Capital advantages: could colleges and universities located in Beijing City win more national social science fund projects?

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the relationship between the distance a college/university from Beijing city and the number of the National Social Science Fund projects it undertakes. We find that geographical location of a college/university is closely related to the number of National Social Science Fund projects it undertakes, and per hundred kilometres far away from Beijing city will result in a decrease of the number of projects by 0.24–0.50. In addition, colleges and universities located in Beijing city have significant advantages over those located in other places with more projects of 1.74–5.68. It is also shown that, for colleges and universities, especially for those top 100, the availability of high-speed railway to Beijing city significantly increases the probability of winning the National Social Science Fund projects.     

中国经济发展的“失衡”：漠视社会成本

社会成本是企业的外生成本，是企业不愿承担的，包括自然资源、生态环境、人力资源及道德等各方面的成本。中国现阶段社会成本居高不下的原因就是对社会成本的重视不够，仍走“以高投入促增长”的老路子，忽视了经济增长背后的巨额社会成本。加强对社会成本的认识，了解其包含的内容，制定控制社会成本的各项措施，是中国转变经济增长方式，实现可持续发展的关键环节。     

Horizontal mergers,cost savings,and network effects

We consider a horizontally differentiated oligopoly and investigate the relationship between merger cost savings and network effects for the incentives of firms to merge and for the postmerger welfare outcomes. We show that it is more profitable to be an insider rather than an outsider of the merger, unless both cost savings and network effects are too low. Mergers can improve customer and total welfare provided both cost savings and network effects are high enough. We find that the possibility for network effects to lead to a Pareto improvement through merger is shown to depend on the number of outside firms.     

Regulation and efficiency in transition: the case of Romanian banks

Using disaggregated panel data for the period 1996–2002, this paper estimates the cost efficiency of Romanian banks and relates it to regulation implemented by the National Bank of Romania. We estimate efficiency using a model that combines the frameworks of both stochastic frontier analysis and shadow cost functions. Our results indicate that, for all types of banks, the cost of technical inefficiency decreases in the years following tightening of regulation. A significant part of this decrease can be attributed to the policy change. Overall, the short-run increase in cost due to additional regulation exceeds the benefits from reduced technical inefficiency. However, our model does not account for other benefits, besides changes in X-inefficiency, such as stability of the banking system, which may be significant.      

IS JAPAN'S HOUSEHOLD SAVING RATE REALLY HIGH?

This paper discusses, and measures the quantitative impact of, a number of conceptual issues relating to the household saving rate data in the National Accounts of Japan. It finds that Japan's seemingly high household saving rate is biased due to the exclusion of capital transfers and real capital gains, the valuation of depreciation at historical cost rather than at replacement cost, the use of a residual measure of financial saving rather than Flow of Funds Accounts data thereon, and the treatment of expenditures on consumer durables as consumption rather than as saving, but that the biases are to a considerable extent mutually offsetting. It also finds that the Japan-U.S. gap in household (personal) saving rates is due largely to conceptual differences and deficiencies and that household saving in Japan consists primarily of financial saving (net lending), meaning that most of it is available to finance investment in other sectors of the economy and/or abroad.     

Traffic congestion: an experimental study of the Downs-Thomson paradox

This study considers a model of road congestion with average cost pricing. Subjects must choose between two routes—Road and Metro. The travel cost on the road is increasing in the number of commuters who choose this route, while the travel cost on the metro is decreasing in the number of its users. We examine how changes to the road capacity, the number of commuters, and the metro pricing scheme influence the commuters’ route-choice behavior. According to the Downs-Thomson paradox, improved road capacity increases travel times along both routes because it attracts more users to the road and away from the metro, thereby worsening both services. A change in route design generates two Nash equilibria; and the resulting coordination problem is amplified even further when the number of commuters is large. We find that, similar to other binary choice experiments with congestion effects, aggregate traffic flows are close to the equilibrium levels, but systematic individual differences persist over time.     

Comparing finite mechanisms

Summary. This paper obtains finite analogues to propositions that a previous literature obtained about the informational efficiency of mechanisms whose possible messages form a continuum. Upon reaching an equilibrium message, to which all persons “agree”, a mechanism obtains an action appropriate to the organization's environment. Each person's privately observed characteristic (a part of the organization's environment) enters her agreement rule. An example is the Walrasian mechanism in an exchange economy. There a message specifies a proposed trade vector for each trader as well as a price for each non-numeraire commodity. A trader agrees if the price of each non-numeraire commodity equals her marginal utility for that commodity (at the proposed trades) divided by her marginal utility for the numeraire. At an equilibrium message, the mechanism's action consists of the trades specified in that message, and (for classic economies) those trades are Pareto-optimal and individually rational. Even though the space of environments (characteristics) is a continuum, mechanisms with a continuum of possible messages are unrealistic, since transmitting every point of a continuum is impossible. In reality, messages have to be rounded off and the number of possible messages has to be finite. Moreover, reaching a continuum mechanism's equilibrium message typically requires infinite time and that difficulty is absent if the number of possible messages is finite. The question therefore arises whether results about continuum mechanisms have finite counterparts. If we measure a continuum mechanism's communication cost by its message-space dimension, then our corresponding cost measure for a finite mechanism is the (finite) number of possible equilibrium messages. We find that if two continuum mechanisms yield the same action but the first has higher message-space dimension, then a sufficiently fine finite approximation of the first has larger error than an approximation of the second if the cost of the first approximation is no higher than the cost of the second approximation. An approximation's “error” is the largest distance between the continuum mechanism's action and the approximation's action. We obtain bounds on error. We also study the performance of Direct Revelation (DR) mechanisms relative to “indirect” mechanisms, both yielding the same action, when the environment set grows. We find that as the environment-set dimension goes to infinity, so does the extra cost of the DR approximation, if the error of the DR approximation is at least as small as the error of the indirect approximation. While the paper deals with information-processing costs and not incentives, it is related to the incentive literature, since the Revelation Principle is central to much of that literature and one of our main results is the informational inefficiency of finite Direct Revelation mechanisms. Received: May 21, 2001; revised version: December 14, 2001 RID="*" ID="*" Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Decentralization Conference, Washington University, St Louis, April 2000 and at the Eighth World Congress of the Econometric Society, August 2000. We are grateful for comments received on those occasions. The second author gratefully acknowledges support from National Science Foundation grant #IIS9712131. Correspondence to: T. Marschak     

Auctions With A Minimum Requirement Of Bids

We show that in a procurement auction with independent and private costs of production and a positive cost of preparing a bid, the requirement of a minimum number of offers for the good to be bought always yields a unique (perfect) Bayesian equilibrium where no firm enters a bid, whatever its cost of production, the number of potential bidders and the size of the bidding cost.
To avoid the no-bid result, the buyer can commit to subsidise the losing bidders in certain circumstances. Alternatively, it can use a stochastic auction, where the provider of the good is not always the firm that bids the lowest price.     

National Treatment and the optimal regulation of environmental externalities

Abstract. We analyze the role of National Treatment in the regulation of environmental product standards for an open economy. A social planner uses product standards to control emissions from the consumption of a traded good. We show that whether National Treatment of standards interferes with welfare‐maximizing policy depends on the instruments available to the policy maker (consumption or emissions tax) and differences in the cost of complying with the standard. We also highlight the asymmetric incidence of the domestic and import product standard when taxes are suboptimal. This asymmetric incidence can also cause welfare‐maximizing policy to violate National Treatment.     

Fire use and prevention by traditional households in the Brazilian Amazon

Fire is an important land management tool for smallholders in the Brazilian Amazon. However, when fires are not properly controlled they can give rise to large-scale wildfires that threaten forests, agricultural plantations, and settlement areas. We use data from a survey of 220 households to examine fire prevention and the scale of fire prevention and burning activities among traditional subsistence households in the Tapajós National Forest in Pará, Brazil. We find that in traditional households, economic variables such as the opportunity cost of household time, market conditions, and the hiring wage are important predictors of these decisions, as is household reliance on standing forest resources for non-timber products. Our results confirm that traditional households actively engage in fire prevention, and suggest that fire prevention is motivated by a desire to protect agricultural plantations as well as standing forest reserves. The results suggest that increased income, improved infrastructure, and improved access to markets for labor and agricultural goods will encourage fire prevention among smallholders in communities with education and planning programs.     

Medicaid managed care: effects on children's Medicaid coverage and utilization

We use data from the National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS) to measure the effects of the growth of Medicaid managed care on children. We examine both the probability that individual children were Medicaid-covered and their utilization of care. We find that managed care penetration has significant effects on the composition of the Medicaid caseload: Young children are less likely to be covered, while poor school-age children are more likely to be covered. When we examine coverage by race, we find that black children are less likely to be covered where Medicaid managed care organizations (MMCOs) are more prevalent. These lower Medicaid enrollment rates are linked to increases in the numbers of young children who go without any doctor visits in a year. These results suggest that it is important to examine the potential effects of changes in Medicaid on selection into the Medicaid program, rather than focusing exclusively on the effects of managed care on those who are enrolled. In addition, among those enrolled in Medicaid, higher managed care penetration is associated with an increase in the number of black children with chronic conditions who go without doctor visits, but with decreases in the number of Hispanic children and poor teens who go without care.     

Mixed markets in bilateral monopoly

Should we expect to see patterns in the privatization of a public bilateral monopoly? To address this question, the paper analyzes the welfare implications of privatization and examines the interplay of firm location in the vertical stream, differential priorities on private and public profit in welfare and cost asymmetries in a mixed bilateral monopoly. We conclude that merely comparing cost savings from privatization upstream/downstream, is inadequate. If public profit is relatively insignificant in welfare, then only relative cost savings matter. However, if public profit is sufficiently important, then privatization downstream will maximize welfare if it is as (or more) cost effective compared to privatization upstream. We find that downstream privatization can be better than upstream privatization even when the latter is more cost effective than the former.     

State-Sponsored Mass Killing in African Wars—Greed or Grievance?

What motivates African governments to engage in mass killings at some stage in the armed conflicts? I make the argument that violence against civilians is the outcome of a rational decision process. Using an empirical model, I identify the conditions for civil wars to evolve into mass killings. The results show that the existence of oil onshore and diamonds, the cost of a military conflict, and the number of ethnic groups in a country affect the likelihood of mass killing.     

Comorbidities and the willingness to pay for health improvements

We show that the willingness to pay for health improvements increases with the severity and probability of occurrence of comorbidities. This result, which is obtained under mild restrictions on the shape of the utility function, has important implications for cost benefit studies applied to health care. In particular it implies that the discrimination of the elderly, believed to be implicit in cost benefit analysis, is less of a problem than commonly thought.     

Inflation dynamics in open economies: Empirical evidence for G7 countries on the role of import prices and the cost channel

The supply side effects of both the nominal interest rate (i.e., the cost channel) and import prices on inflation are very important for the design of monetary policy. However, the empirical identification of the cost channel (traditionally associated with the advance payment of wages) has ignored import prices. We start by deducting a New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) which shows that ignoring import prices in the estimation of the cost channel may lead to incorrect results. Taking this into account, we study the empirical relevance of the cost channel and import prices using the NKPC for the G7 countries. We test whether the estimation of the cost channel is affected when the price of imported inputs is considered; if it is relevant to extend the cost channel given that imports of final consumption goods are also paid in advance; if imports should be treated as inputs and/or consumption goods, and if there is an immediate or slow exchange rate pass-through. Empirical results indicate that the cost channel is present in imported consumption goods in particular, and import prices play an important role in explaining inflation dynamics.     

Entry regulation and social welfare with an integer problem

This paper elaborates on Salop (1979) who showed that the number of firms at free-entry equilibrium is excessive from the viewpoint of social welfare (excess-entry theorem). This paper considers an integer problem of the number of firms entering the market. We find that the excess-entry theorem does not hold true if the marginal production cost is increasing, while it holds true if the marginal production cost is constant. This result warns against the use of the excess-entry theorem for rationalizing entry regulation such as the notorious Japanese Large-Scaled Retail Act restricting the new entry of retailers.     

茅荆坝自然保护区森林游憩资源价值评估

以茅荆坝自然保护区为研究对象,利用SPSS软件对影响游客数量的相关因子进行了回归分析。结果表明：旅行费用是影响游客数量的最重要因子。通过旅行费用法（TCM）计算出茅荆坝自然保护区2010年上半年森林游憩资源利用价值总和为197194万元,其结果可为茅荆坝自然保护区的经营管理及开发建设提供参考依据。     

Analysis of the energy access improvement and its socio-economic impacts in rural areas of developing countries

Access to modern energy is one of the most basic requirements for development. In rural areas of developing countries, there are a large number of people who do not have access to LPG and depend on traditional biomass such as wood, crop, and dung for cooking. In addition, energy has numerous and complex links with poverty reduction. Therefore, it is important to estimate the impacts of energy access improvement on socio-economic situation in the rural areas of developing countries quantitatively. This study focuses on socio-economic impacts of cooking demand through changes in stoves adopted by the rural households. We have developed an energy-economic model of rural areas in India to analyze the links between energy, income, and health hazard, applying both opportunity cost for using fuelwood and exposure to Resipirable Suspended Particulate Matter (RSPM). As a result of the analysis, there is a positive relation between the opportunity cost and the average RSPM exposure of women in the rural areas. Following to increase in the opportunity cost, that is, income, the cost of an improved wood stove becomes relatively lower first than that of a traditional wood stove, and then a gas stove attains price competitiveness. It is achieved that the average RSPM exposure is below the WHO and Japanese criteria for Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM), 190 and 100 [μg/m³], at the opportunity cost of US$9 and 15/GJ, respectively.     

Mix‐and‐match divestitures and merger harm

We consider the effects of a merger combined with a divestiture that mixes and matches the assets of the two pre‐merger suppliers into one higher‐cost and one lower‐cost post‐merger supplier. Such mix‐and‐match transactions leave the number of suppliers in a market unchanged but, as we show, can be procompetitive or anticompetitive depending on whether buyers are powerful and on the extent of outside competition. A powerful buyer can benefit from a divestiture that creates a lower‐cost supplier, even if it causes the second‐lowest cost to increase. In contrast, a buyer without power is always harmed by a weakening of the competitive constraint on the lowest‐cost supplier.     

The Behaviour of the Firm under Alternative Regulatory Constraints

We review the case for intermediate power incentive regulation such as sliding scale when the regulator is badly informed and the firm's profits have a shadow resource cost. We then evaluate a number of different regulatory regimes including sliding scale in terms of productive and allocative efficiency. We find that the sliding scale principle can be applied quite generally—to dividends, profits or rate of return and that it has attractive economic properties.