Politics and Fed policymaking: The more things change the more they remain the same

This paper seeks to explain why the Fed's professed monetarist control strategy tends to break down at politically critical moments. It identifies strong political forces that constrain the Fed to dampen the size of short-run increases in nominal interest rates. Because interest increases impose heavy burdens on economically vulnerable but politically powerful sectors, Fed officials are compelled to give increasing weight to interest-rate targets whenever accelerating inflation or other forces threaten sharp cumulative movements in the level of nominal interest rates. The paper argues further that the Fed's ultimate political function is to be a policy scapegoat for incumbent politicians, showing how well this hypothesis can explain the perennial incompleteness of Fed control strategies and the Fed's principal bureaucratic features.     

The interrelatedness of global equity markets, money markets, and foreign exchange markets

This article investigates different aspects of global financial markets, specifically relationships among equity markets, money markets, and foreign exchange markets across countries. To represent the three major financial markets of the world, Japan is the proxy for Asia, Germany is the proxy for Europe, and the United States is the proxy for North America. Strong evidence exists that international money markets and international equity markets are becoming increasingly integrated over time. This article incorporates foreign exchange values as partial determinants of equity returns and money market returns and investigates the interactions among these three asset markets from a global perspective.     

环交所：为碳交易试点开足马力

为逐步建立中国国内碳排放交易市场,推动运用市场机制以较低成本实现2020年中国控制温室气体排放的行动目标,2011年10,日,国家发改委宣布,北京、天津、上海、重庆、广东、湖北、深圳等七个省市获准开展碳排放权交易试点工作。     

朱戈:创新环境权益定价,为低碳发展融资

"绿色发展"作为中共十八届五中全会提出的"五大发展理念"之一,已经成为中国经济转型的内在要求.为了落实绿色发展理念,北京市"十三五"规划纲要提出了"建设绿色低碳生态家园"、"加快建设全国科技创新中心"和"加快推进产业转型升级"等发展目标.在这样的政策背景下,北京产权交易所(简称:北交所)一直高度重视通过市场手段及金融工具推动节能环保和产业转型,服务于中国绿色发展大局.近年来,北交所的中央单位及市属单位产权交易服务业务中,节能环保及绿色发展项目已经成为业务开拓的重点之一,占比也不断提升.     

Asian equity markets: growth,opportunities, and challenges

Asian equity markets have grown significantly in size since the early 1990s, driven by strong international investor inflows, growing regional financial integration, capital account liberalization, and structural improvements to markets. The development of equity markets provides a more diversified set of channels for financial intermediation to support growth, thus bolstering medium-term financial stability. At the same time, as highlighted by the May–June 2006 market corrections, the increasing role of stock markets potentially changes the nature of macroeconomic and financial stability risks, as well as the policy requirements for dealing with these risks.     

The influence of institutional contexts on the relationship between voluntary carbon disclosure and carbon emission performance

This article examines the relationship between the level of voluntary carbon disclosure (VCD) and carbon emission performance and how the institutional context influences this relationship. Using a sample of Global 500 firms participating in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) over the period 2008–2015, the evidence shows a negative relationship between voluntary carbon disclosure and carbon emission performance, which is consistent with the legitimacy theory that VCD may be undertaken for the purposes of legitimation. However, stringent carbon institutions appear to restrict legitimation attempts and help better reflect underlying performance.     

Tracking the numbers: Across accounting and finance,organizations and markets

This introductory essay reviews recent advances in the emergent field of social studies of finance (SSF) and, subsequently, sets out to illustrate how a closer engagement with SSF might benefit research interests in accounting and vice versa. Finally, it provides a sketch of how mutual engagements across the fields might be intensified in what is identified as an emerging accounting and finance track in the discourse of social science. The prospects of a broader field of research exploring the use of financial numbers across social settings, markets, organizations and cultures are projected, and the possibility of articulating a strong sociological programme of research is considered.     

Housing and the mortgage securities markets: Review,outlook, and policy recommendations

During the 1980s, strong demographic demand for housing created a bulging need for mortgage credit. The mortgage market has creatively accommodated this need through extensive securitization of residential mortgages. This process greatly facilitated the financing of housing demand. During this decade, however, the scheme of funding long-term mortgages with short-term deposits bankrupted savings institutions. A gigantic federal bailout for thrifts was finally required. In the 1990s, the weakening demographics and the resulting reduction in the demand for mortgage credit afford the federal government opportunities to reformulate its housing policies in terms of limiting federal insurance on consumer deposits, phasing out income tax deductibility of mortgage interest, and ensuring capital adequacy at federally sponsored credit agencies.     

Taxes, benefits, and careers: Complete versus incomplete markets

An incomplete-market life-cycle model with indivisible labor makes career lengths and human capital accumulation respond to labor tax rates and government supplied non-employment benefits. We compare aggregate and individual outcomes in this individualistic incomplete-market model with those in a comparable collectivist representative-family model with employment lotteries and complete-insurance markets. The incomplete- and complete-market structures assign leisure to different types of individuals who are distinguished by their human capital and age. These microeconomic differences distinguish the two models in terms of how macroeconomic aggregates respond to some types of government supplied non-employment benefits, but remarkably, not to labor tax changes.     

Mediating instruments and making markets: Capital budgeting, science and the economy

We examine in this paper how certain instruments link science and the economy through acting on capital budgeting decisions, and in doing so how they contribute to the process of making markets. We use the term “mediating instruments” to refer to those practices that frame the capital spending decisions of individual firms and agencies, and that help to align them with investments made by other firms and agencies in the same or related industries. Our substantive focus is on the microprocessor industry, and the roles of “Moore’s Law” and “technology roadmaps”. We examine the ways in which these instruments envision a future, and how they link a multitude of actors and domains in such a way that the making of future markets for microprocessors and related devices can continue. The paper begins with a discussion of existing literatures on capital budgeting, science studies, and recent economic sociology, together with the reasoning behind the notion of “mediating instruments”. We then address the substantive issues in three stages. Firstly, we consider the role of “Moore’s Law” in shaping the fundamental expectations of an entire set of industries about rates of increase in the power and complexity of semiconductor devices, and the timing of those increases. Secondly, we examine the roles of “technology roadmaps” in translating the simplified imperatives of Moore’s Law into a framework that can guide and encourage the myriad of highly uncertain and confidential investment decisions of firms and other agencies. Thirdly, we explore one particular and recent example of major capital investment, that of post-optical lithography. The paper seeks to help remedy the empirical deficit in studies of capital budgeting practices, and to demonstrate that investment is much more than a matter of valuation techniques. We argue, through the case of the microprocessor industry, for greater attention to investment as an inter-firm and inter-agency process, thus lessening the fixation in studies of capital budgeting on the traditional hierarchical and bounded organization. In addition, we seek to extend and illustrate empirically the richness of the notion of “mediating instruments” for researchers in accounting, science studies, and economic sociology.     

Financial markets,financial dependence,and the allocation of capital

We explore one specific channel through which finance promotes growth: the allocation of capital. Using international industrial data, we find that countries with developed financial markets invest more in growing industries, and pull out more funds of declining ones. Most interestingly, this pattern is more eminent for those industries more dependent on external financing. Various robustness checks show that the results are not driven by reverse causality, omitted variables, specific countries or industries.     

A map of the nanoworld: Sizing up the science, politics, and business of the infinitesimal

Mapping out the eight main nodes of nanotechnology discourse that have emerged in the past decade, we explore how various scientific, social, and ethical islands of discussion have developed, been recognized, and are being continually renegotiated. We do so by (1) identifying the ways in which scientists, policy makers, entrepreneurs, educators, and environmental groups draw boundaries on issues relating to nanotechnology; (2) describing concisely the perspectives from which these boundaries are drawn; and (3) exploring how boundaries on nanotechnology are marked and negotiated through contestations of power among various nodes of nanotechnology discourse.     

Hong Kong housing markets: Overview,tenure choice,and housing demand

This paper presents an overview of housing markets and a cross-sectional analysis of housing demand in Hong Kong. Disturbances from political events have produced price upheavals in property prices; long-term inflation and low interest rates provide a strong stimulus for a sustained price surge in the housing market. Household income seems to have relatively little bearing on recent development in the market, especially when demand for housing has become more investment-oriented.With the data from the 1991 Population Census of Hong Kong, we find in the cross-section study that permanent and transitory incomes, rather than current income, provide better estimates in the tenure choice equation. The results also indicate that family size and the number of elderly persons affects ownership. Renter expenditure and tenure choice decisions are linked by using the two-stage estimation procedure of Lee and Trost (1978). No correlation was found between renter expenditure and tenure choice. Further, the two-stage approach does not seem to be superior to the OLS approach in the estimation of the rental expenditure equations.