Quality,experience, and monopoly: the Soviet market for weapons under Stalin1

Monopoly is a particular problem in markets where experience goods are traded, since the consumer cannot respond to bad experiences by switching repeat purchases to another supplier. New evidence shows how the defence ministry as buyer in the Soviet market for military goods responded to this problem by investing in an evaluation of quality prior to purchase, by showing reluctance to buy, and by exploiting the available non‐market means to influence the defence industry as supplier. The effectiveness of these stratagems was limited by the defence industry's counteractions and because the buyer had no choice but to come to a compromise with the supplier.     

控制权影响下的关联购销与上市公司价值——对限售股形成、禁售、解禁的三阶段分析

关联购销常被看作控股股东追求控制权收益的重要方式。控股股东追求的控制权收益不同,对关联购销的处理措施也必然呈现差异化,从而对公司业绩产生不同影响。论文以沪市2003—2011年制造业上市公司为样本,在股权分置改革以及限售股不断解禁的大背景下,研究不同控制权收益驱动的异常关联购销与企业价值的关系。论文研究发现,股权分置改革前,控股股东倾向于追求控制权私利,异常关联购销与企业价值显著负相关：股权分置改革后限售股解禁前,两者虽然仍为负相关关系但已不显著：限售股解禁后控股股东更倾向于提升企业价值获得共享收益,异常关联购销与企业价值呈现正相关倾向,但统计上不显著。     

判别分析模型在信用评价中的应用

本文利用线性判别分析建立信用评价模型,用来对中国2000年106家上市公司2000年96家上市公司进行两类模式（“好”、“差”）分类及三类模式（“好”、“中”、“差”）分类。对于线性判别分析法,又使用两种不同的方法进行判别分析：一种是利用SPSS统计软件对数据样本进行判别分析,称为LDA-SPSS方法：一种是利用原始样本数据推导建立线性判别分析模型,然后根据模型计算得到的结果对数据样本进行判别分析,称为LDA方法。仿真结果表明,无论是两类模式分类还是三类模式分类,LDA-SPSS的判别效果均优于LDA。但与多层感知器（MLP）相比,对两类模式分类,LDA-SPSS（100％）优于MLP（98．11％）,MLP又优于LDA LDA（95．28％）;对三类模式分类,LDA-SPSS（91．67％）优于LDA（82．29％）,LDA又优于MLP（79．17％）。     

浙江下渚湖湿地生态旅游开发策略探讨

生态旅游是湿地旅游的发展方向。下渚湖湿地生态旅游资源丰富,具备湿地生态旅游的良好基础。但下渚湖湿地生态旅游开发存在的一些问题,影响了湿地生态旅游的发展。下渚湖湿地生态旅游必须以可持续发展为指导,制订科学旅游规划,进行开发项目环境影响评价,完善生态旅游配套服务设施,提高公众生态意识,开发特色旅游产品和制定社区参与保障机制等,推动下渚湖湿地生态旅游健康发展。     

How rich countries became rich and why poor countries remain poor: It's the economic structure…duh!

Becoming a rich country requires being able to produce and export commodities that embody certain characteristics. We classify 779 commodities (exported) according to two dimensions: (1) sophistication (measured by the income content of the products exported) and (2) connectivity to other products (measured by how easy it is to ‘jump’ into other potential exports). We identify 88 “good” products (highly sophisticated and well connected products), 93 “bad” products (unsophisticated and poorly connected products), and 598 “middle” products. Then, we categorize 154 countries into four groups according to the export share of each of these three types of products. There are 21 countries whose export baskets contain at least 15% of “good” products; 41 countries with a significant share of relatively sophisticated and well connected products; 50 countries with a significant share of relatively unsophisticated and not well connected products; and 42 countries whose export basket contains at least 15% of “bad” products.     

Government Purchases and the Real Exchange Rate

Recent empirical research documents that an exogenous rise in government purchases in a given country triggers a persistent depreciation of its real exchange rate—which raises an important puzzle, as standard macro models predict an appreciation of the real exchange rate. This paper presents a simple model with limited international risk sharing that can account for the empirical real exchange rate response. When faced with a country-specific rise in government purchases, local households experience a negative wealth effect; they thus work harder, and domestic output increases. Under balanced trade (financial autarky) this supply-side effect is so strong that the terms of trade worsen, and the real exchange rate depreciates. In a bonds-only economy, an increase in government purchases triggers a real exchange rate depreciation, if the rise in government purchases is sufficiently persistent and/or labor supply is highly elastic.     

大型百货商场内部环境与人的购物行为初探——长沙市五一路平和堂百货商场调查报告

大型商场能够满足消费者的多项需求,但是,由于其建筑规模大、功能复杂,在内部空间导向上存在诸多问题。因此,创造良好的商业导向空间,能让消费者易于使用、乐于购物,从而产生比较好的社会和环境效益,满足业主最大限度地赚取商业利润。本文以平和堂的调研为例,就大型商场内部环境与消费者购买行为之间的联系展开分析。     

Executives' Legal Records and the Deterrent Effect of Corporate Governance

We study whether the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms varies depending on the characteristics of the executives subject to these mechanisms, namely their “psychological type,” as proxied by their history of legal infractions. In particular, we examine insider trading, where we can compare the trading behavior of different types of executives in the same firm. We find that “recordholder” executives, that is, those with prior legal infractions, earn significantly higher profits from purchases and sales than nonrecordholder executives. Furthermore, the profitability of both purchases and sales is significantly increasing in the severity of the infraction. Governance mechanisms, such as blackout policies, lower profits of executives with only traffic infractions; however, profits for executives with serious infractions appear insensitive to blackout policies. Insiders with serious infractions are also more likely to trade during blackout periods and before large information events and are more likely to report their trades to the SEC after the filing deadline. Collectively, our evidence suggests that while governance mechanisms can discipline executives with minor offenses, they appear largely ineffective for those with more serious infractions.     

Economic calculation and transaction costs: The case of the airline oversales auction system

According to Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps (2013, p. 123), Mises's critique of economic calculation under socialism renders him the originator of the economic analysis of property rights. This paper also suggests that implicit to Mises's impossibility theorem was also the origins of the theory of transaction costs. This raises the following question: what is the relationship, if any, between the process of economic calculation and the concept of transaction costs? Filtered through a Misesian lens, we argue that transaction costs are the costs of engaging in economic calculation. We illustrate our theoretical point utilizing the case of airline oversales auction system first proposed by Julian Simon (1968). In doing so, we reframe the problem of airline oversales from a transaction-cost approach, one in which property rights in airline seats are initially poorly defined. By doing so, we illustrate that resources expended to discover the valuable attributes of a good (in this case airline seats), the terms of exchange between potential trading partners, as well as enforcing the terms of an exchange, all of which are transaction costs, are also, by definition, the costs of calculating the exchange value of goods. Thus, the airlines oversales auction system is illustrative of an institutional solution to the problem of economic calculation via a reduction of transaction costs.     

融资融券交易风险及其法律控制

融资融券交易在我国已拉开序幕,其"杠杆性"特点决定了它的风险性。如何围绕融资融券交易可能引发的风险进行完善的法律控制,以避免及降低融资融券交易的风险,具有现实迫切性。文中基于风险控制的主体划分,对投资者、证券公司、证券市场所涉风险的法律控制进行了详细解析。     

The political economy of the Exchange Rate Mechanism

The apparent tendency of ERM countries other than Germany to experience high real exchange rates and to subsidize manufacturing is explained by a rational expectations model in which there is optimally asymmetric policy reaction to good and bad times—devaluation in bad, no revaluation in good. The resulting expected depreciation (at all times) causes inflation in normal and good times to be less than expected inflation, raising real wages and the real exchange rate, and creating pressures for subsidy of the traded sector.     

Direct and Spillover Effects of Unconventional Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies

This paper explores the direct effects and spillovers of unconventional monetary and exchange rate policies. We find that official purchases of foreign assets have a large positive effect on a country’s current account that diminishes considerably as capital mobility rises. There is an important additional effect through the lagged stock of official assets. Official purchases of domestic assets, or quantitative easing (QE), appear to have no significant effect on a country’s current account when capital mobility is high, but there is a modest positive impact when capital mobility is low. The effects of purchases of foreign assets spill over to other countries in proportion to their degree of international financial integration. We also find that increases in US bond yields are associated with increases in foreign bond yields and in stock prices, as well as with depreciations of foreign currencies, but that all of these effects are smaller on days of US unconventional monetary policy announcements. We develop a theoretical model that is broadly consistent with our empirical results and that highlights the potential usefulness of domestic unconventional policies as responses to the effects of foreign policies of a similar type.     

Leadership and Cultural Change: An Economic Analysis

The influence of culture on economic performance is analysed using a rational action economic model. Culture is defined as shared values and beliefs. It is shown that functionally useful values can reduce transaction costs and improve economic performance. Leadership is an important transmission mechanism where culture is concerned. Good leaders can improve economic performance but bad leaders can impair it. Good leaders promote a distinctive combination of values, including both altruism and deliberation in decision-making, whilst bad leaders promote a combination of selfishness and spontaneity. Bad leaders survive because it is easier for them to appropriate pecuniary rents, since they are uninhibited by moral scruples. The globalisation of the mass media has favoured bad leadership at the expense of good. Unless corrective policies are introduced, economic performance will deteriorate as the quality of leadership continues to fall.     

Information Uncertainty and Analyst Forecast Behavior*

Prior literature observes that information uncertainty exacerbates investor underreaction behavior. In this paper, I investigate whether, as professional investment intermediaries, sell‐side analysts suffer more behavioral biases in cases of greater information uncertainty. I show that greater information uncertainty predicts more positive (negative) forecast errors and subsequent forecast revisions following good (bad) news, which corroborates previous findings on the post‐analyst‐revision drift. The opposite effects of information uncertainty on forecast errors and subsequent forecast revisions following good versus bad news support the analyst underreaction hypothesis and are inconsistent with analyst forecast rationality or optimism suggested in prior literature.     

解读西方“定量宽松”政策与中国的对应

继2009年3月12日瑞士央行入市干预瑞士法郎加速“货币贬值”后,3月18日关联储宣布购买3000亿美元长期国债和1．25万亿美元抵押贷款证券,就此西方进入了“定量宽松”货币政策时期。为应对西方“定量宽松”货币政策的出台和加快国际货币体制的改革,中国人民银行行长周小川提出的在国际货币基金组织（IMF）现有的特别提款权（SDR）基础上,构建“超主权国际储备货币”的建议在经济学界引起了广泛的热议。     

Multiple equilibria in a cash-in-advance two-sector economy

We consider a two-sector infinite horizon economy with a fractional cash-in-advance constraint on consumption expenditures. This formulation allows us to consider a steady-state velocity of money that is strictly greater than one and, therefore, provides a more plausible framework than the standard formulation in which all the consumption purchases are paid cash. We prove that the steady state is bound to be indeterminate and multiple equilibria occur when the share of the liquidity constraint is low enough and that a capital-intensive investment good or a strongly capital-intensive consumption good improve considerably the scope for indeterminacy. As a consequence, we show that without any restriction on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption, multiple equilibria might occur if the velocity of money is greater than a critical bound that is compatible with empirical estimates.     

The Timeliness of the Bond Market Reaction to Bad Earnings News

We find that bond price quotes impound bad earnings news on a more timely basis than good earnings news and that the bond market impounds bad news on a more timely basis than the stock market. We also find that the timeliness of the bond market reaction to bad news is concentrated primarily among speculative‐grade bonds, consistent with earnings news having a larger effect on bond price quotes when default risk is high. In addition, we find that a portion of the bad news impounded by the bond market reverses following the earnings announcement. Overall, our findings are consistent with bondholders’ asymmetric payoff function having important implications for the valuation role of accounting information in the bond market. Specifically, our findings indicate that bond quotes impound bad earnings news much earlier in the pre‐earnings announcement period than stock prices. In addition, bondholders appear to overreact to the bad earnings news initially and correct this overreaction subsequent to the earnings announcement.     

A ‘blank cheque'? Portuguese Second World War sterling balances, 1940–73

The British effort in the Second World War required massive external financing which depended on Lend‐Lease and the accumulation of sterling balances. Indebtedness in sterling balances corresponded to almost 38 per cent of this total at the end of the war. Portuguese sterling balances, although a small share of the total, were important because of pre‐emptive purchases, especially of wolfram, and because of the ‘gold clause’ which was to be applied to outstanding balances. Portugal's willingness to finance British purchases contrasts with the requirement of German payments in goods or cash for their purchases in Portugal. The settlement of Portuguese sterling balances in August 1945 was singular as it preceded the Anglo‐American settlement of December 1945 which had important consequences for sterling balance holders, as the US insisted that the US$3.75 billion loan should not be used to settle British war debts. Postwar settlement of British debt through a long‐term loan from Portugal to Britain contrasts with settlements that involved the sale of British assets. Salazar's concerns about the postwar international position of Portugal, the Portuguese Empire, and the survival of the Portuguese regime are relevant in explaining his pro‐British stance during and after the war.     

Economic Growth and Longevity Risk with Adverse Selection

We study the implications of adverse selection in annuity markets in a general-equilibrium model of the closed economy. Agents differ in their health type and invest their assets in the annuity market. Without informational asymmetries each agent would obtain an actuarially fair insurance. If the individual health types and total annuity purchases are unobservable to the annuity firms then there exists a pooling equilibrium in which all agents annuitize at a common rate. At this pooling rate unhealthy agents would eventually like to borrow but this would reveal their true health type. As a consequence, they rationally drop out of the market. Surprisingly, the welfare and growth effects of the informational asymmetries are rather small.     

加工贸易进口、前向链接与工业行业生产率

本文通过利用非竞争型投入产出表,从水平和前向链接角度对加工贸易进口的技术溢出效应进行了研究。结果发现,与一般贸易进口的水平溢出效应为负不同,加工贸易进口的水平溢出效应为正,而且加工贸易进口的前向溢出效应远远高于一般贸易。同时发现,行业吸收能力越强加工贸易进口的技术溢出效应越明显;行业内外资比重越高越有利于加工贸易进口的水平技术溢出,但对前向技术溢出不利。另外,按贸易方式把加工贸易划分为来料加工和进料加工两类进行稳健性检验,也得到了水平和前向链接对技术溢出有利的结论,但不同的现金流要求和风险承受能力使进料加工的水平溢出更明显,来料加工的前向溢出更明显。