Ethnic Diversity,Political Stability and Productive Efficiency: Empirical Evidence from the African Countries

While ethnic diversity has been shown to produce numerous negative effects on the economic performance due to disagreement on the production of the public good, nepotism in making employment decisions, increased corruption and rent‐seeking behaviour, its positive effects appear to have received much less attention. We hypothesise and test several explanations why higher levels of ethnic diversity may be associated with better socio‐economic outcomes. We find that productive efficiency will be higher in the societies where ethnicities can benefit from the complementarity of skills. Incentives to engage in an ethnic conflict will be lower and the extent of political stability higher in those countries where the opportunity costs of ethnic conflict are more substantial. We also find some evidence in support of the political aspirations hypothesis that attributes the negative effects of ethnic diversity to the strife by ethnic groups for more political influence.     

Permanent and Temporary Components of Stock Prices: Evidence from Assessing Macroeconomic Shocks

This paper outlines a simple macro model with overlapping wage contracts to investigate how the temporary and permanent components of stock price movements may be related to aggregate macro-economic supply and demand disturbances. In the content of the model, we show that aggregate demand shocks have only temporary effects on real stock prices, while supply shocks may affect the level of real stock prices permanently. Moreover, the temporary component in U.S. stock prices, identified by placing appropriate structural restrictions on a vector autoregressive system estimated for the postwar period, is statistically significant. This evidence supports the mean-reversion hypothesis that stock prices are not pure random walks. The finding is robust to the choice of variables used in the vector autoregressive system and periodicity.     

西部农村经济的“四重资本”短缺:1889个农户证据

对西部地区1889个农户家庭经济状况进行深入调查显示,西部地区农村经济呈现智力资本、体力资本、土地资本和金融资本四重短缺,农业基本处于放弃状态,农村经济呈现无根状态。从农村经济金融的角度建立农业与农村经济增长的内在机制已势在必行。     

Local School Finance and Productive Efficiency: Evidence from Ohio

This paper examines the relationship between local financing of education and school district efficiency. In a system of local school finance, the capitalization of school quality in housing prices provides homeowners with verifiable information regarding the impact of school officials’ actions and strong incentives to act upon that information. I find evidence that school districts with a higher percentage of revenues from local sources perform better on state math tests. In addition, the amount of residential property within a school district is positively related to math test passage rates.

Tax Incentives,On-the-job Training,and Human Capital Accumulation: Evidence from China

This study investigates the effects of an increase in the proportion of tax credit (IPTC) policy on firms' on-the-job-training expenses. We document that the IPTC significantly increases on-the-job training expenses; the result remains valid after a series of robustness tests. An analysis of heterogeneous effects shows that privately owned firms and small-scale firms are more susceptible to the IPTC's impacts than state-owned and large-scale firms. Finally, we find that the IPTC can improve the production efficiency of firms and promote firm performance and innovation.     

人力资本溢出效应:来自省级层面的微观证据

人力资本在一定区域的集聚能促进知识和技能的相互交流,进而推动生产率水平的提高。文章利用省际劳动力微观数据,估计了我国省级层面的人力资本溢出对生产力水平的效应。结果显示,以平均受教育年限衡量的省级人力资本水平每提高一年,劳动力平均生产水平提高约10%。     

International Monetary Regimes and Incidence and Transmission of Macroeconomic Shocks: Evidence from the Bretton Woods and Modern Floating Periods

This paper investigates the relationship between international monetary regimes and incidence and transmission of macroeconomic shocks within the context of an open-economy macro model. Empirical results confirm monetary interdependence and lower incidence of monetary discretion under fixed exchange rates. The average magnitude and dispersion of supply shocks in Bretton Woods and the subsequent float is comparable; however, the average magnitude and dispersion of real demand shocks under Bretton Woods seems higher. Overall, the international monetary regime may pose important constraints to policymakers in open economies.     

人力资本、R&D效率与地区差异

基于我国30个省域2002-2012年的面板数据,运用DEA-Tobit方法法实证检验了全国整体及三大地区人力资本存量及其结构对R&D效率的影响。结果显示,全国整体和东部的人力资本存量、高中及以上层次人力资本对R&D效率有显著促进作用,而中部、西部人力资本存量及各层次人力资本对R&D效率都没有显著促进作用。加强中西部地区人力资本的积累,提高其R&D效率,更好发挥创新对经济增长的支撑作用,是缩小与东部发达地区差异的关键。     

Human Capital Externalities and Proximity: Evidence from Repeated Cross-Sectional Data

Summary  Does schooling generate social returns in excess of the private returns captured by the individual who makes the human capital investment? As a strategy to detect human capital externalities I use Dutch survey data to estimate the impact of the average human capital stock in a region on individual wages, considering regional human capital as a local public good. Indeed, the regional fraction of high-skilled workers or the region’s average educational attainment appears with a positive and statistically significant coefficient in an augmented Mincer specification. However, the impact on individual wages completely vanishes when the firm’s human capital stock is included as an additional control. This may suggest that human capital externalities predominate within firms, though alternative explanations, in particular selection of high-skilled workers in high-productive companies and imperfect substitutability across skill groups, cannot be ruled out. I would like to thank two referees, Nicole Bosch, Theo van de Klundert, Pierre Koning, Rob Luginbuhl, Mauro Mastrogiacomo, Gabriela Schütz, Wouter Vermeulen, Dinand Webbink and seminar participants at the Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General of the European Commission, the NAKE Research Day 2007, the 64th Congress of the International Institute of Public Finance, and the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis for helpful comments, and Joke Goes, Jelte Haagsma and Judith Hoeben for their help with the data. Views expressed are my own, and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the European Commission or the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.     

Business Cycle Fluctuations,Large Macroeconomic Shocks,and Development Aid

We examine the cyclical properties of development aid using bilateral data for 22 donors and 113 recipients during 1970–2005. We find that bilateral aid flows are on average procyclical with respect to the business cycle in both donor and recipient countries. While aid outlays contract sharply during severe downturns in donor countries, they rise steeply when aid-receiving countries experience large adverse shocks. Our findings suggest that development aid may play an important cushioning role in developing countries, but only during times of severe macroeconomic stress. Our results are robust to alternate definitions of aid flows, specifications, and estimation techniques.     

Surface Coal Mining and Human Health: Evidence from West Virginia

This article presents the first panel-data evidence of a human health externality from the air pollution generated by surface coal mining. In West Virginia, a standard deviation increase in a county's exposure to surface coal mining is associated with 9.85 more asthma hospitalizations per 100,000 residents in a given quarter. Interpreted causally, this suggests over $11 million in hospitalization costs over the 6-year study period. The study builds on earlier cross-sectional research by controlling for unobserved county-level heterogeneity, and by defining more accurate measures of exposure. Both methods are shown to reduce the bias associated with earlier estimates of coal mining's effect on health. Young and elderly women demonstrate the largest sensitivities to surface mining. Falsification tests reveal that neither hernias nor bone fractures demonstrate any relationship with surface mining activity.     

Income Inequality,Human Capital,and Income Growth: Evidence from a State-Level VAR Analysis

We use Granger causality and impulse response analysis to examine the relationship between income inequality, human capital attainment, and income growth using annual state-level data over the period 1929–2000. We find consistent evidence that the income share of the top decile Granger-causes income growth, but only weak evidence that income growth Granger-causes the top decile income share. Moreover, an impulse response analysis indicates that income growth responds negatively to permanent changes in the income share of the top decile. These findings appear to have important regional variations, however, with the more densely populated Eastern states showing the strongest associations. We also find evidence that years of schooling may Granger-cause income levels, but little evidence that years of schooling Granger-causes the top decile income share.

Policy Shocks and Macroeconomic Fluctuations in a Two‐country Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Model: Evidence from China*

In this paper, we construct a two‐country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to investigate the sources of business cycles in China and the contributions of policy shocks in economic fluctuations. The empirical results from Bayesian estimation show that, apart from the traditional supply and demand shocks, monetary and fiscal policy shocks also play important roles in determining China's economic fluctuations. In addition, we find significant feedback effects between monetary and fiscal policies in China, indicating that policy coordination is an important feature of China's monetary and fiscal policies. Overall, these results not only shed new light on the policy factors behind China's economic fluctuations, but also provide new evidence that is helpful for understanding the policy transmission mechanisms in China.     

Technical Change and Productive Efficiency: Irrigated Rice in the Philippines*

Panel data are used to study the technical efficiency of rice producers in the Philippines. Production efficiency over time is measured using a stochastic frontier regression with error decomposition. Sources of inefficiency are identified and the link between irrigation and productive efficiency is measured. Results suggest that irrigation was associated with higher levels of technical efficiency in the sample.     

REER Imbalances and Macroeconomic Adjustments in the Proposed West African Monetary Union

With the spectre of the euro crisis hunting embryonic monetary unions, we use a dynamic model of a small open economy to analyse real effective exchange rate (REER) imbalances and examine whether the movements in the aggregate real exchange rates are consistent with the underlying macroeconomic fundamentals in the proposed West African Monetary Union (WAMU). Using both country‐oriented and WAMU panel‐based specifications, we show that the long‐run behaviour of the REERs can be explained by fluctuations in the terms of trade, productivity, investment, debt and openness. While there is still significant evidence of cross‐country differences in the relationship between underlying macroeconomic fundamentals and corresponding REERs, the embryonic WAMU has a stable error correction mechanism, with four of the five cointegration relations having signs that are consistent with the predictions from economic theory. Policy implications are discussed, and the conclusions of the analysis are a valuable contribution to the scholarly and policy debate over whether the creation of a sustainable monetary union should precede convergence in macroeconomic fundamentals that determine REER adjustments.     

收入、生态与农民共富:来自农户的证据

乡村生态振兴对于推进农民走向共同富裕至关重要,但作用机理并不清晰。文章构建农民收入-要素配置-生态环境的分析线索,使用中国劳动力动态调查数据（CLDS）,揭示生态振兴赋能农民共富的实现路径。结果表明：（1）经济收入对农民幸福感产生倒U型影响。但在拐点来临之前,促进收入增长仍是提升幸福感并推进共同富裕的重要措施。（2）收入具有结构性差异。其中,由外出务工获得的非农收入隐含人户分离及情感缺失,对农民家庭幸福产生倒U型影响,农业收入则能够持续地增进幸福感。（3）农业具有生态依赖性。特别地,生态振兴通过促进农地经营规模、农业劳动力供给与农业长期投资进而实现农业增收。进一步的分析表明,生态环境显著地缩小了城乡收入差距并有助于实现全局意义上的共同富裕。文章认为,单纯以非农收入为导向不利于增进农户幸福感,有必要通过生态振兴促进农业经营性增收以诱导他们走向共同富裕。