The devil in the details: Non-convexities in ecosystem service provision

Standard economic theory is built on key assumptions regarding concavity and convexity, particular with respect to the production possibility frontier. Non-convexity is readily demonstrated using a two species conventional model. Now that ecosystem services are growing in prominence it is important to confirm that typical natural resource production relations obey these conditions. If not, innocently prescribing price or allocation policies can lead to a minimum rather than a maximum or to wrong equilibrium solutions in general. This is a particular danger in decentralized pricing systems.     

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.     

Heavy tails and upper-tail inequality: The case of Russia

Motivated, in part, by the recent surge of interest in robust inequality measurement, cross-country inequality comparisons, applications of heavy-tailed distributions and the study of global and upper-tail inequality, this paper focuses on robust analysis of heavy-tailedness properties and inequality in the upper tails of income distribution in Russia, as measured, mainly, by its tail indices. The study is based on recently developed approaches to robust inference on the degree of heavy-tailedness and their implications for the analysis of upper-tail inequality discussed in the paper. Among other results, the paper provides robust estimates of heavy-tailedness parameters and tail indices for Russian income distribution and their comparisons with the benchmark values in developed economies reported in the previous literature. The estimates point out to important similarity between heavy-tailedness properties of income distribution and their implications for the analysis of upper-tail income inequality in Russia and those in developed markets.     

Normal probability plots and the estimation of distribution tails

Quantiles used in normal probability plots can be estimated more accurately from the maximum entropy (ME) distribution than from the order statistics of the sample distribution. The symmetric ME distribution yields additional improvements.     

The devil is in the details: Capital stock estimation and aggregate productivity growth—An application to the Spanish economy

Portuguese Economic Journal - The variables that contribute to explaining the major puzzles and paradoxes in macroeconomics and economic growth literature always appear related, directly or...     

Homogeneity and symmetry testing when the error distribution has fat tails

The Laitinen (1978) and Meisner (1979) experiments are extended to error distributions that are fat-tailed mixtures of normal distributions.     

Correction to: The devil is in the details: Capital stock estimation and aggregate productivity growth—An application to the Spanish economy

Portuguese Economic Journal -     

The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy

Most intellectuals would be pleased to have one major debate named after them. The Marxist economic historian Robert Brenner has managed the remarkable feat of unleashing two significant intellectual controversies. The first, in the historical journal Past & Present during the late 1970s and early 1980s, was provoked by his interpretation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early modern Europe. More recently, however, Brenner has switched his attention from the longue durée of European history to the economic dynamics of contemporary capitalism. In a massive journal-length article published in New Left Review in 1998 he offered a comparative analysis of the three major Western economies—the USA, Japan and Germany—from 1945 onwards, tracing the development of a protracted crisis of profitability that, Brenner contended, explained the ‘long downturn’ experienced by global capitalism since the early 1970s.     

全球化浪潮里的中国经济

一、全球化的发展趋势１．自由贸易成为世界贸易的发展方向,全球市场逐步融合为一体。随着贸易的迅猛发展,世界各国的贸易依存度不断提高,贸易在世界经济中的作用越来越重要。在１９８５～１９９５年的十年时间里,世界出口依存度上升了１倍多,在不同类型的国家中,除中等国家有所下降外,其他各类国家均有不同程度的上升。前世贸组织总干事鲁杰罗认为,今后２５年内将出现一个包括所有国家和地区的、没有歧视和强硬贸易保护主义的全球市场,即所谓的无疆界市场。由于有管理的自由贸易成为多边贸易体制和各国贸易政策的基石,世界贸易自…     

The functions of the family in the great society

Criticisms by Hodgson and others that Hayek and other Austrianscannot offer a theory of the family are responded to with adiscussion of the functions of the family in a market society.The family can be understood as a bridge between what Hayekterms ‘organisations’, or face-to-face social institutionsand ‘orders’, or the anonymous social institutionsof the Great Society. The family's necessary role is then linkedto familiar Hayekian themes of knowledge and incentives. Familieshelp us to learn the explicit and tacit social rules necessaryfor functioning in the wider world, and families are uniquelypositioned to do so, because it is those closest to us who havethe knowledge and incentives necessary to provide that learning.     

体验经济时代的旅游体验

体验经济是继农业经济、工业经济和服务经济之后的一种新的经济形态。旅游体验已成为体验经济时代旅游活动的主要表现形式。现代旅游不完全在于到过哪里,更多的是一种生活方式的体验,是人们满足了基本生理需求和物质需求之后追求的更高更新的精神需求,讲求的是旅游者的一种愉悦、快乐的经历,就其实质而言,是一种旅程和暂居的体验,旅游活动的天然体验属性决定了现代旅游业将是体验经济的时代先锋。     

某高速公路滑坡特征及治理措施研究

以河南某高速公路高填方路段滑坡工程为背景,现场勘探了滑坡变形特性,分析了滑坡发生的诱发因素,即地形和地层特征以及持续降雨,在基于强度折减的有限元分析基础上,提出了采用抗滑桩并辅以锚杆和预应力锚索的处理方案,现场实施效果良好,可为类似工程的设计提供借鉴。     

金融体系的顺周期性问题解读

在信息不对称性和金融市场不完善条件下,金融体系自身具有顺周期变化的特点。金融加速器机制、《巴塞尔协议》的资本约束监管机制以及金融机构自身的行为都会导致信贷供给更为严重的顺周期性,并放大经济冲击、影响宏观政策的效果。而以美国为核心的金融资本主义模式进一步加重了金融体系的顺周期性。因此,对金融体系的顺周期性问题的相关研究成果值得梳理和借鉴。     

财务舞弊中存在的内部控制问题--对世界通信公司财务舞弊案之剖析

世界通信公司曾作为美国第二大长途电话公司,创造了美国资本市场有史以来规模最大的财务舞弊事件。通过对“线路成本”的调整,利用会计造假虚构了近110亿美元的利润。从其破产的案例中可以看出,世界通信公司治理机制的不完善,内部控制受到了极大的忽视,这也是造成世界通信巨大的财务舞弊最主要的原因。之后提出的《塞班斯法案》,要求建立企业财务报告的可靠性,运用真实可靠的会计信息加强对公司的内部控制和风险管理。因此,本文将通过分析世界通信财务舞弊的原因,以及对于防范企业财务舞弊强化内部控制的重要性。     

The Swing Voter's Curse in the Laboratory

This paper reports the first laboratory study of the swing voter's curse and provides insights on the larger theoretical and empirical literature on "pivotal voter" models. Our experiment controls for different information levels of voters, as well as the size of the electorate, the distribution of preferences and other theoretically relevant parameters. The design varies the share of partisan voters and the prior belief about a payoff relevant state of the world. Our results support the equilibrium predictions of the Feddersen–Pesendorfer model. The voters act as if they are aware of the swing voter's curse and adjust their behaviour to compensate. While the compensation is not complete and there is some heterogeneity in individual behaviour, we find that aggregate outcomes, such as efficiency, turnout and margin of victory, closely track the theoretical predictions.     

The lean times in the Peruvian economy

The growth rate of “nonprimary gross domestic product (GDP)” (Perú’s urban economy) dropped to 3.6 percent in 2014 and to 2.4 percent in 2015, far below the annual average of 7.3 percent recorded over the previous decade; moreover, an equally low growth rate of 2.8 percent per year is projected in 2016. In the macroeconomic history of Peru, the times of plenty —that is, the more or less prolonged booms—are also times of high prices of the commodities that the country exports; meanwhile, the lean times—that is, the more or less intense recessions in which economic activity slows down—are times of low commodity prices. This article describes the negative external shock undergone by the Peruvian economy and its recessionary and inflationary effects over 2014–15, analyzes the fiscal and monetary policies applied in response to the external shock, and outlines the macroeconomic challenges faced by the new government of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.     

经济发展的社会检讨

在当代中国经济迅猛发展的过程中,存在着许多约束性的因素,主要有：权力约束、环境约束、教育约束、社会关系约束和家庭关系约束等。要克服这些约束,必须做好以下几个方面的工作：加强社会主义精神文明建设,努力提高全民族的精神文化素质;加快改革进程,尽快实现由计划经济向市场经济的转化;加强法制建设,彻底实现有人治向法治的转变;切实贯彻落实环境问题是基本国策的战略思想,使环保观念深入人心;加快教育体制改革,彻底