The new long-term trend in the price of natural gas

A significant negative trend in the long-term price of natural gas at the wellhead is revealed from simulations with a partial equilibrium model of the industry in the United States. The model framework consists of a simultaneous equations system for production from reserves and for demands for production in the residential, commercial and industrial sectors. We utilize a wide range of historical data to calibrate the model and then develop two sets of scenarios for future prices, one based on further industry development under current regulation, and the other based on deregulation and development of an open market for gas services. The key variables — price of natural gas, level of production and inground gas reserves — for the next 10 years improve for the consumer whether or not there is deregulation but the second scenario leaves the consumer better off sooner.     

工资变动、汇率变动与产业结构调整——基于跨国行业数据的动态分析

名义工资与名义汇率作为引导资源配置的重要价格性指标,如何变动与调整对于产业结构的调整和优化具有重要意义。通过运用动态一般均衡理论与动态面板数据模型分析发现,名义工资增长对制造业部门内部的产出结构优化存在积极影响,而名义汇率贬值能够对部门间产出结构优化发挥积极作用。因此,为有效促进经济结构调整,需要适度提升名义工资,保持名义汇率相对稳定或适度贬值。     

Growth,economic structure,and residential distribution of a small city

This article presents a growth model of a small open city with economic structure and geography. The city which is located along a line segment has three, industrial, services and housing, sectors. The spatial growth model of a small city synthesizes the main ideas in some important models in the neoclassical growth theory, urban economics, and the literature of economic growth of small open economies. We show that the dynamic system has a unique equilibrium. We also simulate the motion of the urban economy over time and space. The unique feature of our approach is to treat production activities, economic structure, residential distribution, capital accumulation, and consumption on the basis of microeconomic mechanism as an integrated whole. Our simulation provides some important insights into the processes of the urban economic growth. For instance, under certain conditions, when the industrial sector’s productivity is increased, the wage rate, price of services, capital intensities of the services and industrial sectors, and per-worker output levels of the two sectors are increased. The total labor supply, the capital stocks employed by the three sectors and the labor forces by the service and industrial sectors are all increased. The shares of the three sectors are not affected by the technological change in the long term, even though the shares are initially affected. The per capita consumption level of the industrial goods rises and the consumption level of services falls. The land and housing rents are increased and the consumption of housing per household falls. Moreover, the current account balance tends to be more in surplus and the growth rate is increased.     

Capital–skill complementarity and the immigration surplus

We build a neoclassical growth model with overlapping dynasties and capital–skill complementarities to evaluate changes in immigration policy. Calibrating the model using US data, we quantify the differential effects of skilled and unskilled immigration on factor returns and on the welfare of different sectors of the population. An influx of high-skilled immigrants lowers the wages of skilled workers, raises the wages of unskilled workers, and because of the relative complementarity between capital and skilled labor, substantially raises the rate of return to native-owned capital. By contrast, an influx of unskilled immigrants produces an opposite effect on wages, and has only a negligible effect on the return to capital. Because of capital–skill complementarity, an increase in the number of skilled immigrants generates an immigration surplus—the overall welfare benefit accruing to the native population—that is approximately ten times larger than the immigration surplus generated by an identical increase in the number of unskilled immigrants. This differential welfare effect is far higher than can be accounted for by the disparity between the productivities of each type of worker.     

How migration restrictions limit agglomeration and productivity in China

China strongly restricts rural–urban migration, resulting in a well acknowledged surplus of labor in agriculture. But migration is also restricted within sectors. This paper argues that these intra-sector restrictions lead to insufficient agglomeration of economic activity in both the rural industrial and urban sectors, with resulting first order losses in GDP. For urban areas the paper estimates a city productivity relationship, based on city GDP numbers. The effects of access, educational attainment, FDI, and public infrastructure on productivity are estimated. Given these, worker productivity is shown to be an inverted U-shape function of city employment, with the peak point shifting out as industrial composition moves from manufacturing to services, as predicted by urban theory. As far as we know this is the first paper to actually estimate the relationship between output per worker and city scale for any country. The majority of Chinese cities are shown to be potentially undersized—below the lower bound on the 95% confidence interval about the size where their output per worker peaks. The paper calculates the large gains from increased agglomeration in both the rural industrial and urban sectors.     

技术创新、资本积累与工业化的增长和就业效果

改革以来,中国工业化的一个重要特征是工业部门产出迅速扩张的同时,它吸收的就业增长明显滞后.笔者发展了一个理论模型和相应的统计分析框架,从理论和实证两个方面考察了工业化的两个基本推动力量--技术创新和资本积累对我国工业化进程中产出和就业增长的影响.我们发现,资本积累没有对工业部门产出和就业增长的趋势产生统计上显著的影响,然而,它是推动1990年之前工业部门产出增长以及1978年～2004年间工业部门就业增长的主要力量;技术创新的劳动节约偏向决定了工业部门就业增长明显下降的趋势,并成为1990年以后工业部门产出增长的主导力量.     

Investment, Pass-Through, and Exchange Rates: A Cross-Country Comparison

Using detailed data from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan, we examine the implications of exchange rates for time series of sectoral investment. Both theoretically and empirically, we show that investment responsiveness to exchange rates varies over time, positively in relation to sectoral reliance on export share and negatively with respect to the share of imported inputs in production. Important differences exist in investment endogeneity across high- and low-price-over-cost markup sectors, with investment in low-markup sectors often significantly more responsive to exchange rates. Cross-country differences in investment response are only partially explained by industrial organization arguments.     

International trade,job training,and labor reallocation

A large literature studies the impact of increased import competition on workers' outcomes, however, relatively few studies examine which policies can aid workers displaced by trade. In this article, we evaluate the impact of an industrial job training program in Brazil on workers displaced from manufacturing sectors. We find that industrial training increases the probability of re-entry into the formal labor market 1 year after displacement by about 17 percentage points and is even more effective for workers displaced from sectors exposed to high import competition. This effect is mainly associated with workers switching sectors and occupations after training.     

Explaining ERM realignments: Insights from optimising models of currency crises

This paper attempts to provide empirical evidence on the determinants of the realignments throughout the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM). Motivated by the implications of optimising currency crisis models, we relate the probability of “crises” to a set of macroeconomic fundamentals. By using a conditional binominal logit model we show that regime switches are strongly influenced by movements in industrial production, foreign interest rates, competitiveness and imports as well as in foreign exchange reserves. These findings are consistent with the general propositions of recent currency crises models.     

R&D cluster quality measures and technology maturity

“Innovation indicators” strive to track the maturation of an emerging technology to help forecast its prospective development. One rich source of information is the changing content of discourse of R&D, as the technology progresses. We analyze the content of research paper abstracts obtained by searching large databases on a given topic. We then map the evolution of that topic's emphasis areas.The present research seeks to validate a process that creates factors (clusters) based on term usage in technical papers. Three composite quality measures—cohesion, entropy, and F measure—are computed. Using these measures, we create standard factor groupings that optimize the composite term sets and facilitate comparisons of the R&D emphasis areas (i.e., clusters) over time.The conceptual foundation for this approach lies in the presumption that domain knowledge expands and becomes more application specific in nature as a technology matures. We hypothesize implications for this knowledge expansion in terms of the three factor measures, then observe these empirically for the case of a particular technology—autonomous navigation. These metrics can provide indicators of technological maturation.     

Optimal hedging with currency forwards,calls, and calls on forwards for the competitive exporting firm facing exchange rate uncertainty

We extend the well-known full hedge theorems of the hedging literature to random profits that are nonlinear in the random exchange rate. This arises when production flexibility is added to the standard model of the risk-averse exporting firm, where all production decisions have to be made before the exchange rate is known. Hence, hedging with currency derivatives that provide a linear payoff in the exchange rate can no longer provide a perfect hedge. Therefore forward selling is replaced by writing a certain call portfolio. Adding delayed revenue to the model induces the firm to sell calls on forwards. Because our generalized full hedge proposition is proved for random profits that might as well decrease in the exchange rate, the result is applicable to certain types of importing firms, too. — Given the absence of speculative motives on the part of the firm, it turns out that long-term investments in capital goods are chosen in risk-neutral manner.     

Wage bargaining,trade and growth

We construct a North-South product-cycle model of trade with fully-endogenous growth and union wage bargaining. Economic growth is driven by Northern entrepreneurs who conduct R&D to innovate higher quality products. Northern production technologies can leak to the South upon successful imitation. The North has two sectors: a tradable industrial goods sector (manufacturing) where wages are determined via a bargaining process and a non-tradable sector (services) where wages are flexible. The South has only a tradable industrial goods sector where wages are flexible.We find that unilateral Northern trade liberalization, in the form of lower Northern tariffs on industrial goods, increases the rate of innovation but decreases both the bargained wage in the industrial sector and the flexible wage in the service sector. The wage effects are relative to the Southern wage rate. We also consider a variant of the model with Northern unemployment, driven by a binding minimum wage in the non-tradable service sector. In this case, Northern tariff cuts decrease the innovation rate and the bargained wage rate. In addition, the Northern unemployment rate increases. The model thus highlights the role of labor market institutions in determining the growth and labor market effects of tariff reductions. We also study the effects of unilateral Southern trade liberalization.     

Endogenous technological progress in a multi-sector growth model

This paper presents an endogenous growth model driven by human capital, where human capital can be allocated across three sectors: the production of the final consumption good, the educational sector and the production of technological capital (in the form of knowledge or ideas). In our model, which also includes public expenditure and population growth, labor augmenting technical progress is endogenous and this enriches the transitional dynamics of the economy. With respect to ideas-based growth models, we assume knowledge is produced according to a neoclassical technology, combining ideas and human capital. Such an assumption is motivated by empirical works showing the existence of significant decreasing returns in the creation of ideas at the aggregate level (as Kortum, 1993; and Pessoa, 2005) and of the weak relationship between some inputs of the knowledge production process (as the number of researchers) and the total factor productivity growth rate (as Jones, 2002). Under some general conditions, this economy exhibits the existence of a steady state equilibrium and an unstable multidimensional manifold. Numerical examples are provided to show the existence of stable arms.     

Conjectural-variation models and supergames with price competition in a differentiated product oligopoly

Conjectural-variation models (CV models) are popular in empirical research as they infer the degree of market power from real data. Theorists of industrial organization, however, disapprove of them for lack of theoretical foundation arguing that dynamic reactions are forced into a static model with the strategy space and time horizon only loosely defined. The presented model follows an idea put forward by Cabral (1995) and demonstrates that the CV model can be interpreted as the joint-profit-maximizing steady-state reduced form of a price-setting supergame in a differentiated product market under optimal punishment strategies. For the symmetric two-firm case the CV parameter is shown to cover the full range of possible outcomes — from Bertrand competition to joint unconstrained monopoly — depending on the degree of product differentiation, market growth, bankruptcy risk, and the discount rate. For the asymmetric-cost case numerical calculations are provided.     

The Impact of Biotechnology Pervasiveness and User Heterogeneity on the Organization of Public Sector Research

What is the appropriate institutional set-up for knowledge generation and use in biotechnology? This paper contributes to the debate by addressing the combined--and potentially conflicting--influence, upon the definition of institutional policies and structures, of two of biotechnology's distinctive features. First, its science-based nature, which defines a set of requirements concerning the production of knowledge and the ability to use it; and second its wide applicability, which requires the consideration of the diversity of technological and organizational capabilities displayed by the whole range of potential biotechnology users. In particular the study investigates whether and to what extent institutional models, whose emergence was largely associated with the behaviour of advanced industrial users from science based sectors, are suitable to the requirements of a more heterogeneous set of biotechnology users, and therefore can withstand a variety of industrial specializations. This issue is addressed empirically by analysing the evolution of the scientific and technological infrastructure of Portuguese biotechnology, as well as the strategic positioning and actual behaviour of individual research and technology organizations. The paper discusses the effectiveness of the current institutional model in Portugal and the implications of a mismatch between biotechnology institutional research frameworks and the industrial structure, for organizations, individual researchers and firms.     

Scientific personnel reallocation and firm innovation: Evidence from China’s college expansion

Given that the supply of scientific personnel is inelastic, the expansion of public research may negatively influence private research by driving up the wage of scientific personnel and reallocating them away from private sectors. China's massive college expansion since 1999 and labor market segmentation provide us with a unique opportunity to investigate such a reallocation effect on firm innovation. Consistent with the reallocation hypothesis, we find that China's college expansion negatively influenced firm innovation as well as regional innovation in the short run. Moreover, we provide direct evidence on scientific personnel reallocation by finding that when college expansion was more intensive, highly educated laborers were less likely to choose an industrial job, and those working in industries enjoyed a higher wage rate when holding a professional (research related) job.     

工业互联网平台研究知识结构与拓展方向

以WoS数据库中工业互联网平台研究文献为对象，采用文献计量法对工业互联网平台研究文献进行统计分析，对工业互联网平台研究学科知识结构、热点和趋势进行总结。研究发现：工业互联网平台领域学科知识结构由工业互联网平台与工业4.0、云制造平台与企业商业模式、物联网与平台基础设施、工业互联网平台与智能物流、物联网与企业信息系统5部分构成。研究热点方向主要包括工业互联网平台知识管理与商业模式、工业互联网平台应用与产业创新、工业互联网平台与制造企业生产管理。最后，提出以“工业互联网平台基础架构—工业互联网平台运行机制—工业互联网平台产出结果”为主线的工业互联网平台理论框架，并从3个角度提出未来研究方向，旨在为国内工业互联网平台学术研究和管理实践提供参考。     

企业集群研究:认识、理论与实践

企业集群理论是由传统产业区位论发展而成的新的关于企业空间集聚的理论。文章遵循“认识—解释—实践”的程序,从企业集群的定义、分类、特征;形成因素、形成机理、竞争优势;政府和非政府组织的作用,企业集群与地方及区域发展等方面,对我国企业集群的有关研究成果进行了总结,兼顾国外该领域一些主要理论、流派和研究的比较,对这些成果进行了评述。     

The effect of labor market monopsony on economic growth

In this endogenous growth model, a minimum efficient scale of production and workers’ home-to-work travel costs combine to give firms monopsony power, and this monopsony power leads to slower growth. Monopsony drives the wage below the marginal product of labor. This lower wage leads to lower investment in human capital and thereby to a lower growth rate. This makes investment in human capital – and therefore the growth rate – suboptimal. We provide evidence from a cross-country panel to support our model: Urbanization, which we assume is determined by a country’s exogenous population density and cropland area, positively impacts the wage share of output; the wage share positively impacts educational attainment; higher-income countries have higher wage shares; and within-country upticks in the wage share have a positive lagged effect on the growth rate.     

Problem-oriented modeling in industrial technology: The steel industry

The development of up-to-date industrial technology and improving efficiency can be achieved by operational control and management and by research and design. These three problems and the corresponding subproblems can be formulated, investigated, and solved on the basis of problem-oriented mathematical models.The general approach to the development of the problem-oriented models has several particular features that depend on the problems to be solved—knowledge and data about the systems to be modeled, demand for model accuracy, type of model solution (off-line or on-line), computer type, and so on.The results of implementing problem-oriented models to improve the efficiency of industrial technology is considered for the case of steelmaking in basic oxygen furnaces (BOF), which is the most widely used technology in the world.The problems that were formulated, the approaches to the development of the mathematical models, and the processes that occur in BOF technology are typical for other different kinds of industrial technology, such as chemicals, the cement industry, atomic reactors, and the glass industry.