labour market institutions and 'structural rigidities' as the root cause behind Europe's poor employment record. Instead, it is argued that macro demand management played the key role, particularly monetary policy. Concentrating on Germany, the analysis shows that fiscal consolidation was accompanied by monetary tightness of an extraordinary degree and duration. This finding is of interest regarding the past as well as the future. For the Maastricht regime much resembles the one that produced the unsound policy mix of the 1990s: a constrained fiscal authority paired with an independent monetary authority free to impose its will on the overall outcome. The analysis thus highlights a key asymmetry in the Maastricht regime that is likely to continue to inflict a deflationary bias on the system. It is argued that this policy bias may be overcome only if the ECB deliberately assumed its real role of generating domestic demand-led growth, thereby resolving Euroland's key structural problem: asymmetric monetary policy. As regards the conventional structuralist theme, the analysis debunks the 'Dutch myth' of supply-led growth through structural reform. Depicting a popular fallacy of composition, we stress that the peculiar Dutch strategy of demand-led growth does not present itself as an option for Euroland.     

社会资本与草根民主——罗伯特·帕特南的《使民主运转起来》

文章回顾了历史以来关于民主理论的研究 ,认为帕特南于 1993年发表的《使民主运转起来 :现代意大利的公民传统》是近年来西方民主理论研究方面影响最大的著作之一。作者对《使民主运转起来》一书的宗旨、理论框架、主要观点及其创新之处进行了评论 ,指出“社会资本”是《使民主运转起来》引入的最重要的分析范畴 ,而《使民主运转起来》的出版无疑有力地推动了西方民主理论的发展。     

让自然做功——融合“雨水管理”的绿色街道景观设计

绿色街道在国外,尤其是在美国已经成为进行街道雨水管理的重要方法与途径。分析街道雨水管理问题的出现,阐述了绿色街道的概念与功能,详细解析了美国波特兰市西南第12大街绿色街道景观建设的实例。在此基础上,全面研究介绍了绿色街道景观设计应用的雨水种植沟、雨水种植池、路牙石扩展池和雨水渗透园四种不同的街道雨水花园策略。最后结合城市街道景观设计建设的特点,应用四种街道雨水花园策略对道路绿带、交通岛绿地和停车场绿地三种绿色街道设计建设模式进行了详细的设计研究。     

Experimentation in Markets

We present a model of entry and exit with Bayesian learning and price competition. A new product of initially unknown quality is introduced in the market, and purchases of the product yield information on its true quality. We assume that the performance of the new product is publicly observable. As agents learn from the experiments of others, informational externalities arise.
We determine the Markov Perfect Equilibrium prices and allocations. In a single market, the combination of the informational externalities among the buyers and the strategic pricing by the sellers results in excessive experimentation. If the new product is launched in many distinct markets, the path of sales converges to the efficient path in the limit as the number of markets grows.     

Markets and jungles

Economic institutions determine prospects for growth and development. This paper examines necessary conditions for an economy to support institutions that implement markets. Agents differ in land holdings, skill, and power. A competitive market assigns land to the skilled, not necessarily to the powerful. Therefore a market?allocation needs to be robust to coalitional expropriation. In a dynamic setting, market payoffs may induce sufficient inequality in next period??s endowments for markets to alternate with expropriation in a limit cycle, decreasing efficiency and amplifying macroeconomic fluctuations. Long run stability of markets is favored by higher social mobility, more initial equality, and less mismatch between skill and land.     

Markets as communication systems

As the information relative to endowments, costs and preferences is dispersed among many agents, the quality of resource allocation depends on the ability of markets to communicate information inside the economic system. Because information is transferred through negotiation and transaction behaviors, the network of trading relations defines the channels through which it flows. In the present study, we use new computational tools to analyze the performance of two wholesale trade institutions widely used around the world: network trading and marketplace trading. Whilst network trading and marketplace trading disseminate far fewer bits of information than a perfectly transparent benchmark market, they often manage to generate an allocation of resources that is almost as good. In many cases, network trading proves more effective than marketplace trading (contrary to a common preconception). This surprising performance of network trading is linked to a form of indirect arbitrage induced by connections between networks. Implications for market design and public policy making are presented, along with prospects for further research.     

Macroeconomics and Credit Markets

The extent to which freedom should prevail continues to be a lingering question in the economic discipline. The article focuses on how freedom is conceptualized. The question addressed is whose freedoms are being served through economic self-governance. The profit seeking microeconomic objective of capitalists, as addressed by Karl Marx, must lead to structural change resulting in unemployment. But unemployment has disastrous social costs. So the promotion of freedom for capitalists comes at a high cost toward society. Thus it is argued that the concept of freedom is itself a paradox. Freedom itself must be constrained to be viable.     

资本市场复杂性分析

传统的资本市场理论(CMT)在很大程度上基于公平合理的随机游动(布朗运动)或“鞅(Martingales)”,即对明天价格的期望等于今天的价格。     

Experimental Foreign Exchange Markets

The paper analyzes experimental markets where subjects buy and sell two different assets. The assets' properties vary across treatments, and their relative price is the exchange rate. Although both assets uniformly exhibit bubbles, the exchange rate satisfies cross‐currency arbitrage. There is no evidence of a positive risk premium in these markets, and almost all subjects' forecasts of the exchange rate are rational.     

Financial Markets and Wages

We study a labour market equilibrium model in which firms sign optimal long-term contracts with workers. Firms that are financially constrained offer an increasing wage profile: they pay lower wages today in exchange for higher future wages once they become unconstrained. Because constrained firms grow faster, the model predicts a positive correlation between the growth of wages and the growth of the firm. Under some conditions, the model also generates a positive relation between firm size and wages. Using matched employer–employee data from Finland and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth for the U.S., we show that the key dynamic properties of the model are supported by the data.