Labour and the theory of the multinational corporation

Here the author claims that despite the evergrowing volume of literature on multinational corporations little progress appears to have been made in understanding their effects on labour markets. This is reflected in the inconsistent and largely unsuccessful response of organised labour to multinational penetration.     

Capabilities and utilities

This paper deals with the problem of looking for resource allocation mechanisms which would be accepted as just in Sen's capabilities framework. We start by suggesting a way of simplifying Sen's idea of capability by using acapability index which measures the ability of a person to function. Then we look for mechanisms providing allocations which could be deemedjust, in pure distribution problems. An allocation will be called just when its corresponding capabilities are leximin suprema. We provide a characterization result of this mechanism in a framework which mimics Roemer's bargaining in economic environments, in which the role of utility functions is now played by capability indices. When a positive relationship between capability indices and utilities exist, just allocations are optimal in utility terms.     

A pollution theory of value

Environmental policies in effect add polluting emissions to the list of society's limited resources. As a consequence, they necessitate the estimation of a new system of values that will relate social ends and economic activities in a regime of optimum resource allocation. The purpose for formulating the theory presented in this paper is to illuminate the nature and assist the determination of these values when emissions are regulated. In discussing the theory's contributions, I place emphasis not on the normative properties of the theory but rather on the potentials it offers for an integrated environmental policy evaluation within a social context. The theory is founded on the concept of productive efficiency and the related concept of accounting prices for resources and for the products of resource utilization.     

A theory of supplier network-based innovation value

To understand how a supplier helps a buying company create value through innovations, studies have focused on a supplier's internal resources or its relationship with a buying company. Building upon this body of literature, we develop a theory of supplier network-based innovation value in this conceptual paper. This theory explains how a supplier's upstream and downstream value network can be a source of competitive advantage for a buying company. Specifically, it proposes that the levels and types of supplier innovation value is contingent on the configuration of a dual-ego value network, characterized by the locus and degree of buyer-supplier structural equivalence. This theory also explains how a supplier's ties with a buying firm's competitors can pose both opportunity and risk to buying company innovation. This theory contributes to the literature by showing when “seemingly undesirable” suppliers, due to a lack of technical capability or strong relationship with a buying company, might still be valuable to a buying company's innovation.     

Differentiability properties of rank-linear utilities

We study the differentiability properties of concave functionals defined as integrals of the quantile. These functionals generalize the rank dependent expected utility and are called rank-linear utilities in decision theory. Their superdifferential is described as well as the set of random variables where they are Gâteaux-differentiable. Our results generalize those obtained for the rank dependent expected utility in Ref. [Carlier, G., Dana, R.-A., 2003. Core of a convex distortion of a probability. Journal of Economic Theory 113, 199–222.].     

A note on the AHP and expected value theory

It is shown here that one cannot simply take columns of numbers, normalize them and add to obtain results corresponding to operations in the AHP. This is what traditional expected value theory using a single scale would lead one to do. Care needs to be exercised. What one must do is to interpret the data represented by each column according to relative importance to a decision maker so that the alternatives under each criterion are pairwise compared according to the fundamental scale used to represent judgments. This procedure then leads to a set of vectors which belong to the same ratio scale and they can now be combined by using the weights of the criteria.     

人力资本当期价值计量理论与方法创新

通过研究，提出了人力资本当期价值计量理论与方法，试图解决长期未能解决的人力资本价值计量难题，实现了人力资本价值计量的重大创新。     

运用边际优势理论促进我国企业海外投资

我国加入WTO后,由于世界经济一体化,传统的以国际贸易为主的世界经济格局逐渐被打破,代之而起的是跨国公司为主体的国际直接投资新格局。近年来,我国企业海外投资发展很快。据商务部统计,截止2002年6月底,中国在境外累计设立企业(不含金融类)已达到6758家,协议投资总额132亿美元,其中中方投资额为88.8亿美元。因此,如何不失时机地与世界各国进行经贸合作,参与国际竞争,发展我国     

Mapping walkability. A subjective value theory approach

The analysis of urban walkability has been extensively explored in the last decades. Despite this growing attention, there is a lack of studies attentive on how citizens' values, individual abilities and urban environment favour or hinder the propensity to walk. Hence, there is a need to explore how preferences and values of citizens vary in space in order to design walkability policies able to improve the capability set of citizens. In this perspective, the design of spatial decision tools aimed to plann public policies for the development of walkable cities needs further investigation. We propose a Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method aimed to elaborate walkability decision maps for different groups of citizens that reflect their capability to walk in the urban environment. We tested the method in the city of Alghero (Italy). First, we analysed walkability under a normative model named CAWS; then we made a survey with 358 participants in order to study the driving values that influence their choice to walk and finalised to build an evaluation model attentive to individual differences. Cluster analysis was employed to group citizens into 11 groups based on their sociodemographic characteristics and preferences on spatial criteria of walkability. Finally, by integrating GIS with MCDA we built a set of decision maps representative of the walkability of the 11 groups of citizens. Results highlight the importance of citizens’ values for policy design, allow the interpersonal comparison among individuals and group preferences and give new suggestions for the formulation of walkability oriented urban policies. Moreover, the results confirm the usability of the general method as a decision support tool supporting the design of urban policies.     

Forecasting the urban skyline with extreme value theory

The world’s urban population is expected to grow fifty percent by the year 2050 and exceed six billion. The major challenges confronting cities, such as sustainability, safety, and equality, will depend on the infrastructure developed to accommodate the increase. Urban planners have long debated the consequences of vertical expansion—the concentration of residents by constructing tall buildings—over horizontal expansion—the dispersal of residents by extending urban boundaries. Yet relatively little work has predicted the vertical expansion of cities and quantified the likelihood and therefore urgency of these consequences.We regard tall buildings as random exceedances over a threshold and use extreme value theory to forecast the skyscrapers that will dominate the urban skyline in 2050 if present trends continue. We predict forty-one thousand skyscrapers will surpass 150 meters and 40 floors, an increase of eight percent a year, far outpacing the expected urban population growth of two percent a year. The typical tall skyscraper will not be noticeably taller, and the tallest will likely exceed one thousand meters but not one mile. If a mile-high skyscraper is constructed, it will hold fewer occupants than many of the mile-highs currently designed. We predict roughly three-quarters the number of floors of the Mile-High Tower, two-thirds of Next Tokyo’s Sky Mile Tower, and half the floors of Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Illinois—three prominent plans for a mile-high skyscraper. However, the relationship between floor and height will vary considerably across cities.     

公用事业产品定价的市场机制与政府规制

城市公用事业是典型的垄断性产业,通过城市公用事业地域与网络垄断性、外部性、公益与营利双重性分析,论证了政府价格规制之必要。其次分析了以新古典经济学和凯恩斯经济学作为逻辑理论基础的西方国家城市公用事业价格规制,及其逐步形成的公共利益理论、俘获理论、寻租理论以及放松规制乃至取消规制的演化过程。最后深入剖析我国城市公用事业存在的规制单一、价格倒逼、补偿缺位,监管虚设等问题,继而提出了强化市场定价、设计经济杠杆、完善社会监督、加强政府监管、构建价格体系等政策建议,以期实现政府规制与市场化融合,提升规制的公平、公正与效能。     

市政公用事业改革为城市发展注入活力

作者认为 ,改革开放以后 ,城市市政公用事业有了长足进步 ,主要表现在 :城建资金总量提高 ,能力建设增长迅速 ;城市基础设施“欠帐”问题初步解决 ,城市面貌极大改观 ;市场化改革取得进展 ,供应效率有提高。成就的取得在于观念、机制和体制的转变。     

Existence of smooth utilities on Banach lattices

In this paper, we focus our attention on the representability of a preference relation by differentiable utility functions when the consumption sets belong to an infinite dimensional commodity space. We obtain sufficient conditions for the existence of a C^r function representing a preference relation defined on an open subset of a Banach lattice.     

公允价值本质探讨——以价值理论为基础

从价值理论的角度,可揭示出公允价值的本质：在现实的不完全市场中,公允价值是对真实效用价值的近似衡量,是以市场为基础、提供可靠且相关信息的独立的计量属性。与历史成本法相比,公允价值计量在反映真实性、中立性和可证实性方面都具有优势。金融危机中受到指责的应是对公允价值计量的误操作,而非公允价值本身。     

Total Labour Requirements and Value Added Productivity of Labour in the Process of Economic Development

When the inverse of the value added productivity of labour is regressed on total labour requirements (which is equivalent to labour values), a significant relationship is obtained. This indicates that the value added productivity of labour can be explained by total labour requirements (labour values). The mean value of the regression coefficients is about 1.7. The regression coefficients have a tendency to increase during the process of rapid economic development and to decrease afterwards. Such movements are explained by value added linkages. This study is based on input–output analysis, where total labour requirements per monetary unit of output and the value added productivity of labour are calculated for each of 24 industries in Japan, Korea and USA, every 5 years between 1960 to 1985.     

Characterization of the existence of semicontinuous weak utilities

In this paper we characterize the existence of semicontinous weak utilities for acyclic binary relations. We shall reobtain directly from that result sufficient conditions that are available in the literature.     

Educational Development and Labour Markets

For over a century and a half, there have been cyclical phases ofsaturation and shortage in the numbers of students enrolled at German and Prussian universities. Starting from thisobservations, this article constructs a neoclassical glutting theory. A two-fold hypothesis is put forward. Firstly,the behaviour of students in their choice of curriculum depends on the expected rewards. Indeed, the allocation of studentsto the various faculties depends on the comparative yields of the latter in terms of expected earnings and job availabilityin the corresponding professional sectors. Thus, the rewards expected by a student are represented by the earnings on thelabour market at a given moment and that he or she considers to be sustainable in time. Secondly, an attraction phenomenonmay appear for certain curricula when a shortage occurs in different professional sectors. Once the shortagehas been made up, the demand effect continues as a result of delay in the perception of the situation by young people.This may gradually lead to comparative over-production of qualifieduniversity leavers. This unbalanced situation diverts new cohorts ofstudents to other sectors ofeducation and may cause a new shortage, finally resulting in acyclical movement modulated according to job availability.