Tariff-tax reform and exchange rate dynamics in a monetary economy

Using a dynamic monetary model, this paper analyzes the short- and long-run impacts of a tariff-tax reform on the economy, with attention being paid to short-run fluctuations in exchange rates. When a policy reform is announced and if the public believe that it will decrease excess demand, the domestic currency depreciates now to reflect its future depreciation. On the contrary, the domestic currency immediately appreciates if the public believe that it will increase excess demand. However, if there is a relatively small increase in excess demand, the public may mis-react in the exchange rate market by observing currency depreciation first and then appreciation toward the steady-state rate.     

Sustainable reverse supply chains and circular economy in multichannel retail returns

The percentage of products being returned in multichannel retail are high and further increasing, yet many retailers and manufacturers are unaware of the importance and scale of this issue. They consider dealing with returns as a cost of doing business and are oblivious of the potential for conflicts between their corporate social responsibility commitments and their returns practices. This article investigates how far sustainable practices and circular economy concepts have been implemented in retail returns systems; it identifies vulnerabilities, barriers, and challenges to the implementation of sustainable, circular practices and suggests ways to overcome them, as sustainability, loss prevention, and profit optimisation can go hand in hand with the right approach to the organisation of the reverse supply chain. Implications of this research on strategic management are outlined. The research was conducted using in‐depth interviews and observations with four major retailers in the United Kingdom, 17 structured interviews, 100 retailer website reviews, and three retail community workshops, all with British and other European retailers.     

Equilibrium price dynamics in an overlapping-generations exchange economy

An extension to the Yaari (1965)–Blanchard (1985) continuous time overlapping generations model for an endowment Arrow–Debreu economy with an age-structured population is presented. It is proved that Arrow–Debreu equilibrium prices are represented by a double linear integral equation, and depend on the age-distributions of population and endowments. For an economy with a balanced growth, and logarithmic utility, we prove that bubbles may exist if endowments are distributed earlier than some critical age.     

Population ageing and pension reform in a small open economy with non-traded goods

In this paper we study the implications of population ageing in an economy with a sizeable non-traded goods sector. To this effect a highly stylized micro-founded macro model is constructed in which the age structure of the population plays a non-trivial role. The model distinguishes separate birth and death probabilities (thus allowing for net population change), allows for age-dependent labour productivity (thus mimicing life-cycle saving), and includes a rudimentary pension system (thus allowing for intergenerational redistribution). The model is used to analytically study demographic and pension shocks.     

Selling shares to retail investors: auction vs. fixed price

We analyze the problem of selling shares of a divisible good to a large number of buyers when demand is uncertain. We characterize equilibria of two popular mechanisms, a fixed price mechanism and a uniform price auction, and compare the revenues. While in the auction truthful bidding is a dominant strategy, we find that bidders have an incentive to overstate their demand in the fixed price mechanism. For some parameter values we find that the fixed price mechanism outperforms the auction.     

市场经济需要清单计价——从改造工程实践谈工程量清单计价方式

本文对两种常用的建筑工程量计价方式,即传统的"定额计价"和现代的"清单计价"做了简要介绍和对比,进而介绍了我院在改造工程中应用工程量清单计价方式的做法与效果,并提出了应用工程量清单计价方式的建议.     

The existence of rational expectations equilibria in a large economy with noisy price observations

Non-revealing rational expectations equilibria exist in microeconomic pure exchange economies in which a continuum of uninformed agents have suitably distributed noisy price observations. Slight dispersion in the prices observed by the subset of uninformed consumers is the key condition for continuity (and smoothness) of aggregate excess demand, although individual demands are discontinuous. It leads to equilibria in which markets approximately clear in a strong sense. The equilibria are obtained by applying a fixed point argument to state-dependent excess demand functions.     

Equilibria in a large production economy with an infinite dimensional commodity space and price dependent preferences

We prove the existence of a competitive equilibrium in a production economy with infinitely many commodities and a measure space of agents whose preferences are price dependent. We employ a saturated measure space for the set of agents and apply recent results for an infinite dimensional separable Banach space such as Lyapunov’s convexity theorem and an exact Fatou’s lemma to obtain the result.     

An event time study of the price reaction to large retail trades

This paper analyzes large retail trades using an event study approach. A major finding in studies of this nature is an immediate reversal on the trade subsequent to the large transaction, for both large purchases and large sales. This reversal is inconsistent with the overwhelming majority of previous findings which show a stock price continuation following purchases to the close of trading. We confirm the reversals first using transaction prices, and then show that continuations follow both large purchases and sales when quote data is used. These large trades do not lead to a fundamental change in stock price volatility. We conclude that the transaction price reversal is driven by natural bid-ask bounce around large purchases and large sales.     

The political economy of financial reform: are Abiad and Mody right?

Motivated by the questions ‘Financial Reform: What Shakes It? What Shapes It?’ raised by Abiad and Mody ( 2005 ), this paper studies the forces that induce governments to undertake financial sector reform. Rather than their ordered logit technique, it uses a within groups approach allowing for error dependence across countries and over time. This analysis shows that some of the AM findings are not robust to error dependence and the estimation method. It has shed new light on the political economy of financial reform. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Savings and the Budget

The fall in the personal sector savings ratio to a record low last year has been a major factor behind the rapid growth of domestic demand in the past two years and the associated deterioration in the current account. It is also a major uncertainty in the Chancellor's Budget judgement. Existing econometric relationships for the consumption function have failed to predict the fall in personal savings over the past few years. Possible explanations include statistical error, the effects of financial deregulation, the housing boom, expectations of higher growth in incomes, and demographic influences. In this Viewpoint, we report on a new consumption function that successfully explains the decline in savings. It provides evidence of a major demographic influence resulting from the decline in the proportion of the population in the 45–64 age cohort, the main savers in society. Subsidiary effects arise from the boom in house prices, and statistical mis-measurement. The equation predicts an appreciable revival of savings over the next few years as the 45–64 age cohort grows again. These shifts in demographic structure reflect the after-effects of the Second World War. This new evidence suggests that the Chancellor has done quite enough to ensure a slowdown in consumption, and that he would be ill-advised to heed calls for special measures to boost savings. By contrast, well conceived tax changes that remove microeconomic distortions in the tax system (perhaps moving in the direction of an expenditure tax) would improve the tax structure, and may well increase the scope for tax cuts in future budgets. Our new consumption function also lends weight to the Chancellor's argument that the current account deficit is not a source of concern, insofar as it arises from a shift in savings associated with demographic changes that will be reversed in due course.     

油价改革：照顾哪头才算对？

油价的改革不是简单把加油站的价签一换就完了,到底要照顾哪一头,恐怕还得慢慢摸索一阵呢     

Considerations of a retail forecasting practitioner

Forecasts can be used in an extraordinarily diverse range of ways across many domains in which forecasting practitioners work continuously towards improving their forecasts. Each of these domains may require the analysis of different kinds of inputs and special considerations. Even within a given domain, such as retail, there may be many similar use cases of the same kind of forecast, which can lead to practitioners making different decisions. This paper discusses several of the important decision points that practitioners must work through and uses item-level sales forecasting in the retail domain as leveraged by pricing and inventory management as examples of the different paths that may be taken. It considers how each use can lead to a different forecasting objective, and a corresponding focus on different error metrics. In addition, there are several tradeoffs in the forecasting methods that are used to meet each of the objectives best, including the kinds of models used, the running time speed, and forecast accuracy requirements.     

国有经济战略性调整与深化国有企业改革

国有经济在建设中国特色社会主义和提高中国国际竞争力中具有不可替代的地位和作用。在新的历史时期,必须深入推进国有经济战略性调整和国有企业改革,进一步改革完善国有资产管理体制,转变企业发展方式,使国有企业真正发挥其独特的作用。     

An econometric model of a retail firm

Existing models of retail resource allocation generally specify response functions in a somewhat ad hoc manner. These are not usually derived from an explicit model of consumer maximization, and they generally do not explicitly consider the supply side of the market. This paper shows how the model of Ehrlich and Fisher (1982) can be used to provide insights into the proper specification of these functions. We illustrate the application of this model on data from a retail chain; our application extends work in Ratchford and Stoops (1988) to the demand side of the market. Potential areas of application of the model are to understanding the demand for labor and advertising services by consumers, and to the measurement of retail productivity.     

Imitation and price competition in a differentiated market

We study the stable market outcome that evolves in a spatially differentiated market when price-competing firms choose actions by imitation of the most profitable firm. We compare and contrast the stable outcomes under two imitation procedures: one, where each firm immediately imitates the most profitable firm, and the other when a firm imitates another firm only if it is more profitable while being “sufficiently similar” (in context of the market segment it operates in) or “sufficiently close”. In either case, the symmetric pure strategy Nash equilibrium is always a stable outcome. However, when imitation of the most profitable firm is immediate and market differentiation is ‘moderate’, states with prices lower than the Nash equilibrium are also stable. In contrast, when imitation of the most profitable firm is more gradual and market differentiation is below a threshold, states with prices above the Nash equilibrium are also stable. Thus, while competitive evolutionary pressure in this imitation based model does result in the Nash equilibrium always being stable, other outcomes may be stable as well. Interestingly, the states that are stable under gradual imitation give the firms a higher profit than the stable states under immediate imitation.     

Savings, Personal Wealth and Risk

In this Briefing Paper we examine the underlying determinants of personal savings behaviour to substantiate our view that the recent fall in savings rates does not imply that it must in future bounce back to some more normal level. On the contrary there are good reasons for believing that savings are more likely to go on falling than to rise.
We argue that consumer behaviour should be related explicitly to personal wealth as well as to disposable income. Personal wealth has risen substantially since 1982: the fall in inflation and long-term interest rates has pushed up gilts' prices; the recovery of profits has sparked off a stock market boom; and the value of the housing stock, which is by far the most important asset held by the personal sector, has started to rise again in real terms. This rise in asset values means that, despite a rise in consumption financed by borrowing, the personal sector balance sheet still in a healthy state, particularly when account is taken of the personal savings now held indirectly via pension funds. These have risen rapidly recently, reducing the need for other long-term savings.
The rise in total wealth has increased savers' tolerance of a fall in net liquid assets (bank and building society deposits etc less borrowing). The willingness to hold a smaller (precautionary) stock of net liquid assets may also reflect a perceived reduction in risk. Financial markets have been much more stable over the period since 1975 than over the preceding eight years, and may now be signalling that the period of adjustment to the shocks and disturbances of the 1970s is drawing to an end. The fall in savings is a worldwide phenomenon. As in the UK it is linked to the fall in inflation and may also be connected with the recovery of the world's major stock markets.     

Charity and redistributive taxation in a unionized economy

European economies are characterized by unionized labor markets and governmental redistribution of income. This paper studies a model where those two features are combined with the possibility for individuals to make charitable contributions to the poor. The model exhibits equilibrium unemployment that increases with the degree of altruism. It is shown that a more progressive income tax can both reduce the unemployment rate and improve the public budget. These results are driven by charity increasing wage pressure and the altruistic rich failing to internalize the effect of their donations on the wage setting behavior of the unions.