The Riddle of German Self-Interest北大核心CSSCISSCI

How will the crises inside the euro-zone end?Many people have asked me this question in the US in recent weeks.How,in particular,might the eurozone move from crisis into stability     

The Role of Environmental Management in Consumers Preferences for Corporate Social Responsibility

Consumers in modern societies are increasingly sensitive to environmental performance by large and small corporations, making it a crucial issue in the overall policy of corporate social responsibility. The objective of this paper is to study the role of environmental performance in the profile of corporate social responsibility as perceived by consumers. We utilize a stated preference approach to the study of consumer’s preferences. This approach allows for the evaluation in monetary terms of the trade-offs that individuals can make between various aspects of corporate policy decisions, including the extent of environmental performance. The data is modelled by means of a mixture heuristics approach that allows us to study the utilization of various decision rules in the choice of products with various degrees of environmental performance. The results show that the linear compensatory heuristic is the most extended across individuals and these subjects value most the policies concerned with environmental management. Those subjects opting for the non-compensatory decision rule tend to focus on the attribute of good labour relations as the most salient factor defining corporate social responsibility. In addition, policy measures are relatively more valued for some products rather than for others, suggesting that consumers discriminate between products when valuing companies’ environmental profiles.     

Calculation of Self-Interest and Constitutional Consensus: The Role of Ideology

Constitutional political economy's veil of uncertainty prevents citizens from identifying their specific interests under political rules and facilitates agreement on rules by moving all individuals to an average position. But the calculation of self-interest in such settings is not straight-forward; citizens require a model of how the economy works to predict the effect of rules on welfare. Political ideologies typically supply such models. Citizens subscribing to different ideological models anticipate differential treatment under a given constitutional rule, breaking down the ability of the veil of uncertainty to achieve consensus. Constitutional consensus is unlikely in the absence of ideological consensus.     

澳大利亚卫生保健制度的私有化：公费医疗制度的终止

卫生保健政策是战后福利国家政策的重要组成,它代表的是一种不分社会等级面对全民的、超越市场机制、以收入补贴形式向民众提供医疗服务的方案。在澳大利亚,一直到公共健康保险机构以及继而公费医疗制度实施以后,全民卫生保健系统才得以确立。从此以后,公费医疗一直承受缩减资金的压力。自二十世纪七十年代中期开始,缩减政策一直是福利国家发展的主导政策。本文旨在追溯澳大利亚卫生保健系统的发展过程,揭示卫生保健系统的主要发展趋势,包括私有化过程,国民保健责任由集体承担转变为由私人承担的过程。这种发展趋势代表的是一种残余体制,它将威胁到以提供公平医疗保健待遇为宗旨的全民公费医疗制度的实施。     

社会排斥与劳动力市场分割——以性别歧视为例

劳动力市场因其社会性与制度性因素至少被分割成主要和次要两个层次,较之主要市场.次要市场的就业条件差、待遇低和发展机会少.女性劳动者因其社会性别角色的定位,往往被排斥在次要劳动力市场,就业困难且频遭歧视.社会性别排斥是劳动力市场分割的"借口",而分割的劳动力市场又强化了社会性别的排斥程度,如果没有相关的约束,这个恶性循环机制难以规避.正如商品和资本市场,在劳动力市场中,一方改进的代价是另一方的受损,无论如何效率和福利都没有实现最优,存在着改进的必要.本文深刻剖析社会排斥与中国劳动力市场分割的原因及危害,为政策和制度的建立提供理论研究的依据.     

Correcting Market Failure Due to Interdependent Preferences: When Is Piecemeal Policy Possible?

Allowing for general utility interdependence and agent heterogeneity, we characterize taxes that will generate first best solutions in markets. We show the equivalence of tax corrections derived from the Marshallian and compensated demand approaches. Next we analyze the conditions that are required for the market failure to be corrected by: (1) specific indirect ad valorem taxes on commodities, (2) the same proportional tax rate on every commodity, and (3) a proportional income tax rate on each individual. The conditions are related to the restrictions necessary to have H synthetic consumers without externalities who replicate behavior of individuals with externalities.     

The Dynamic Evolution of Preferences

This paper develops a general methodology for characterizing the dynamic evolution of preferences in a wide class of strategic interactions. We give simple conditions characterizing the limiting distribution of preferences in general games, and apply our results to study the evolutionary emergence of overconfidence and interdependent preferences. We also show that this methodology can be adapted to cases where preferences are only imperfectly observed. Earlier drafts of this paper were circulated under the title: “The Evolution of Perception Biases” and some of these results appeared in the earlier working paper Heifetz, Shannon and Spiegel (2003). We thank three anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Shannon thanks the NSF for research support under grant SES-0351346.     

Preferences for social protection: Theory and empirics

Empirical cross-country evidence suggests that countries position themselves along a sort of Market Regulation (MR)-Social Expenditure (SE) trade-off “line”. Theoretically, it is clear that there exists a certain degree of substitutability between SE and MR, since both can provide a cushion against socio-economic risks. However, market regulation is an inefficient means to provide protection, since it might reduce productivity and the employment level. Still, to be politically viable efficiency-enhancing deregulation policies must come along with appropriate fiscal measures (social protection spending) to compensate the losers of reforms or to accommodate any temporary negative effect on aggregate demand. This implies that the political determinants of MR and SE should be jointly analyzed to explain both the multiplicity of stable combinations of MR and SE empirically observed, and the strong political resistance often encountered in the implementation of structural reforms. The focus of this paper is a theoretical and empirical (using microdata from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP)) investigation on the socio-economic, institutional and cultural factors which shape voters' preferences for MR and SE and determine the relative salience of the two political issues. Such an analysis should provide fundamental pieces of information to carry out a proper analysis of the political process to give account of the multiplicity of combinations of MR and SE empirically observed.     

The Social Structure of the Australian Urban Labour Market: 1976–1991

Abstract
The changing social structure of the labour market has both distributional and efficiency implications for Australian society. This article analyses the increase in the employment inequality among Australian urban neighbourhoods (that is, Collectors Districts or CDs) between the 1976 and 1991 censuses. When CDs are ranked by socioeconomic status we find that the employment rate falls by more in the low status areas than in other areas. Given that participation and population growth rates are higher in the high status areas, this phenomenon is likely to be driven by differences in employment levels. Shift share analysis of changes in employment levels shows that the lower demand for workers who live in the low status areas has led to falls in employment in those areas. Therefore the structural shift in the Australian economy has been a major explanation of the differences in employment rate within Australian cities. The results raise questions about the current ability of Australia's economy to adjust to the structural change necessary in an open economy .     

再分配倾向的决定:对既有文献的考察

本文对再分配倾向决定领域的既有文献进行详尽考察,认为从内在动力角度来理解各种决定因素才是根本,归纳提炼了再分配倾向决定的四大动机:经济利益动机、风险规避动机、公平信念动机和声誉理想动机。再分配倾向决定的四大动机通过不尽相同的理论逻辑机制和多种实证影响因素对人们的再分配倾向产生影响,四大动机的框架为实证研究中的因素筛选提供了有力的工具。对于该领域进一步的研究,本文提出应用实验手段的重要性,并应注意宏观变量对再分配倾向的内生性影响。     

Social Market Economy: origins,meanings and interpretations

This paper investigates various possible meanings of ‘Social Market Economy’—60 years after its political initiation in Germany. We focus on the variety of intellectual sources that influenced the formation and interpretation of the concept in Germany during the first half of the last century. Our particular attention is on Müller-Armack’s definition of a rather dualistic concept of ‘social’ versus ‘market economy’ and the subtle differences it has with an original (Freiburg School) view of ordo-liberalism that lends itself more easily to a constitutional economics perspective.

社会市场经济:德国模式的解读与借鉴

德国的社会市场经济模式被认为是成功的市场经济模式。本文通过对德国社会市场经济的理论基础、基本理念和运行机制的分析,探讨了德国社会市场经济模式对我国建立和完善有中国特色社会主义市场经济体制的借鉴意义。     

The Selection of Preferences Through Imitation

The paper presents a model in which a population of agents repeatedly play games against nature; the rules of behaviour followed are revised over time through a process of imitation. For binary decisions, imitation selects rules consistent with a preference relation of the kind proposed by SSB utility theory and regret theory. In general, this preference relation need not satisfy either independence or transitivity; we state conditions on imitation necessary for it to do so. For decisions over three or more options, the long-run tendency is for options that are maximally preferred in terms of SSB preferences to be chosen. If no maximally preferred option exists, the process of imitation may not converge.     

社会转型中我国市场的宏观特征

随着我国社会主义市场经济机制的完善和发展,作为市场主体的企业骤增,同时,与国际市场的接轨,也使我国作为一个市场更具开放性,从而使市场竞争加剧。对我国企业而言,如何迎接社会转型所带来的机会与挑战,有策略地运作市场、寻求发展,首要的工作就是认识和把握现阶段我国的市场特征。从宏观上看,当前我国市场表现出如下几个特点。一、从结构看,它是一个相对分割的市场在企业咨询服务中,常听到企业有关负责人讲“如果全国１３亿人口有１％使用我们产品之类的话。如果说这不是一句傻话,至少是句废话。中国作为一个大市场,尽管有其…     

论社会主义市场经济的社会公正

社会公正是社会主义和谐社会的重要特征。经济发展能在一定条件下与社会公正相互制约、相互影响,共同推动社会和谐地向前发展。社会主义公正体现了权利与义务之间的对等关系。从某种意义上说,社会主义蕴含着对公正的诉求。在社会主义市场经济发展中,实现社会公正需要多管齐下。