Hyperbolic Discounting,Borrowing Aversion and Debt Holding

Analysis of an original Internet‐based survey reveals that debt holding is related to time discounting through: (i) present bias, measured by the degree of declining impatience in the generalized hyperbolic discount function; (ii) borrowing aversion, captured by a sign effect in that future losses are discounted at lower rates than future gains; and (iii) impatience, measured by the overall discount rate. Hyperbolic respondents are classified naïve if their answers reveal them to be time‐inconsistent procrastinators, and otherwise sophisticated. Naïve respondents with more steeply declining impatience are more likely to be debtors. The sign effect relates negatively to borrowing. Survey responses indicative of high or declining impatience are associated with credit card borrowing and other overborrowing indicators.     

Profiting from innovations: the role of new game strategies in the case of Lipitor of the US pharmaceutical industry

In exploring why innovators often do not profit from their innovations, researchers concentrate on innovators versus imitators and the extent to which owners of complementary assets capture profits from innovations. The literature provides scant attention to factors that sap profits from innovations. This paper argues that an innovator's positioning vis‐à‐vis customers, suppliers, complementors, and other co‐opetitors plays a critical role in the innovator's profitability. The article explores how an innovator can use new game strategies to better positioning, thus capturing rents from innovations and enabling further innovations in the future. The study examines the case of Lipitor, one of the world's best‐selling drug, to illustrate how positioning can play in a firm's ability to profit from its innovations.     

Gender Discrimination and Worker Selectivity: A Comparison of the Self-employed and Wage Earners

This study compares the size and nature of the gender earnings differentials for the self-employed and wage earners in Korea, taking into account the workers’ self-selection of each employment type. The two-stage estimates of the earnings equation, corrected for worker selectivity, are used to decompose the gender earnings differentials into productivity-related and discriminatory factors. Our results suggest that the size of the gender earnings gap is larger in the wage sector than in the self-employment sector, but not by large margin, and so is the discrimination effect when not controlled for worker selectivity. With worker selectivity controlled, the discrimination effect is greatly intensified in the wage sector, while it becomes not significant in the self-employment sector. These findings imply that the observed gender earnings gap in the wage sector is largely ascribed to discrimination against women, while the gender earnings gap in the self-employment sector is mostly due to productivity difference that, in part, is caused by worker selectivity.     

试论税收调节收入分配的局限性以及教育问题的引入

改革开放以来中国国民经济的持续快速发展，促进了城乡居民收入总体的不断提高，客观上也带来了经济利益在不同利益群体间的重新调整和分配及社会收入分层的加剧，居民收入差距在城乡、行业、地区之间的扩大，逐步成为现阶段收入分配领域的焦点问题。一些人把我国贫富差距拉大的原因归咎于没有建立起一套完善的税制，致使税收的调控功能没有有效发挥出来。笔者认为，这种说法是有失偏颇的。     

信息不对称条件下的中国零售业营销研究

一、信息不对称条件下中国零售业的营销困难 信息不对称给中国零售业营销带来了困难。那么，这些困难是什么？其具体表现形式又是怎样的呢？让我们逐一考察。     

Does health insurance decrease health expenditure risk in developing countries? The case of China

This article studies the impact of health insurance on individual out‐of‐pocket health expenditures in China. Using China Health and Nutrition Survey data between 1991 and 2006, we apply two‐part and sample selection models to address issues caused by censored data and selection on unobservables. We find that, although the probability of accessing health care increases with the availability of health insurance, the level of out‐of‐pocket health expenditure decreases. Our results from a selection model with instrumental variables suggest that having health insurance reduces the expected out‐of‐pocket health expenditure of an individual by 29.42% unconditionally. Meanwhile, conditional on being subjected to positive health expenditure, health insurance helps reduce out‐of‐pocket spending by 44.38%. This beneficial effect of health insurance weakens over time, which may be attributable to increases in the coinsurance rates of health insurances in China.     

Does an Audit Judgment Rule Increase or Decrease Auditors' Use of Innovative Audit Procedures?

The current audit environment encourages auditors to conduct defensive auditing procedures in lieu of using new, innovative, and potentially more effective audit procedures, due to concerns these procedures may be second-guessed in litigation or by audit inspectors such as the PCAOB. As a result, auditors may prefer traditional “generally accepted” procedures over innovative procedures that are potentially more effective. We test recent proposals that an Audit Judgment Rule (AJR) encourages the use of innovative, and potentially more effective, audit procedures analogous to the similar Business Judgment Rule that affords legal protections to corporate directors. Under an AJR, litigators or audit inspectors could not second-guess auditor judgments, even if they perceive that alternate judgments would have ordinarily been reached, provided the auditor's judgment was made in good faith and in a rigorous manner. However, the AJR's requirements that auditors must defend the rigor of their innovative judgments could potentially backfire and lead auditors to select more traditional procedures. Under the framework of goal activation theory, we conduct an experiment with audit managers and seniors and find that an AJR makes auditors less likely to select innovative audit procedures, particularly when audit risk is high. They do so despite believing the innovative procedures to be more effective than the traditional procedures. Findings from a supplementary experiment with experienced auditors further suggest that national office affirmation of the reasonableness of the procedures does not help overcome this effect. Overall, our findings suggest that an AJR may have the unintended consequence of further increasing auditors' focus on more traditional, and potentially less effective, audit procedures.     

资源禀赋对保护区劳动力转移的影响分析——以朱鹮国家级自然保护区为例

利用秦岭南坡洋县和宁陕县随机抽取的308位农户的数据,建立资源禀赋对劳动力转移的影响的Logit模型。研究结果表明:资源禀赋对农户外出决策影响十分小,说明农户对传统资源的依赖度的降低;而上学小孩的多少对农户外出行为影响较大,说明教育支出给农户带来巨大的经济压力,是促使农户外出的重要影响因素。     

Vertical Specialization and Trade Growth in Northeast Asia

As the global economy has become further integrated, the international production chain has become more sophisticated, with diversified stages of production located in different countries. Economic theorists have argued that the fragmentation of the global production chain is partly attributable to the high growth in international trade over the past several decades. In this study, we examine vertical specialization in China, Japan and Korea, and its contribution to these nations' trade. Using a multilevel model, it is illustrated that vertical specialization has encouraged increases in trade among all three countries. In particular, China's outcome is remarkable considering how recently it became a member of the WTO.