Veto Players and Central Bank Gold Sales

This paper offers a critique of the increasingly prevalent argument that the late twentieth century saw a ‘financialisation’ of capitalism anchored in the USA, the UK, and other leading Western economies. The objective of the paper is not to claim that there has been no such structural mutation, but that the studies which allegedly demonstrate this mutation are compromised by the anaemic geographies that structure and animate them. Such studies, the paper argues, fetishise the national scale and, in doing so, offer a restricted and potentially misleading reading of trends such as, most notably, historic growth in the share of corporate profits accruing to ‘finance’ within individual countries. Examining empirical data for the UK, but explicitly incorporating the international perspective typically missing from existing studies of financialisation, the paper points to the vital role of international expansion by UK financial institutions in growing the financial sector's share of profits. Whether so-called ‘financialisation’ has also contributed to this growth remains, the paper submits, open to question.     

Presidential Reputation and the Veto

This paper develops a dynamic model of the bargaining between a legislature and an executive with veto power. The dynamic nature of the model provides the executive with incentives to use the veto as a reputation building device in order to gain more favorable legislative outcomes. The model illustrates that the implicit threat of building a reputation may cause the legislature will be more accommodating in its proposals to the executive. The model illustrates the possibility of a ``honeymoon period' of legislative accommodation followed by a decline in the president's influence. This paper also explores ways in which the legislature might mitigate the effects of presidential reputation building.     

The Executive Veto: Purpose, Procedure, and Paradox

American governments, federal and state, leave a gap in legislative representation: global majorities are practically silent compared with local ones. An executive veto can right the balance. But prevailing procedural designs are fraught with paradox. I offer a simple new design that avoids paradox, can be instituted without constitutional amendment, and enhances both legislative and executive responsibility.     

Veto players and foreign aid provision

This study investigates how the political institutions of developed economies influence their foreign assistance. Specifically, we argue that the number of effective veto players has a negative effect on the volume of aid provision. To provide foreign assistance, the incumbent government in a donor country must have unanimous support from all effective veto players in policy making. Thus, it has more barriers to overcome when the polity is characterized by many and preference-wise heterogeneous veto players. By examining the official development assistance outflows of 27 OECD countries for the period of 1977–2006, we find empirical patterns that corroborate our argument.     

Veto power in committees: an experimental study

Veto power consists of the right of one or more players to unilaterally block decisions but without the ability to unilaterally secure their preferred outcome. Our experiment shows that (i) committees with a veto player take longer to reach decisions (are less efficient) and generate less consensus than without a veto player, (ii) veto power substantially enhances proposer’s power, and (iii) non-veto players are substantially more willing to compromise than veto players. We relate our results to the theoretical literature on the impact of veto power as well as to concerns about the impact of veto power in real-life committees.     

Delegation versus Veto in Organizational Games of Strategic Communication

In organizations, principals use decision rules to govern a more informed agent's behavior. We compare two such rules: delegation and veto. Recent work suggests that delegation dominates veto unless the divergence in preferences between the principal and the agent is so large that informative communication cannot take place. We show that this result does not hold in a reasonable model of veto versus delegation. In this model, veto dominates delegation for any feasible divergence in preferences, if it induces the agent to shut down low quality proposals that he would otherwise implement and if such projects have sufficient likelihood.     

Federal Reserve System Rising: The Expansion of Board Veto Authority on the Eve of the Great Depression

Most scholars agree that restrictive Federal Reserve System (FRS) policies contributed to the depression’s duration and severity. FRS policy mistakes are attributed to faulty ideas, poor leadership, and decentralised institutions. Extant scholarship treats ideas as constraints which systematically led policy-makers astray. This paper instead focuses on the dual roles ideas play in shaping institutions and uniting coalitions behind institutional projects. It traces the rise and fall of New York FRS Governor Benjamin Strong’s ‘great idea’ that the FRS should promote international monetary stability. Declining support for New York’s internationalism enabled a rural Board faction to expand its veto power from 1928 to 1930. In the critical year following the 1929 stock market crash, Board obstruction of New York FRS attempts to lower its discount and bill rates caused its investments to fall faster than the system’s bond portfolio expanded, forcing outstanding system credit to contract. Beyond showing that the Board’s pre-depression rise mattered, the paper speaks to broader debates about how ideas become empowered to shape policies and inform interests.     

以德治国必须以德治“网”——度论建设我国社会主义网络道德

因特网（Internet）技术是计算机网络技术的最重要成果，它给信息的传播方式带来了一场革命性的变化，同时深深地影响着人类生活的各个方面，它不仅给人们提供了快捷的通讯服务和全球性的信息沟通，而且还给人们带来了极为丰富的知识宝库。然而神奇的互联网给人们带来前所未有     

“以德治国”必先“以德治官”

江泽民同志在全国宣传部长会议上强调指出，要在依法治国的同时，以德治国。以德治国，就是以马列主义、毛泽东思想、邓小平理论为指导，以为人民服务为核心，以集体主义为原则，以爱祖国、爱人民、爱劳动、爱科学、爱社会主义为基本要求，以职业道德、社会公德、家庭美德的建     

Big Players in Slovenia

The subjectivism of Austrian economics helps to explain the statistical fact of long memory in asset prices. The theory of Big Players is an Austrian approach to understanding the effects of discretionary policymaking in markets. It leads to implications that can be tested with statistics. In particular, Big Players induce herding and, thereby, an increase of persistence in asset prices. A recent episode in Slovenian monetary theory provides a case study. This case study adds to a set of similar studies, all tending to support the theory of Big Players.     

Tournaments of Weakly Heterogeneous Players

We consider three prominent tournament formats—contests, binary elimination tournaments, and round-robin tournaments—in the case when players are heterogeneous in their abilities but the heterogeneity is, in a well-defined sense, weak. Using linear approximation, we characterize equilibrium strategies and payoffs in the three tournament games and compare them to the benchmark symmetric case of identical players. We describe small deviations from the symmetric equilibria by elasticities of a player's equilibrium effort with respect to her own ability and the abilities of her rivals. Our results only require general symmetry and smoothness assumptions but not specific functional forms for the probabilities of winning in tournaments. We show that, in equilibrium: (i) a player's effort and payoff depend on her rivals' abilities in a model-independent way, either through the average ability of the field (for static games), or through the properly discounted average ability of the field (for dynamic elimination tournaments); (ii) players respond stronger to changes in their own relative abilities than to changes in their rivals' relative abilities; (iii) aggregate effort (dissipated rent) does not change compared to the benchmark case; (iv) it is not possible to manipulate aggregate effort through seeding in binary elimination tournaments, although optimal seeding schemes for other purposes can be identified; and (v) balanced seeding and a uniform distribution of relative abilities cancel out the dependence of a player's effort on her rivals' abilities in binary elimination tournaments.     

Drug Prohibition and Individual Virtue

As far as economics is concerned, the market for drugs, as in all other cases, maximizes the welfare of all who participate in it, at least in the ex ante sense. Legalization—like the repeal of alcohol prohibition—will also help solve drug related problems such as crime, impurities leading to death and child abuse. Nor does it follow from the fact that such substances are addictive and harmful that using them must be coercive, and should be banned. Also rejected is the ‘public health’ argument that legalization would result in too great a rate of addiction.     

上天有好生之德

“生生之德”是中国文化的基本精神,“生”的意义不仅仅表现为生命,更表现为生生不息、和谐有序的深层次含义,尤其在儒家的世界观里,宇宙的本质即是生生不息的生命动态过程。中国自古强调“天人合一”的思想,在人与自然的关系中人不仅充分体现出主体性,同时也生发出“民胞物与”的极具包容的博大情怀。天地有四时,人体亦有春夏秋冬,以人道应天道,才是构建人与自然和谐统一的应循之道。     

试论以德治国

江泽民同志在全国宣传部长会议上的重要讲话，是全面开创新世纪宣传思想工作新局面的重要文献。讲话内容丰富，意蕴深邃，其中特别是首次提出了以德治国的重要思想，强调把依法治国与以德治国紧密结合起来。认真学习领会贯彻这一重要思想，深刻理解其思想内涵，对于在新形势下加强精神文明建设，全面推进建设有中国特色社会主义各项事业，具有重大的现实意义。一以德治国重要思想的提出，是因为对一个国家的治理来说，法治与德治，从来都是相辅相成、相互促进的；这一重要思想也是对古今中外一切国家治政经验的深刻总结江泽民同志在讲话中指…     

构建“以德治国”的治理系统

去年以来,江泽民同志多次提出并阐述了“以德治国”的重要思想,这是对邓小平理论的重要发展。改革开放以来,邓小平同志反复强调重视思想道德建设,坚持两手抓,两手都要硬。但我们过去主要都是从精神文明建设同物质文明建设的关系的角度来认识社会主义精神文明建设的地位和作用,在实践中也主要是着眼于把物质文明与精神文明建设有机结合起来,使两者相辅相成,相互促进。而“以德治国”的重要     

Competing Against Experienced and Inexperienced Players

In certain markets success may depend on how well participants anticipate the behavior of other participants who have varying amounts of experience. Understanding if and how peoples behavior depends on competitors level of experience is important since in most markets participants have varying amounts of experience. Examining data from two new experimental studies similar to the beauty contest game first studied by Nagel (1995), the results indicate that (1) players with no experience behave the same against competitors with and without experience but (2) players quickly learn to condition their behavior on competitors experience level, causing (3) behavior to stop moving toward the equilibrium whenever new players enter the game and (4) experienced players to earn more money than less experienced players. The paper discusses the implications of the results for understanding and modeling behavior in markets in which participants have different amounts of experience.This revised version was published online in May 2005 with corrections to the acknowledgements.     

企业核心能力:借助价值链形成竞争优势

企业竞争优势来自于企业内部的核心能力，那么核心能力又是如何形成竞争优势？作者认为核心能力借助于价值链形成竞争优势；核心能力重点围绕价值链的战略环节形成竞争优势。