消费文化、认知偏差与消费行为偏差

本文放松了理性经济人假设,在行为经济学双曲线贴现模型框架下,以"自我控制"认知偏差及相应的模型参数设定对东西方消费文化差异进行了技术表达,进而阐明了消费过度(欧美国家)和消费不足(东亚国家)这两类消费行为偏差的形成机制。本文采用全球48个国家和地区1978—2007年的面板数据,以儒家虚拟变量和性生活指数作为消费文化的替代变量检验了文化与消费的关系。结果表明,在解释东西方消费率差异时,预防性储蓄等传统理论的解释力远低于不可观测的国家个体效应。儒家虚拟变量和性生活指数能分别解释国家个体效应的28%和58%。这表明消费文化等不随时间改变的个体因素比传统变量更能解释各国居民的消费差异。实践层面上,双曲线贴现模型中锁定技术能有效纠正"自我控制"认知偏差,从而消解儒家文化对消费的深度抑制,可为扩大内需政策创新提供思路启发和技术支撑。     

Influence of consumption experiences on customers'''' satisfaction:an empirical study on fresh farm products in Wuhan, China

Which factors influence customers’ satisfaction? Which way or path does each factor influence and decide customers’ satisfaction? These problems are the focuses of the research on customers’ satisfaction. This paper analyzes the survey data from some customers in the fresh farm food supermarket of Wuhan City with factor analysis method, multiple linear regression method, etc. The analysis results reveal that: 1) the consumption experiences decide custom- ers’ satisfaction degree through influencing the customers’ expectation and the perceived performance, namely the consumption experiences is the important factor which decides customers’ satisfaction; 2) the consumption experiences that influence customers’ satisfaction is a multi-dimensional construct, including such four dimensions as product consumption experience, service experience, shopping convenience experience, supermarket environment experience; furthermore, the degree that different consumption experiences influence customers’ satisfaction is diverse, and the product consumption experiences are the most important factor. This paper is of realistic significance to a certain extent to enrich the theoretical research on customers’ satisfaction and promote the practice of agricultural product marketing.     

HUMAN CAPITAL DISTRIBUTION,GROWTH AND TRADE

Distribution differences in human capital matter for a country's growth and trade. While the existing literature considers only the diversity difference in talent distribution, we argue that the kurtosis difference is also an important factor. In a two‐sector equilibrium growth model, where the production function is supermodular for the consumption‐good sector and submodular for the R&D sector, we prove that the diversity effect and kurtosis effect are opposite to each other. A country endowed with more diverse but leptokurtic talent distribution may have lower growth rate and import submodular goods, opposite to the conventional result from considering only the diversity difference.     

Competitive trade models and real world features

Competitive small-dimension international trade models perform well in comparing free (or restrictive) trade with autarky, especially in emphasizing that consumption patterns can differ from production patterns and that production becomes highly concentrated while consumption patterns are expanded. Variations on these small-dimensional models can usefully show how with trade production patterns may nonetheless be more diverse and a country’s labor force become more heterogeneous in its skills. The paper illustrates how the Middle Products framework can be reinterpreted to support variety in production and in labor skills.      

人民币实际汇率错位对出口贸易影响的实证研究

本文在既有文献的基础上,通过结合我国经济转型的特点,研究了人民币实际汇率错位对出口贸易的影响。文中提出了更加合理的模型,引入关税(出口退税额)、政府支出、贸易条件等变量,通过Johansen协整检验、误差修正模型、格兰杰因果检验、脉冲响应函数和预测方差分解等计量方法进行了实证检验,结果表明,1978￣2005年,人民币实际汇率错位对出口贸易产生负面影响。其后,运用二元离散选择模型(Logit模型)进一步对二者关系进行了考察,得出了人民币实际汇率错位幅度与净出口呈负相关的结论,即汇率错位幅度越小,越有利于出口,从而出现贸易顺差。     

CIGARETTE TAXATION AND DEMAND: AN EMPIRICAL MODEL

This paper evaluates the impact of taxation on cigarette consumption, using a recursive model that includes a retail price equation and a dynamic demand equation. The analysis is based on panel data for 11 western states over the period 1967–1990. Results indicate that cigarette consumption is price-sensitive, with a demand elasticity of –0.40 in the short run and –0.48 in the long run. A tax increase, such as that imposed in California in January 1989, can have a strong effect of reducing cigarette consumption by between 11.2 percent in the short run and 13.4 percent in the long run. These results support the theory of rational addiction and the hypothesis that, as a part of their oligopoly behavior, the tobacco companies often do raise end-market prices by more than the amount of the increase in tax rates .     

农户家庭消费结构的区位差异分析——基于河南16村1000农户的实证

文章运用ELES模型对农户家庭消费结构进行了分析,结果表明:农户目前仍处于低水平消费阶段,生存性消费远高于发展类消费;农户基本消费需求随经济区位变化的敏感性高于自然区位,且在生存类与发展类上存在较大差异;不同区位农户基本消费需求的满足程度各异,其中优势区农户的满足度较高;农户边际消费倾向总体偏低,但优势区农户生存类消费与弱势区农户发展类消费的边际倾向均较高;不同区域各类型户收入弹性的变动幅度较大,差异格局明显。     

Home production and Social Security reform

This paper incorporates home production into a dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations with endogenous retirement to study Social Security reforms. Specifically, home production takes housing, home input, and home hours as inputs and produces a good that is substitutable with market good. As such, the model differentiates both consumption goods and labor effort according to their respective roles in home production and market activities. Using a calibrated model, we conduct a policy experiment where we eliminate the current pay-as-you-go Social Security system. We find that the experiment has important implications for labor supply as well as consumption decisions and that these decisions are influenced by the presence of the home production technology. More importantly, comparing our economy to a one-good economy without home production, the welfare gains of eliminating Social Security are magnified significantly especially in the long run. The reasons are twofold and related to the general aspects of home production. First, home production implies a more elastic labor supply rendering the payroll labor tax more distortionary. Second, home production introduces insurance possibilities that are not present when only market-produced goods are available and, thus, reduces the need for government redistributive policies.     

促进我国居民消费模式转变的税收政策选择

扩大居民消费对我国经济增长的拉动作用,已成为"十二五"规划的一个重点。但是,目前我国在居民消费不足的同时,却又存在"高物质、高消耗、高排放"现象。为了促进经济发展方式的转变,实现可持续发展,充分发挥税收政策引导市场主体行为的作用就至关重要。因此,可以根据"低物资、低消耗、低排放"可持续消费模式的三元结构,提出了贯穿消费模式的生态、环保、节约各个环节,并集引导、调节、鼓励、惩罚于一体的税收政策体系建议,以促进我国可持续消费模式的建立。     

Satiation and habit persistence (or the dieter's dilemma)

Frequently individual consumption varies cyclically over time. In order to model such behavior, we have to generalize the intertemporal utility function so that it depends not only on current consumption but on total previous consumption and on the change in current consumption. Solving the resulting model requires a generalization of the Euler-Lagrange equations.     

INCOMPLETE FINANCIAL MARKETS,IRREVERSIBILITY OF INVESTMENTS AND FISCAL AND MONETARY POLICY INSTRUMENTS*

In this paper, we analyse the use of fiscal and monetary instruments to improve long‐run welfare when productive investment is irreversible and uncollateralizable and there is no insurance. Only fiat money or government issued bonds provide self‐insurance. We demonstrate that an increase in precautionary savings reduces irreversible productive investment. Hence, subsidies to promote productive but irreversible investment should be financed in such a way that they do not reduce insurance capability. When lump‐sum subsidies are high, a consumption tax is likely to be more redistributive and thus more consumption smoothing than are the other sets of instruments analysed in our model.     

Gender and the demand for medical care

The consumption of a set of diverse medical services is analysed in an effort to determine the sources of high utilization by women.Unlike previous studies of gender and the demand for medical services,the range of services investigate allows us to draw conclusions about the influence of physicians as agents.We use a modified version of the almost-ideal demand model in the emperical analysis which,unlike the double-log quadratic, or linear demand models, is consistent with constraints imposed by economic theory.Through decomposition of the variance, it was found that if women reported the same series of health indicators as men. their use of most services would fall below that of men.     

Educational Financing and Lifetime Earnings

This paper formulates and estimates a dynamic programming model of optimal educational financing decisions. The main purpose of the paper is to measure the effect of short-term parental cash transfers, received during school, on educational borrowing and in-school work decisions, and on post-graduation lifetime earnings. The estimated parameters of the model imply that parental cash transfers do not significantly influence post-graduation lifetime earnings. Long-term factors such as family background and prior human capital investments are more important. Parental cash transfers do, however, significantly determine the decision to borrow or work during school and the level of lifetime consumption.     

Dynamics of the UK natural gas industry: System dynamics modelling and long-term energy policy analysis

We present a dynamic model of the indigenous natural gas industry in the UK. The model has been built using a system dynamics approach. Using the model several scenarios have been analyzed. We found that management of the supply-side policy alone cannot substantially postpone the discovery, production and consumption peak. We also found that the dynamics of the main variables, namely, exploration, production and consumption, are sensitive to initial demand conditions. Postponing the onset of gas price increases can therefore be achieved more effectively through efforts to reduce demand growth. One might expect that a low taxation policy would encourage more exploration and production of gas and thereby stimulate higher consumption rates. Instead, there was no overall net effect on production and consumption in the long term. The depletion effect on cost of exploration acts as counterbalance to low taxation policy. Depletion effect causes cost and thus price to rise further which depress consumption rate. The advances in exploration and production technology can delay the peak of exploration, production and consumption. Technological improvements mean lower cost of exploration and production which pressure down the long-term pattern of price dynamics.     

A neoclassical analysis of the Korean crisis

In late 1997, Korea experienced a huge and unusual economic crisis. The three main features of this crisis are the sudden recession, the rapid recovery and a consumption drop as large as the output drop. A large body of literature qualitatively explains the Korean crisis in terms of financial and monetary variables such as exchange rates and interest rates. This paper complements these studies by quantitatively analyzing fluctuations in real macroeconomic variables such as real GDP and consumption. A stochastic small open economy neoclassical model can quantitatively account for the Korean crisis taking TFP and real interest rates as exogenous.     

Intertemporal substitution and random changes in preferences: Time series evidence for four countries

This study attempts to estimate a model of intertemporal substitution taking into account serially correlated changes in preferences with quarterly aggregate time series data for the USA, Great Britain, West Germany and Switzerland. Thereby, necessary optimality conditions representing the trade-offs between present and future consumption, present and future leisure, as well as present consumption and leisure are estimated using the forward-filtered estimator of Hayashi and Sims. The estimation results obtained for the dynamic optimality conditions reject the model formulated. The analysis of the static optimality conditions gave more satisfactory results with respect to intertemporal substitution elasticity in consumption.     

农户参与生态旅游的能源碳排放测算及影响因素研究——基于大熊猫国家公园试点调查数据

在自然保护地周边生态旅游发展过程中,乡村农户的生产经营活动对环境和资源产生的压力是当前研究的热点问题,而能源消费则是其中的重要方面。研究以大熊猫国家公园试点区为例,测算了农户在参与生态旅游前后各项能源的消耗及其碳排放的变化情况,并利用改进的STIRPAT模型探讨其影响因素,结果发现:农户在参与生态旅游之后能源消费结构呈多元化趋势,薪柴和电能源消耗成为碳排放的主要来源;农户接待游客量、收入水平以及实物和资金等能源补贴政策显著影响了能源碳排放量。基于此,提出规范农户经营行为、提高资金补贴、推广节能技术和设备、加强宣传力度等对策建议。     

Variations in farm consumption and their relationship to income: an empirical investigation of Illinois farm households

Empirical tests of household consumption have yielded mixed results regarding the validity of the life cycle/permanent income (LCPI) hypothesis. A significant problem with such studies is the difficulty in finding sufficient micro-level data on household expenditures. By using the recent rich quantity of such data in the Farm Business Farm Management (FBFM) data for Illinois farms from 1995 to 2009, the study reported here for farm households should provide more consistent results regarding the LCPI hypothesis. Applying an empirical model based on the LCPI hypothesis, this article identifies the determinants of farm consumption and the relationship to income. This study provides evidence that current income changes are not significant in explaining the consumption changes of farm households, thus supporting the LCPI hypothesis for farm households.     

Perspectives on International Trends and Dynamics in Population and Consumption

There are increasing concerns that global environmental limits may soon be met as a result of increasing numbers of people coupled with increasing consumption of resources. However, the current level and rates of growth in both consumption and population vary systematically among countries grouped according to income levels. Many high income countries have population growth rates at close to replacement levels, but their per capita consumption is consistently several times higher than low income countries. Low income countries need to grow out of poverty and have high population growth rates. Using current population structures for India and the USA in an age-structured demographic model, and simple projections of annual reductions in fertility or consumption per capita over the next 50 years, we show that while reductions in both consumption and fertility are necessary to stabilize impacts, there are short term gains from consumption reductions in high income countries such as the USA, and long term gains from early fertility reductions in growing economies such as India.     

Conservation: From Voluntary Restraint to a Voluntary Price Premium

This paper investigates how concern for the environment translates into predictable patterns of consumer behavior. Two types of behavior are considered. First, individuals who care about environmental quality may voluntarily restrain their consumption of goods and services that generate a negative externality. Second, individuals may choose to pay a price premium for goods and services that are more environmentally benign. A theoretical model identifies a symmetry between such voluntary restraint and a voluntary price premium that mirrors the symmetry between environmental policies based on either quantities (quotas) or prices (taxes). We test predictions of the model in an empirical study of household electricity consumption with introduction of a price-premium, green-electricity program. We find evidence of voluntary restraint and its relation to a voluntary price premium. The empirical results are consistent with the theoretical model of voluntary conservation.