Global apparel production and sweatshop labour: can raising retail prices finance living wages?

This paper provides some empirical evidence on issues raisedby the global anti-sweatshop movement. We first consider therelationship between wage and employment growth, finding noconsistent trade-off between them. We then measure the shareof labour costs in the production of garments in the US andMexico. We find that the retail price increases necessary toabsorb the costs of raising wages substantially are small, wellwithin the range of price increases that polls suggest US consumersare willing to pay. We close by considering some implicationsof these results.     

A Socio-instutionalist Critique of the 1990s' Reforms of the United Kingdom's National Health Service

This paper argues that the on-going reforms to the UK's National Health Service initiated in the 1990s represent potentially profound institutional change to the values underpinning the process of care. The market-orientation of the reforms is highlighted, and it is asserted that the theoretical rationale for this is informed by the nascent neoclassical health economics and new institutionalist literatures, which exhibit utilitarian propensities in that both stress outcomes and at best relegate process. Drawing from the seminal contribution of Thorstein Veblen, the paper argues that market-oriented reform in the UK may induce a shift from a Hippocratic ethos to a more individualistic value system.     

Austrian exporters: unique or alike? New insights and missing puzzle pieces

In this paper we provide detailed evidence on the performance of exporters compared to non-exporters in Austrian manufacturing industries based on firm-level data. The centrepiece of the study is the issue of the export premium, i.e. the size and productivity advantages of exporting firms compared to their purely domestic peers. We present evidence for the existence of sales, labour productivity and wage premia. These results are largely in line with the results found for other European countries. Furthermore we document the existence of large differences in these premia across industries and provide explanations for this finding. Our results are robust with regards to including additional firm control variables such as employment and R&D-related variables though the magnitudes of the export premia become much smaller. We also propose a new interpretation of the export premium estimation with firm fixed effects which we interpret as a result on export switchers. Finally, we employ a probit model to document the importance of sunk export costs for the decision to export.     

Bargaining and separation costs in two-sided markets

A two-sided market is characterized by contract negotiations, bilateral exchanges between buyers and sellers. Separation costs endow trading partners with monopoly power, rendering this a market of bilateral monopolistic competition. Market equilibrium is defined by these negotiations, a matching of the two sides, and a set of prices; the costs of disagreement are endogenous. A bargaining strategy some players use is commitment to a position. Disagreements are possible and, contrary to the case of bilateral monopoly, these disagreements are not always inefficient.     

Tail dependence between gold and sectorial stocks in China: perspectives for portfolio diversification

This article analyzes the relationship between gold quoted on the Shanghai Gold Exchange and Chinese sectorial stocks from 2009 to 2015. Using different copulas, our results show that there is weak but significant tail dependence between gold and Chinese sectorial stock returns. This means that the dependence between extreme movements of the two assets is not pronounced and confirms the role of gold as a safe haven asset. Based on analyzing the efficient frontier, CCC-GARCH optimal weights, hedge ratios and hedging effectiveness, we further show that adding gold into Chinese stock portfolios can help to reduce their risk. Gold appears to be the most efficient diversifier for stocks of the materials sector and the less efficient for the utilities sector. As a robustness check, we also compare gold to oil and indicate that gold is more efficient than oil in the diversification of Chinese stock portfolios.

     

美国预算和财政管理改革的演进及对中国的启示

一直以来,美国公共预算和财政管理的改革都是务实的、政治的、演进的,有时也不乏创新性。通过对美国公共预算和财政管理改革的历史进行回顾,可以得出一个理解公共预算和财政管理改革的理论框架,这将有助于理解美国现行预算和财政制度体系。这些改革经验对于包括中国在内的世界各国均具有一定的启示和借鉴意义。     

Comparative performances of measures of consumer and economic sentiment in forecasting consumption: a multi-country analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to compare the capabilities of assorted measures of consumer and economic sentiment in predicting the growth of household expenditure. An analysis of quarterly data on five European countries shows that for none of these can the model which incorporates the EU’s headline consumer confidence indicator be deemed to be significantly inferior to any of its seven rivals. However, the rankings of the sentiment variables are seen to be influenced by: the proportion of total spending by households that is devoted to durable goods; and the nature of the behaviour of consumption over the forecast interval.     

Central city crime and suburban economic growth

This paper explores the relationship between inner-city crime patterns and suburban income growth, analysing data on 318 US counties for selected metropolitan statistical areas of 32 states within the United States from 1982 to 1997. The findings suggest that violent crime does seem to have a negative impact on close-in suburbs, with a less negative impact farther away from the central city (becoming positive at some point). While results are not as robust as we had hoped they are consistent with flight to further-out suburbs rather than migration to different metropolitan areas in response to urban crime.     

Valuing ecosystem services: A shadow price for net primary production

We analyze the contribution of ecosystem services to GDP and use this contribution to calculate an empirical price for ecosystem services. Net primary production is used as a proxy for ecosystem services and, along with capital and labor, is used to estimate a Cobb Douglas production function from an international panel. A positive output elasticity for net primary production probably measures both marketed and nonmarketed contributions of ecosystems services. The production function is used to calculate the marginal product of net primary production, which is the shadow price for ecosystem services. The shadow price generally is greatest for developed nations, which have larger technical scalars and use less net primary production per unit output. The rate of technical substitution indicates that the quantity of capital needed to replace a unit of net primary production tends to increase with economic development, and this rate of replacement may ultimately constrain economic growth.