The Boom and the Slump: a Causal Account of the 1990s/2000s and the 1920s/1930s

Not all booms are alike, nor are slumps. The institutions and the shocks are never exactly the same. Yet the late 1990s boom, and its unwinding, strikingly parallel the boom of the roaring 1920s, the deep decline into the early 1930s andonly a partial rebound. Both experiences began with an investment boom, then a downturn in investment while consumption held up. Economic activity closely tracked investment. The realizations of extraordinary productivity gains were present in the problematic and incomplete recovery of the 1930s, which suggests the possibility that return to the medium‐term natural rate of unemployment may be a rather long process. I expect the rest of the decade to resemble the rest of the 1930s – a limited recovery with investment and employment below historical norms.     

Accumulation pattern of the Brazilian economy in the 1990s and 2000s

This paper investigates the dynamic relationships among income distribution, debt ratio and capital accumulation in the Brazilian economy in the 1990s and 2000s. One explanation for the relatively slow growth of the Brazilian economy is the relatively low rate of investment. The paper presents an econometric model, based on Nishi, to investigate the causes of instability in investment in the period. It concludes that the Brazilian economy since the economic opening presents a debt-burdened pattern of capital accumulation.     

环境会计的计量与信息披露模式研究

随着经济的发展和环境问题的日益突出，企业的环境经济活动已纳入企业的财务评价体系。环境会计就是适应这种需求而诞生的新兴会计学科。环境会计所要解决的一个重要问题是如何将其转化为会计指标，以便对其进行确认、计量和披露。     

Puerto Rico in the 1970s and 1980s: Crisis of the Development Model

In his institutional economic essay on "Taxation in Chicago and Philadelphia" (published in 1895) John R. Commons addresses property tax assessment. He demonstrates that the revenue is not just a question of the tax rate and the distribution of the tax burden but also one of constitutional requirements and how the taxes are assessed. His essay is reviewed with regard to his later work, subsequent Institutional Economics, and the social provisioning of the market for professional tax advice. The degree of liabilities is defining characteristics of the differences between the United States and Germany.     

Is the Fed’s news perception different from the private sector’s?

The recent literature on monetary policy has dedicated considerable attention to modelling agents’ processing of information about the future in real time. This paper contributes to this growing strand by investigating the implied differences in the so-called news shocks estimated from the standard New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model using the real-time data sets from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and the Federal Reserve’s Greenbook (GB) forecasts. Alternative specifications with either the SPF or GB forecasts aim to delineate the differences in the private sector’s and the Fed’s expectations of future macroeconomic outcomes and identify the differences in their perception of news shocks. Our results indicate that while the demand news shocks have very similar distributions in the two datasets, the monetary and cost-push news shocks from the models estimated on the GB data tend to be larger than those from the SPF. These findings suggest that the Federal Reserve’s forecasting methods allow for more variation in future outcomes than the SPF’s. These findings mesh well with the extant literature on the superiority of the Fed’s forecasts relative to the private sector’s and provide a structural explanation for the source of this superiority.     

A note on Canadian migration to the United States during the 1980s and 1990s

Considerable media attention had been directed towards the flow of highly talented Canadians to the United States in the 1990s. There are firm theoretical reasons, however, to believe that qualitative differences in migration began as early as the 1980s, owing to the widening distribution of earnings and the related increased returns to education in the United States relative to Canada, both of which could result in qualitative improvements in the migration flow. US immigration policy remained essentially unchanged during the 1980s, but changed markedly in the 1990s owing to the implementation of the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) and its successor, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). We use a flexible empirical approach to document these changes in immigrant quality using 1980, 1990 and 2000 US census data. Our results suggest that improvements in Canadian immigrant quality occurred during the 1990s, but these also happened earlier, casting doubt on the hypothesis of improving Canadian immigrant quality in the 1990s. Quantile regressions also show that improvement in the entry quality of immigrants was not limited to the upper tail of the earnings distribution.     

20世纪30～40年代毛泽东对民粹主义的批判--兼论新民主主义理论的形成和发展

民粹主义否认资本主义的历史作用,主张从农村村社直接过渡到社会主义.20世纪30～40年代,在对民粹主义保持高度警惕,进行深刻批判的基础上,毛泽东为中国选择了一条经由新民主主义过渡到社会主义的正确道路,形成和发展了新民主主义理论.     

The tale of the tails: Canadian income inequality in the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract.  We present new evidence on levels and trends in after-tax income inequality in Canada between 1980 and 2000. We argue that existing data sources may miss changes in the tails of the income distribution, and that many of the changes in the income distribution have been in the tails. For this reason, we turn to an alternative source. In particular, we construct data on after-tax and transfer income using Census files augmented with predicted taxes based on information available from administrative tax data. Using these data, we find that Canadian after-tax inequality levels are substantially higher than has been previously recognized, primarily because income levels are lower at the bottom of the distribution than in commonly used survey data. We also find larger long-term increases in after-tax income inequality and far more variability over the economic cycle. This raises interesting questions about the role of the tax and transfer system in mitigating both trends and fluctuations in market income inequality.     

From socialism in the 1900s to socialism in the 2000s: the rise of liberal socialism

In the twentieth century, Europe and North America were at the epicentre of the century-long conflict between capitalism and socialism; more specifically, between the rule of law and the rule through law. By the early 1990s, socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe decayed from within leaving in its wake economic misery and intellectual emptiness. Yet, socialism is raising its head once again. This new variant of socialism, which I call ‘liberal socialism’, has one critical difference that sets it apart from its predecessors. Unlike all three types of socialism in the last century – Fascism, National Socialism and Communism – liberal socialism is not imposed from the top down; it is emerging from the bottom up. The incentive effects of increasing redistributional governmental programmes map a road to liberal socialism by influencing the median voter and weakening private property rights. However, election results in many European countries, and at state and local levels in the United States, suggest that the median voter has not moved to the left. At the same time, economic analysis and empirical evidence have established the economic efficiency of credible and stable private property rights relative to all other property rights arrangements. Thus, liberal socialism is a real threat to the rule of law but its success is far from certain.     

试述我国股市有效性的研究方法及检验

本文围绕我国股市的效率展开,意欲对其是否有效进行检验。指出市场 效率不是一个简单的问题,以主观选择的有限的数据得出的结论,往往因人而异,但总可以以主流的状况表示市场的状况。结论是：我国股市尚未达到弱型效率。     

Pit closures in the British coal industry: a comparison of the 1960s and 1980s

The postwar development of the British coal industry has been punctuated by two large-scale pit closure programmes - in the 1960s and the 1980s. For many commentators these represent the final stages of the inevitable and terminal decline of the industry and thus the task facing government is how best to mediate the conflict between economic and social efficiency. The argument of this paper is that rationalisation of capacity was perceived by management as the best way of reconciling the often conflicting external constraints placed on the industry by government. Accordingly, pit closures are viewed as the outcome of specific policies pursued by both management and government and should not be seen as an inherent feature of the industry.     

入世后企业品牌竞争与企业文化建设

加入WTO后,标志我国进入与国际经济接轨新时代,我国将全方位、多层次、多领域对外开放,将在更大范围和更深程度上参与国际经济竞争与合作。作为市场竞争主体的企业,面临新的考验和挑战。坚持与时俱进,建设优秀的企业文化,创立企业品牌,提高企业竞争力,这是当前亟待研究和解决的一个重大课题。     

Continuing Progress? Trends in Occupational Segregation in the United States over the 1970s and 1980s

This study uses comparable data on 470 detailed occupations from the 1970, 1980, and 1990 Censuses to analyze trends in occupational segregation in the United States in the 1980s and compare them in detail to the 1970s experience of declining segregation. We find that the trend towards reduced segregation did indeed continue into the 1980s at only a slightly slower pace. In both decades, changes in sex composition within occupations accounted for the major share of the decline in segregation (compared to changes in the mix of occupations in the economy). We also find that the pattern of changes in the sex composition of occupations and in the employment distribution of workers that produced the observed reductions in segregation were remarkably similar in each of these two periods. This similarity potentially poses some problems for the future. As women continue to enter the same areas, resegregation, which we found to have relatively moderate effects in the 1970s and 1980s, becomes an increasing possibility. Continued progress towards reducing occupational segregation requires that women succeed in entering a broader range of traditionally male occupations and/or a greater flow of men into traditionally female occupations.