Some economics of content protection

We are grateful to a perceptive referee for many constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper entitled The Economics of Content Protection: A Dual Approach. The usual disclaimer applies.     

In search of the meaning of entrepreneurship

This paper is an attempt to build a bridge between the popular and the academic usage of the terms entrepreneur and entrepreneurship, and to identify the raw materials needed to construct an interpretive framework capable of illuminating the nature of entrepreneurship and its role in economic theory. We review briefly the contributions made to this topic by Cantillon, Schumpeter, Schultz and Kirzner. We advance a synthetic definition of the entrepreneur as someone who specializes in taking responsibility for and making judgemental decisions that affect the location, the form, and the use of goods, resources, or institutions. We then conclude with some observations on the basic choice confronting economics regarding the place of entrepreneurship in economic analysis.     

Maximizing purchase decision factors other than price

Assessing and acquiring technology does not have to be chaotic, driven solely by price, clinical preference, and emotion. With the tools available, it can be distilled to a process of organized common sense, which results in maximum flexibility for the user and allows materiel managers to procure the best, most cost-effective equipment for the hospital.     

Small firm mutual funds: Additional evidence on the small firm effect

Returns generated with small firm mutual fund data are used to examine the extent to which identification of a small firm effect is due to the difficulty in measuring the direct and indirect transaction costs involved in investing in the common shares of small capitalization stocks. Little if any evidence of the excess risk-adjusted returns is obtained for either of the period 1978–1983, when the small firm effect was observed, or the period 1984–1989, when it was not. The small firm effect may therefore be attributed to (1) higher direct transaction costs including bid-ask spread and broker fees and (2) higher indirect transaction costs including portfolio management expenses and market impact costs.The authors thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Brett Salazar for valuable assistance in data collection. Errors remain our own.     

信贷配给对我国货币政策有效性的影响

一、理论综述 20世纪30年代凯恩斯革命以来，西方经济学界围绕货币政策有效性问题有许多争论。凯恩斯主义肯定货币政策的有效性；货币主义肯定货币政策的短期效应而否定货币政策的长期效应；理性预期学派完全否定货币政策的有效性，新凯恩斯主义则完全肯定货币政策的有效性。而中国真正的货币政策操作始于1984年二级银行体制的建立。     

美国数字经济探析

自从1998年美国商务部公开采用“数字经济”来描述信息技术给美国经济以及世界经济带来的社会变革以来,“数字经济”的提法得到广泛认可。但是国内关于数字经济的研究尚处于起步阶段。本文在考察国外学术界、官方和商业精英关于数字经济内涵论述的基础上,认为数字经济是由数字技术不断创新所推动的一场新经济革命,并进一步分析美国数字经济发展现状及对中国的若干启示。     

Managers’ Corporate Entrepreneurial Actions and Job Satisfaction

Through the development and extension of theories and scholars’ subsequent empirical analyses of significant, theoretically grounded research questions, the knowledge about corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and its successful use continues to advance. Moreover, the literature suggests important relationships between the corporate environment, managers’ entrepreneurial behavior and successful implementation of corporate entrepreneurship actions. In an attempt to test some of those relationships, we describe an empirical study of 523 managers that examines the relationships among the antecedents to managers’ entrepreneurial behavior, a decision to implement entrepreneurial actions, and resulting job satisfaction and reinforcement practices.     

Hölder continuity of the policy function approximation in the value function approximation

We show that given a value function approximation V of a strongly concave stochastic dynamic programming problem (SDDP), the associated policy function approximation is Hölder continuous in V.