By force of demand: Explaining cyclical fluctuations of international trade and government spending

This paper explores the role of demand shocks, as an alternative to productivity shocks, in driving both domestic and international business cycles within the international real business cycle (IRBC) framework. In addition to those well-documented domestic business cycle fluctuations (e.g., the volatility and cyclicality of output, consumption, investment, labor hours, and labor productivity) and international business cycle properties (e.g., the countercyclical net export and the comovement puzzle), this paper focuses on two additional stylized facts in the industrialized countries: the procyclical trade openness (the GDP fraction of trade volume) and the countercyclical government size (the GDP fraction of government spending). Using a parsimonious dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, we show that the model׳s predictions under productivity shocks are not consistent with these facts. Instead, a demand-shock-driven model replicates the above facts while matching other domestic and international business cycle properties. An estimated version of the model confirms the quantitatively important impacts of demand shocks.     

International synchronization of the Mexican states business cycles: Explaining factors

The aim of this paper is to identify the explaining factors of the synchronization of the business cycles of the Mexican states and those of the US economy. The cycle indicator is obtained by de-trending the series of total formal employment (Mexican states) and nonfarm employment and industrial production (US). In general, our panel data model estimations suggest the existence of spatial autocorrelation and significant time-period fixed effects. Also, the estimates indicate a significant and positive effect of the ratio of foreign direct investment to gross domestic product (GDP), which may be supplementing the impact of international trade (driven by the most internationally integrated states) and a negative effect of the ratio of remittances to GDP (driven by less integrated states). Finally, the evidence suggests that more similar productive structures yield more synchronized business cycles.     

World,country, and sector factors in international business cycles

Do sector-specific factors common to all countries play an important role in explaining business cycle co-movement? We address this question by analyzing international co-movements of value added (VA) growth in a multi-sector dynamic factor model. The model contains a world factor, country-specific factors, sector-specific factors, and idiosyncratic components. We estimate the model using Bayesian methods for 30 disaggregated sectors in the G7 economies for the 1974–2004 period. Our findings show that, although there is a substantial role for sector-specific factors, fluctuations are dominated by country-factors. The world factor appears to play a minimal role because, when using aggregate data, the world factor captures both the factor common to all countries and industries and the factor common to the same industry across countries. We then examine how these factors evolved as globalization deepened over the past two decades. Our results suggest that business cycles at a disaggregate level have not become more synchronized internationally. This is mainly driven by a substantial fall in the volatility of world shocks during the globalization period, rather than a lower sensitivity of sectoral growth to world factors. Our results also reveal that world factors appear to be more important for industries with a higher level of international vertical integration.     

International business cycles and risk sharing with uncertainty shocks and recursive preferences

This paper analyzes the effects of output volatility shocks on the dynamics of consumption, trade flows and the real exchange rate, in a two-country, two-good world with consumption home bias, recursive preferences, and complete financial markets. When the risk aversion coefficient exceeds the inverse of the intertemporal substitution elasticity, then an exogenous rise in a country׳s output volatility triggers a wealth transfer to that country, to compensate for the greater riskiness of the country׳s output stream. This risk sharing transfer raises the country׳s consumption, lowers its trade balance and appreciates its real exchange rate. In the recursive preferences framework here, volatility shocks account for a non-negligible share of the fluctuations of net exports, net foreign assets and the real exchange rate. These shocks help to explain the high empirical volatility of the real exchange rate and the disconnect between relative consumption and the real exchange rate.     

城镇化进程中政府的职能作用

城镇化的推进需要各级政府发挥主导作用.本文认为,政府的主导作用主要表现为城镇化确立发展理念,科学定位区域内产业分工与协作,加强监督管理,改革城建投融资体制,促进城镇可持续发展,着力营造和优化环境等.政府要通过发挥决策作用、服务作用、法治规范作用、宣传教育作用等实现对城镇化的推进.     

The international transmission channels of US supply and demand shocks: Evidence from a non-stationary dynamic factor model for the G7 countries

We employ a multi-country non-stationary dynamic factor model to assess spillover effects and transmission channels of US supply and demand shocks on a variety of macroeconomic variables in individual non-US G7 countries. We find that trade, financial and confidence channels all play a significant role in the international transmission of US shocks. However, the results point to substantial heterogeneities of shock transmission across the individual G7 economies. In particular, we find negative transmission effects for Italy and Japan as the only two G7 countries not well integrated into global value chains. Moreover, the exchange rate responses of Germany, France and Italy turn out to be far less pronounced in comparison to the other G7 economies which we relate to their membership of the euro area and their coordinated monetary policies prior to the establishment of the euro. Whereas we document a close comovement of stock market dynamics across the G7 countries, we find credit and real estate markets to be less synchronized. We do not find the effects and transmission channels to be fundamentally affected by the post-2008 economic environment.     

The (un)importance of unemployment fluctuations for the welfare cost of business cycles

This paper studies the cost of business cycles within a real business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market. We endogenously link both the cyclical fluctuations and the mean level of unemployment to the aggregate business cycle risk. The key result of the paper is that business cycles are costly: fluctuations over the cycle induce a higher average unemployment rate since employment is nonlinear in the job-finding rate and the past unemployment rate. We show this analytically for a special case of the model. We then calibrate the model to U.S. data. For the calibrated model, too, business cycles cause higher average unemployment; the welfare cost of business cycles can easily be an order of magnitude larger than Lucas's (1987) estimate. The cost of business cycles is the higher the lower the value of nonemployment is, or, equivalently, the lower is the disutility of work. The ensuing cost of business cycles rises further when workers' skills depreciate during unemployment.     

News shock,firm dynamics and business cycles: Evidence and theory

The literature of expectation-driven business cycles has overlooked the role played by endogenous entry. This paper documents empirically news shock as a major source of fluctuations in firm dynamics and comovement between firm entry and GDP using structural vector auto-regressions. We then develop a tractable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study the propagation mechanism assuming fixed operating costs for incumbents and decreasing survival rates for entrants. Our quantitative prediction closely matches the positive comovement between firm entries and core macroeconomic indicators upon news shock. These results remain robust at the sectoral level when the baseline model is extended to a two-sector setup.     

新创企业国际化：国际商务理论研究的新领域

新创企业国际化作为国际化经营中的新现象,伴随着创业型经济的兴起和经济全球化的深入发展日趋频繁和普遍,成为近年来国际商务理论研究的新兴领域和理论热点。本文在简要介绍新创企业国际化理论兴起与发展的基础上,围绕国际化动因、过程与战略选择以及国际化对新创企业成长和绩效的影响三个方面对新创企业国际化理论进行分析梳理和评述,以期为国内相关问题的研究提供一个清晰的研究脉络,并为我国企业国际化经营实践提供理论借鉴。     

Limited participation in international business cycle models: A formal evaluation

In this paper, we argue that limited asset market participation (LAMP) plays an important role in explaining international business cycles. We show that when LAMP is introduced into an otherwise standard model of international business cycles, the performance of the model improves significantly, especially in matching cross-country correlations. To perform formal evaluation of the models we develop a novel statistical procedure that adapts the statistical framework of Vuong (1989) to DSGE models. Using this methodology, we show that the improvements brought out by LAMP are statistically significant, leading a model with LAMP to outperform a representative agent model. Furthermore, when LAMP is introduced, a model with complete markets is found to do as well as a model with no trade in financial assets – a well-known favorite in the literature. Our results remain robust to the inclusion of investment specific technology shocks.     

财经院校双语教学实践中遇到的问题与对策

双语教学对于财经院校有着极为重要的意义。财经院校通过开设双语课程培养了不少高素质财经人才。当前,越来越多的财经院校开设越来越多的双语课程。但是,由于许多财经类院校双语课程开设的时间并不长,开设过程中通常都会遇到一些问题。有效解决这些问题将会极大地提高双语教学质量。     

Growth effects of annuities and government transfers in perpetual youth models

We show that in overlapping generations endogenous growth models with uncertain lifetime, the introduction of government transfers always increases economic growth by crowding out the private annuity market and increasing accidental bequests. In particular, if the government imposes a flat-rate consumption tax (which is neutral to the consumption–saving margin), uses part of the tax revenue for unproductive purposes, and rebates the rest equally across agents as a lump-sum transfer, the economy grows faster and improves the welfare of future generations.     

商科人才素质需求调查分析

本文分析了企业所需商科大学生的素质,使在校大学生在大学学习期间进行就业准备,为学校提供未来就业指导工作的资料,也为商科人才教学模式改革提供思路。     

The impact of the US on Latin American business cycles: A new approach

Business cycles in Latin America have tended to be more volatile than those in wealthier nations such as the US. Accordingly, much research has been conducted on Latin business cycles, as well as the impact of the US on such fluctuations. Some research seeks to find how “integrated” cycles are in the US and Latin America, yielding conflicting results. We apply a new method to the question of business cycle synchronization between the US and nine Latin nations. We find that in the majority of cases integration has been rising in recent years. We also find, contrary to some previous studies, that integration does not appear to be affected by either the level of trade or of capital account openness. Finally, we find that the two countries that are dollarized – Ecuador and El Salvador – appear least integrated with the US. This last finding has potentially troubling implications in terms of the ability of these nations to adjust to asymmetric shocks vis-à-vis the US.     

The impact of fiscal positions on government bond yields in CEE countries

This paper investigates the influence of government debt and primary balance on long-term government bond yields in 10 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in the period 2000–2013. The results indicate that a one percentage point increase in the stock of government debt is associated with an increase in government bond yields of 2.7–4 basis points, while a one percentage point increase in the primary deficit to GDP ratio is associated with an increase in government bond yields of 12.9–24.3 basis points. We also find evidence of non-linearities in the debt-interest rate relationship, whereby the threshold after which the impact of debt turns from negative to positive is significantly lower than in advanced economies.     

The performance of international returnee ventures: the role of networking capability and the usefulness of international business knowledge

This paper sheds light on the international new ventures led by returnee entrepreneurs and investigates the influence of networking capability and the usefulness of international knowledge for the overall performance of so-called international returnee ventures (IRVs). By integrating network theory with a capability view of firm performance, it advances six hypotheses that form a structural model, which is tested with LISREL on a sample of 194 IRVs from China. The findings show that international networking capability has a positive influence on the provision of international business knowledge, which in turn is positively related to the innovation performance, but they have a negative impact on the financial performance. Hence, this study presents a discussion of the usefulness of knowledge gained from the international network relationships of emerging market returnee entrepreneurs.     

商务英语在企业管理中的应用及其重要性

在经济全球化趋势的带动下,中国与世界各国的贸易往来日益频繁。随着我国外资企业数量不断增多,商务英语的作用就不再局限于对外交流合作中,在企业内部的管理中,商务英语也发挥着重要作用。本文主要分析商务英语在企业管理中的应用以及其重要性。     

The way out of recessions: A forecasting analysis for some Euro area countries

This paper proposes a two-regime Bounce-Back Function augmented Self-Exciting Threshold AutoRegression (SETAR) model which allows for various shapes of recoveries from the recession regime. It relies on the bounce-back effects which were first analyzed in a Markov-Switching setup by Kim, Morley, and Piger (2005), and were recently extended by Bec, Bouabdallah, and Ferrara (2011). This approach is then applied to the post-1973 quarterly growth rates of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Euro area real GDPs. Both the linear autoregression and the standard SETAR without the bounce-back effect null hypotheses are strongly rejected against the Bounce-Back augmented SETAR alternative in all cases but Italy. The relevance of our proposed model is further assessed by a comparison of its short-term forecasting performances with those obtained from a linear autoregression and a standard SETAR. It turns out that the bounce-back model’s one-step-ahead forecasts generally outperform the other ones, particularly during the last recovery period in 2009Q3–2010Q4.     

Business process architectures: overview,comparison and framework

With the uptake of business process modelling in practice, the demand grows for guidelines that lead to consistent and integrated collections of process models. The notion of a business process architecture has been explicitly proposed to address this. This paper provides an overview of the prevailing approaches to design a business process architecture. Furthermore, it includes evaluations of the usability and use of the identified approaches. Finally, it presents a framework for business process architecture design that can be used to develop a concrete architecture. The use and usability were evaluated in two ways. First, a survey was conducted among 39 practitioners, in which the opinion of the practitioners on the use and usefulness of the approaches was evaluated. Second, four case studies were conducted, in which process architectures from practice were analysed to determine the approaches or elements of approaches that were used in their design. Both evaluations showed that practitioners have a preference for using approaches that are based on reference models and approaches that are based on the identification of business functions or business objects. At the same time, the evaluations showed that practitioners use these approaches in combination, rather than selecting a single approach.     

Business model innovation: Identifying foundations and trajectories

Business model innovation is an emerging hot topic in management research. It has been developing steadily for 20 years and has gained enormous momentum in recent years. A solid basis has been created, and the first literature reviews summarize the topic. However, an analysis of the core literature and the general foundation of business model innovation literature is missing. This gap is closed with this bibliometric. It analyzes 30 core articles referenced in 380 business model innovation publications. From this, a total of four research clusters can be delineated. This foundation of the research area is supplemented with a trend analysis of recent publications, which identifies three trends for the future of this research stream. The analysis highlights that sustainability, dynamic capabilities, and small- and medium-sized enterprises are the most promising trends in business model innovation. Based on the results, we present a general model for business model innovation.