The Role of Monetary Policy in the New Keynesian Model: Evidence from Vietnam

This paper re-designs the New Keynesian model developed by Ireland (2004 Ireland, P. N. (2004). Technology shocks in the New Keynesian model. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(4), 923–936. doi: 10.1162/0034653043125158[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and then uses the Vietnamese data from January 1995 to December 2012 to estimate the model's parameters. The empirical results show that the State Bank of Vietnam had been more aggressive as well as more responsive to aggregate fluctuations in the period before August 2000 than in the latter period. Thus, this change in the policy stance could be a potential reason for the declining importance of monetary policy in generating movements in output growth, inflation, interest rate, and the output gap across the subsamples. Another notable finding is the dominant role of the cost-push shock in explaining fluctuations in inflation, interest rate, and the output gap, leading to a policy implication that more attention should be devoted to developing substitute and complement industries so as to mitigate negative effects of the cost-push shocks by reducing the degree of dependence on imports.     

Auditing and the Purification of Blame

Although public sector special audit and performance audit are frequently involved in blame, very few studies (save for Radcliffe 1997) provide detailed empirical accounts on how auditing participates in blame allocation. This study sets out to study one case of blame allocation by describing and characterizing the origins of failure and antecedents leading to the need for blame allocation, the institutional entities and arrangements that participate in the blame game, and how these entities, including the supreme audit institution, are mobilized in the processes of blame allocation. Applying a case methodology with Actor–Network Theory principles, the study extends Hood's (2002, 2007) research on blame and blame avoidance strategies by showing how a blame‐frame evaluates and allocates blame. The contribution of the paper is in four parts: first, it reveals the mechanisms that cause scapegoating of particular people and the role of auditors as experts in such mechanisms; second, it assists to develop an understanding of some factors at the core of the “accountability paradox” noted by Roberts (2009); third, it contributes to explanations as to why failing public sector reforms survive controversy and scandal since a scapegoating process can “reboot” reforms by erasing the reform's problems; and fourth, it demonstrates that an understanding of blame can be a useful addition to Actor–Network Theory.     

Breaking the letter vs. spirit of the law: How the interpretation of contract violations affects trust and the management of relationships

Contract violations are ubiquitous. There has been little attention, however, dedicated to understanding the mechanisms involved in making sense of and addressing such occurrences. Two experimental studies investigated how people interpret contract violations and how these interpretations affect trust and the management of relationships. By drawing on the distinction between violations of the letter versus spirit of the law, we show that letter violations are more difficult to overcome than spirit violations, due to higher perceived intentionality. These effects generalized across different populations, levels of contracting experience, types of contracting contexts, levels of ambiguity within the contract, and degrees of contract complexity. The results yield important implications for understanding contract violations, trust, and organizational responses as a relationship management capability. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

TESTING FOR MULTIPLE BUBBLES: LIMIT THEORY OF REAL‐TIME DETECTORS

This article provides the limit theory of real‐time dating algorithms for bubble detection that were suggested in Phillips, Wu, and Yu (PWY; International Economic Review 52 [2011], 201–26) and in a companion paper by the present authors (Phillips, Shi, and Yu, 2015; PSY; International Economic Review 56 [2015a], 1099–1134. Bubbles are modeled using mildly explosive bubble episodes that are embedded within longer periods where the data evolve as a stochastic trend, thereby capturing normal market behavior as well as exuberance and collapse. Both the PWY and PSY estimates rely on recursive right‐tailed unit root tests (each with a different recursive algorithm) that may be used in real time to locate the origination and collapse dates of bubbles. Under certain explicit conditions, the moving window detector of PSY is shown to be a consistent dating algorithm even in the presence of multiple bubbles. The other algorithms are consistent detectors for bubbles early in the sample and, under stronger conditions, for subsequent bubbles in some cases. These asymptotic results and accompanying simulations guide the practical implementation of the procedures. They indicate that the PSY moving window detector is more reliable than the PWY strategy, sequential application of the PWY procedure, and the CUSUM procedure.     

Retirement Expectations and Satisfaction with Retirement Provisions

This paper investigates the relationship between subjective expectations regarding the replacement rate of income at retirement and several measures of pension satisfaction. We use panel data on Dutch employees, analyzed with fixed effects models, allowing for correlation between unobserved heterogeneity in satisfaction and optimism or pessimism in expectations. The level of the expected replacement rate is found to be positively related to satisfaction: respondents who revise their expectations of the level of their replacement rate upwards tend to become more satisfied with their pension provisions, in particular with the level of the expected benefits. We do not find robust evidence for a relationship between uncertainty and pension satisfaction.     

Effects of commitment on intentional loyalty at the person-to-person and person-to-firm levels

This study explores how customers’ affective commitment and calculative commitment to the personal adviser and bank, respectively, affect their intentional loyalty to the personal adviser and bank. Data were collected using a web survey of mass affluent customers of a major Swedish bank. Responses were measured and analysed using factor, correlation, and regression analyses. The results reveal that the person-to-person and person-to-firm loyalty categories are influenced by affective and calculative commitment to the personal advisor and by affective commitment to the bank, but not by calculative commitment to the bank. Moreover, there is a strong relationship between customer loyalty to the personal adviser and to the bank. It can be concluded that affective commitment has a stronger overall impact on customer loyalty than does calculative commitment, indicating the importance of creating affective ties with customers, and that personal advisers are central to bank – customer relationships. The importance of financial issues to mass affluent customers implies that both affective commitment and calculative commitment to the personal adviser are important in building customer loyalty to a bank or brand.     

区域协调发展背景下新疆旅游业平衡地区经济差距作用评价

目的/意义确定新疆旅游业在区域协调发展中的作用和潜力。方法/过程首先对新疆各地的经济差距、旅游经济差距进行了测算。然后,采用“旅游经济平衡指数”和集对分析两种方法进一步对新疆旅游业平衡地区经济差距的效果进行评价。最后,为了进一步明确新疆各地特别是落后地区旅游发展的潜力,对新疆各地旅游资源潜力进行分析。结果/结论结果显示:1)新疆各地经济差距突出,存在区域不协调发展的风险;2)旅游经济在新疆区域协调发展中发挥了平衡效果,且还有很大潜力;3)新疆各地旅游资源潜力与经济格局不完全反向对应,但充分挖掘各地旅游资源潜力,积极发展旅游产业,特别是国际旅游,将有助于喀什地区及其周边落后地区的经济发展和脱贫致富,也有利于伊犁、塔城、阿克苏、阿勒泰、吐鲁番等中等地区缩小与发达地区的差距。因此,未来大力发展旅游业将有助于新疆的区域协调发展。