关于宏观经济政策的若干反思

大稳健时期让宏观经济学家和政府决策者误以为大家已熟练掌握了宏观经济政策运用,本次危机显然对此观点提出了挑战。为此,国际货币基金组织（IMF）专家对危机前的宏观经济政策进行了重视审视,分析了主要共识,指出其中存在的失误,以及哪些危机前的框架原则当前仍能适用,并尝试建立新的宏观经济政策框架。建议应该对通货膨胀目标进行重视审视,协调运用货币政策和监管政策,统一通货膨胀目标制与汇率政策,更广泛地提供流动性,注意积蓄财政政策空间,设计更好的财政自动稳定机制。     

Stock Exchange Reforms and Market Efficiency: the Italian Experience

This paper examines whether the reforms introduced by the Italian Stock Exchange from 1991 to 1994 (creation of specialised intermediaries, obligation to trade on the official markets, screen-based trading and cash settlement) did increase market efficiency. The issue is addressed using both the traditional information efficiency model, which tests market efficiency by verifying the predictability of prices conditional on some information subset, and a microstructure approach that measures efficiency as the distance of the price movements from their efficient components, represented by a random walk process. The joint analysis of daily and intraday data on prices and volumes validates the hypothesis that most of the reforms have increased market efficiency over the sample period, except for cash settlement, which appears to have substantially reduced it.     

Power laws in firm size and openness to trade: Measurement and implications

Existing estimates of power laws in firm size typically ignore the impact of international trade. Using a simple theoretical framework, we show that international trade systematically affects the distribution of firm size: the power law exponent among exporting firms should be strictly lower in absolute value than the power law exponent among non-exporting firms. We use a dataset of French firms to demonstrate that this prediction is strongly supported by the data, both for the economy as a whole and at the industry level. Furthermore, the differences between power law coefficients for exporters and non-exporters are larger in sectors that are more open to trade. While estimates of power law exponents have been used to pin down parameters in theoretical and quantitative models, our analysis implies that the existing estimates are systematically lower than the true values. We propose two simple ways of estimating power law parameters that take explicit account of exporting behavior.     

Technological paradigms,patterns of learning and development: An introductory roadmap

This paper presents an evolutionary microeconomic theory of innovation and production and discusses its implications for development theory. Using the notions of technological paradigm and trajectory, it develops an alternative view of firm behavior and learning. It is shown then how these are embedded in broader national systems of innovation which account for persistent differences in technological cappacities between countries. Finally, this bottom-up evolutionary analysis is linked with an institutional top-down approach, and the potential fruitfulness of this dialogue is demonstrated.We thank the discussants and participants at the workshop on Technology and Competitiveness in Developing Countries, Venice, 26/11/93, for their useful comments.The research leading to this work has benefited at various stages from the support of the Italian National Research Council (CNR, Progetto Strategico Combiamento Technologico e Crescita Economica) and of the International Institute of Applied System Analysis (IIASA, Austria).     

On delayed technological shifts

When a new technology capable of superseding an existing one appears, we sometimes observe the so-called sailing-ship effect, which consists of the old technology's improvements in response to the emergence of the new one. This helps explain why the old technology does not disappear quickly. However, some more aspects contribute to slowing down the process of substitution of the new for the old technology, such as users’ reluctance to switch to the new one, the degree of diffusion of the old technology, and other forces. In this work, we provide a formal model which takes into account both the technical improvements of the old technology as well as the other forces, where the latter are synthesised in what we define as a memory effect.     

Toward a simple structure: a comparison of different rotation techniques

This paper thematise the problem of seeking and devising a simple structure, when the solution envisages the extraction of more than one component or factor. To this avail, we shall make a comparison between a number of rotation techniques, both orthogonal and oblique, to evaluate just how capable they are of delivering the highest possible semplification of the data yielded by the analysis. To evaluate the results obtained through empirical controls, we have drawn up a simple structure index. For reasons of space, we shall apply principal components analysis to our method, although the results obtained here also hold for factor analysis.     

Celebrating the Memory of Corrado Gini: a Personality Out of the Ordinary

Corrado Gini was one of the most brilliant and internationally recognized scientists of the Italian School of Statistics. This paper, written on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death, recalls the key aspects of his life and his extraordinary scientific contributions. In describing his impressive mind, interdisciplinary interests, his long and significant academic life, his immense scientific production, and his commitment to official statistics, we must also take into account the particular historical period that Gini lived in. But the most relevant and honourable of his acknowledgements is the impact he undeniably had and still has on the international scientific community of statisticians and non‐statisticians.