Do Hallyu (Korean Wave) Exports Promote Korea’s Consumer Goods Exports?

This study analyzes the link between international trade in tangible consumption goods and services, and intangible cultural goods using panel data of Korea’s exports to 40 countries of three types of consumer goods and TV content since the mid-2000s. The growing popularity of Korean TV dramas (the stand-in for the Korean wave or “Hallyu” phenomenon) has not been confined to the East Asian region with interest spreading much further afield. This study estimates a one-directional gravity model that uses various forms of consumer goods exports as well as inbound visitors to Korea as dependent variables and a set of explanatory variables plus the Korean broadcasting content exports using the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood procedure. From our analysis, we find the Hallyu exports to have a positive effect on consumer good exports and inbound visitor flows in general, but the strength of the influence seems to be weakest in the case of durable consumer good exports.     

Liquidity and the dynamic pattern of asset price adjustment: A global view

Global liquidity expansion has been very dynamic since 2001. Contrary to conventional wisdom, high money growth rates have not coincided with a concurrent rise in goods prices. At the same time, however, asset prices have increased sharply, significantly outpacing the subdued development in consumer prices. We investigate the interactions between money and goods and asset prices at the global level. Using aggregated data for major OECD countries, our VAR results support the view that different price elasticities on asset and goods markets explain the observed relative price change between asset classes and consumer goods.     

Eager sellers and stony buyers: understanding the psychology of new-product adoption

Companies that introduce new innovations are the most likely to flourish, so they spend billions of dollars making better products. But studies show that new innovations fail at a staggering rate. While many blame these misses on lackluster products, the reality isn't so simple. The goods that consumers dismiss often do offer improvements over existing ones. So why don't people purchase them? And why do companies keep peddling products that buyers are likely to reject? The answer, says the author, can be found in the brain. New products force consumers to change their behavior, and that has a psychological cost. Many products fail because people irrationally over-value the benefits of the goods they own over those they don't possess. Executives, meanwhile, overvalue their own innovations. This leads to a serious clash. Studies show, in fact, that there is a mismatch of nine to one, or 9x, between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers truly desire. Fortunately, companies can overcome this disconnect. To start, they can determine where their products fall in a matrix with four categories: easy sells, sure failures, long hauls, and smash hits. Each has a different ratio of product improvement to change required from the consumer. Once businesses know where their products fit into this grid, they can manage the resistance to change. For some innovations, major behavior change is a given. In those cases, companies can either wait for consumers to warm to the product, make the improvement so great that buyers get past their apprehension, or try to eliminate the incumbent product. Firms can also try to minimize buyer resistance by making products that are compatible with incumbent goods, seeking out those who are not yet users of the existing product, or finding true believers.     

On the Long Run Effects of Public Capital and Disaggregated Public Capital on Aggregate Output

We study the cointegration properties of data on aggregate output, five proxies for labor, two proxies for private capital, public capital, and disaggregated public capital for the United States for 1948–1993. We find evidence of multiple cointegrating vectors; we typically find three or four cointegrating vectors depending on which combination of proxies is evaluated. When public capital is disaggregated by type there is less evidence for cointegration. Finally, innovations in public capital have long lasting effects on output, labor, and private capital, and innovations to output, labor, and private capital also have long lasting effects on public capital.     

Trade Liberalization and Import Margins

Trade policy has well-documented effects on trade volumes. Reaching beyond volumes, I explore the effect of European emerging economies' recent institutional trade liberalization on extensive (i.e., the set of imported goods) versus intensive import margins (volumes per imported good) with highly disaggregated data. Differentiating goods categories by use, I find robust evidence of stronger extensive import margin effects of liberalization for intermediate and capital goods compared to consumer goods. This identifies an important channel for the link between reforms and growth in transition. The results also support new models of heterogeneous firms and trade, which predict that extensive import margin effects of a country's institutional trade liberalization should—through lowering fixed costs for rest-of-the-world exporters—increase with decreasing substitutability among products.     

Made in U.S.A.: a renaissance in quality

In the opinion of some journalists and business leaders, Japan's preeminence in product quality is a direct consequence of lectures delivered 40 years ago in Tokyo by two Americans--W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran. According to Dr. Juran, this view is pure chauvinist nonsense. Despite the shoddiness of Japanese consumer goods before the war, the Japanese did have a quality tradition in the superb workmanship of certain ancient crafts and in the design and manufacture of their military hardware, which, at the outset of the war, was highly competitive with our own. It was just that the Japanese had never devoted engineering expertise, capital, or management attention to the quality of exportable consumer goods. The shock of losing the war changed that mind-set. When Dr. Juran first lectured in Japan in 1954, his audience consisted of 140 CEOs. He had given the very same lectures dozens of times in the United States, but never to top management. American CEOs concentrated their attention on financial reports. Quality was a discipline that they delegated to engineers and special quality departments. In Japan, senior executives took personal charge of managing for quality; trained their managers, engineers, and employees in quality methods; developed quality measurements; pursued quality change at a revolutionary pace; and kept at it year after year until, by the mid-1970s, Japan had passed the United States in quality manufacturing. The unsung heroes of the Japanese quality revolution were Japanese managers, not American experts. Now Dr. Juran sees the beginnings of a quality revolution in the United States as global competition drives managers to focus on their nondelegable responsibilities in quality management.     

Structural change, Engel's consumption cycles and Kaldor's facts of economic growth

Non-linear Engel-curves for consumer goods cause continuous structural change. Goods are sequentially introduced starting out as a luxury with high income elasticity and ending up as a necessity with low income elasticity. Although this leads to rising and falling sectoral employment shares, the model exhibits a steady growth path along which the Kaldor facts are satisfied. Extending the basic model to the case of endogenous product innovations shows that complementarities between aggregate and sectoral growth may give rise to multiple equilibria.     

Delineating social finance

This paper reviews social finance. Venture philanthropy, microfinance, crowdfunding and social impact bonds are financial and social innovations that reshape capital markets, the production of public goods, entrepreneurship and the fundamental principles of financial analysis. In this context, the pursuit of social and environmental impact is assessed alongside the tradeoff between risk and expected return. The market for impact investments consists of suppliers of capital, recipients of capital, the institutional framework and financing flows. This paper describes the financial market for the pursuit of impact and highlights principal challenges, such as the small scale and long horizon of social ventures, the lack of standardized reporting and financial measures for social outcomes, as well as the elusive causality between impact investments and social change.     

Durable Goods,Investment Shocks,and the Comovement Problem

Sticky‐price models suggest that capital investment shocks are an important driver of business cycle fluctuations. Despite quantitative importance in explaining business cycles, a comovement problem emerges because the shocks generate intertemporal substitution effects away from consumption toward investment. This paper resolves the problem by extending the standard sticky‐price model to a two‐sector model with consumer durable services. When durable goods are used as investment in capital and consumer durables, positive capital investment shocks also generate intratemporal substitution effects away from consumer durable services toward nondurable consumption that dominates intertemporal effects. Consequently, consumption increases, and the comovement problem is resolved.     

中美贸易冲突的贸易后果 ——基于中美贸易细分产品数据的研究

基于双重差分模型,依据2014-2019年的中美贸易细分产品月度数据,考量中美贸易冲突对中美两国贸易的影响.结果显示:贸易冲突对中国从美国进口负向影响显著,且在样本期内具有平稳性与持续性;对中国对美出口负向效应显著,且在样本期内呈"倒U型"趋势.事件前期和中期,在"抢出口"效应作用下,贸易冲突对中国对美出口具有短期促进作用;事件后期,对中国对美出口的破坏影响显现.细分产品层面,贸易冲突对中国从美国资本品和消费品的进口负向影响显著,表明国家和个体层面都对贸易有所限制.出口方面,中国消费品出口所受的负向影响较强.同时,中美贸易冲突对于第三国贸易转移效应显著.     

Energy Price Shocks and the Macroeconomy: The Role of Consumer Durables

We create a model with a distinction between investment in consumer durables and capital goods, as well as energy use by households and firms, to evaluate the importance of energy price shocks for output fluctuations. Simulation results indicate that this economy has a smaller proportion of output fluctuations attributable to energy price shocks than one without durable goods and household energy use. We show that an energy price hike is absorbed by reducing investment in durables more than in fixed capital. This rebalancing effect cushions the hit to future production. Thus, productivity shocks remain the prime driver for output fluctuations.     

Trends in Financial Innovation and their Welfare Impact: an Overview

There is evidence that financial innovations are sometimes undertaken to create complexity and exploit the purchaser. Thus financial innovation does have a dark side. As far as the financial crisis is concerned, securitisation and subprime mortgages may have exacerbated the problem. However, financial crises have occurred in a very wide range of circumstances, where these and other innovations were not important. There is evidence that financial liberalisation has been more of a problem. There are many financial innovations that have had a significant positive effect including venture capital and leveraged buyouts and innovations to fund environmental and health improvements.     

Fluctuations in innovations overtime

This paper first explains the concept of innovation life cycles and their relationship to leading sectors of the economy. It then briefly describes the relationship between innovation life cycles and long waves in macro-economic development, and presents a chronology and characterisation of the four phases of the long wave derived from Schumpeter. Various phases of the long wave could be expected to have different effects on the propensity to innovate, and this propensity probably varies also between new industries and existing established industries, as well as between product and process innovations. A list ef 80 major innovations is classified by sector and date, to provide a preliminary empirical validation of the hypotheses advanced on the varying influence of the successive phases of the long wave on different types of innovation. Finally, the author's findings are compared with those of Mensch and Schmookler.     

农村家庭消费需求调查分析——以辽宁省沈阳市为例

为了解当前沈阳市农村居民家庭的收支水平、收入来源结构、消费支出构成及其变化趋势,尤其关注价格变化对农村居民消费的影响程度,本文选取120户农村居民家庭进行了实地问卷调研。调研显示:样本家庭生活环境进一步改善,生活便利程度提高,收支盈余比例增加,收入同比基本持平;样本家庭支出同比持平,其中日常生活支出及农业生产支出占总支出比重增加;样本家庭大宗消费品普及,新型大宗消费品增加,农业生产资料价格对消费影响程度较大,计划消费的意愿低迷;农村金融服务水平明显提高,农民贷款需求基本得到满足,新型农村金融机构支持"三农"的作用尚未体现。     

A Trusteeship Theory of Accounting for Natural Capital Assets

One of the problems encountered in implementing accrual accounting in the government sector is that of accounting for natural capital assets provided freely to government and which are used as public goods. Professional accounting standards require that these assets be valued and included in the government's statement of assets and liabilities. The problem is not encountered in business accrual accounting because business neither acquires assets freely nor provides services to the public on a non-commercial basis.
Various issues surrounding accrual accounting for natural capital assets used as public goods are examined in this article. The nature and characteristics of such assets, and the distinctions between private goods and public goods markets, are first explained to set the context for examination of the issues. Then the issues as to whether natural capital assets should be treated as assets for accounting purposes and included in the government's statement of financial position are analysed according to FASB standards; it is concluded that they are not assets. Rather, it is proposed that these assets used for the provision of non-commercial services to the public should be treated in a separate category as public goods assets which are held in trust by the government on behalf of the nation, for the benefit of current and future generations and for the preservation of the natural ecology of the nation. Commercial valuations are not relevant for these assets and they need not be valued in financial terms for their good management.     

应税消费品的界定、识别与调整——基于法律、技术与政治互动的税收逻辑

当前,我国消费税制改革与立法一体化工作的关键问题在于应税消费品的法治选择,该过程表现为立法框定、技术识别与政治调整的互动逻辑。在立法层面,针对现有应税消费品概念的语义抽象性,有必要在分析选择课税理论、梳理历史变迁的基础上,完成应税消费品概念的法律化和内涵化;在技术层面,基于典型税案中所暴露出的问题,应从形式和实质维度强化法律规则与技术标准的衔接;在政治层面,应从税制改革与税收法定的协调性、功能明晰与税目重构的关联性、选择课税与政治决策的程序化方面着力。     

The impact of implied facilities cost of money subsidies on capital expenditures and the cost of debt in the defense industry

We examine the public policy effects of a cash flow subsidy unique to the government contracting industry, on defense contractors’ capital expenditures and cost of debt over a relatively long time-period, 1978–2009. Because the Department of Defense found evidence of a shrinking defense industrial base in the early 1970s, it wanted to encourage capital spending by defense firms. The result was a cost accounting standard that reimbursed contractors for an imputed facilities capital cost of money (FCCOM) that has remained in effect, virtually unchanged, for almost 30 years, despite structural changes in the defense industry. Our results, using a sample of 628 defense firms, suggest that the standard met its intended objective of increased capital spending within 10 years of its promulgation. However, we also find that the FCCOM subsidy may have contributed to a decreased cost of debt within the defense sector over the long-term. Finally, further analyses indicate that the long-term persistence of this subsidy may have encouraged defense contractors to overinvest in capital goods. Our findings suggest that public policy makers should consider both direct and indirect effects of regulation embedded in accounting standards.     

论我国金融消费者的概念及其特权

我国传统的消费者概念应修正为:消费者是为个人消费而获得商品或服务的自然人,但是以生产、经营为直接目的而获得商品或消费的除外。金融消费者可定义为:为个人消费而购买、使用金融商品或接受金融服务的自然人,但是以生产、经营为直接目的而获得金融商品或接受金融消费的除外。金融消费者享有消费者所享有的全部特权,与其他普通消费者的特权相比较,其财产安全权、知情权与金融隐私权需要在立法中加以特殊的保护。     

Changing capital values and the propensity to innovate

Basic innovations tend to cluster in periods of discontinuity, when changes in the marginal efficiency of capital (amongst other things) lead to disappointing depreciation in the operative value of installed capital goods in stagnating industries, thus inducing investors to seek alternatives, and so making the economic system ready for new technologies. The conditions encouraging innovation are formulated in a contingency theory of changes in capital values, changes which occur as the economic influence bestowed by owning production facilities moves from one sector to another. This non-equilibrium theory allows short- and long-term forces of balance and dominance in economic exchange to be considered together.     

金融创新如何缓解信任品市场失灵?——中国食品安全责任强制保险的自然实验

信任品市场(如食品、医药等)存在的问题一直困扰着中国和世界很多国家。关于产品和服务质量的信息不对称(道德风险和逆向选择)会导致信任品市场失灵。缓解信任品市场失灵,一种常见的解决方案是政府监管;而经济学家认为更加基于市场的解决方案(例如强制责任保险等金融创新)可能更为有效。在理论上,强制责任保险有两种相反的效应:保险公司的监督减少了道德风险 vs. 保险加剧了企业的道德风险,但一直亟待实证检验。幸运的是,中国食品安全责任强制保险的改革实验走在了世界的前列。本文利用了中国在不同地区、不同时间推行的这个自然实验,通过双重差分的方法识别出责任保险对于信任品市场的因果效应。本文的研究发现,强制责任保险能显著降低食品安全事故发生概率。这表明政府强制推行的金融创新可以成为信任品市场失灵的一种有效的替代性解决方案。