30-Year Reform and Opening up——Export Review(1978-2008)

This year marks 30th year commemoration of China’s" reform and opening up" policy, the strategic decision made at the 3rd plenarysession of the national party congress’ 11th central committee of Communist Party of China (CPC) in Dec. 1978. History made its way to the end of 1978. In December of that particular year, CPC leaders tapped on the table to decide to open up and reform this long-encapsulated country in a milestone conclusion. Thirty years elapsed. Like many other industrial sectors that benefited from this monumental decision, Chinese textile industry has undeniably been growing at a fantastic speed, and its export is on an unrivalled growth in phase...     

The Rising College Premium in the Eighties: Return to College or Return to Unobserved Ability?

The changes in the distribution of earnings during the 1980s have been studied extensively. The two most striking characteristics of the decade are (a) a large increase in the college/high school wage gap, and (b) a substantial rise in the variance of wage residuals. While this second phenomenon is typically implicitly attributed to an increase in the demand for unobserved skill, most work in this area fails to acknowledge that this same increase in demand for unobserved skill could drive the evolution of the measured college premium. In its simplest form, if higher ability individuals are more likely to attend college, then the increase in the college wage premium may be due to a increase in the relative demand for high ability workers rather than an increase in the demand for skills accumulated in college. This paper develops and estimates a dynamic programming selection model in order to investigate the plausibility of this explanation. The results are highly suggestive that an increase in the demand for unobserved ability could play a major role in the growing college premium.     

Commonality in the LME aluminum and copper volatility processes through a FIGARCH lens

Dynamic representation of spot and three‐month aluminum and copper volatilities is considered. Aluminum and copper are the two most important metals traded in the London Metal Exchange. They share common business cycle factors and are traded under identical contract specifications. The bivariate FIGARCH model, which allows parsimonious representation of long memory volatility processes, is applied. The results show that spot and three‐month aluminum and copper volatilities follow long memory processes, that they exhibit a common degree of fractional integration and that the processes are symmetric. However, there is no evidence that the processes are fractionally cointegrated. This high degree of commonality may result from the common LME trading process. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 28:935–962, 2008     

Neo‐Rawlsian Fringes: A New Approach to Market Segmentation and New Product Development*

Prior research into the link between new product development and market segmentation has focused on two main approaches: (1) design, segment, and do limited competitive evaluation; and (2) segment first, design second. This paper proposes a third approach, which is to simultaneously design, perform segmentation according to benefit and to evaluate against competitive designs. This research uses a benefit segmentation technique based on conjoint analysis (or other techniques that relate product attributes to consumer utility) in which the segments emerge simultaneously with the design based on certain design principles or “strategies.” Herein a method is proposed to narrow down the many possible feasible designs (combinations of attributes) to a finite set and to examine the appeal of each design. Five distinct design strategies are proposed for modeling and studying competitive reaction. These include “traditional” ones such as differentiation and new ones whose fringe customers have high utility. The paper shows that these five strategies are adequate for modeling competitive reaction using simulation. Another contribution of the paper is the way competitive reaction is modeled. In generating and evaluating a design the desire herein is also to assess the defensibility of the design and include it in the evaluation criteria. These issues are addressed by decomposing the solution procedure into two phases. In the first phase, different optimal designs are created based on predefined product development strategies. In the second, these optimal designs are compared against one another with regard to market share and potential to secure market leadership. This work shows that the nature of competition as well as the variability of customer preferences are critical to how a strategy performs. This process uncovers a surprisingly robust design strategy—developing attributes such that a “lower fringe” is most satisfied—that even achieves market dominance under certain conditions. This methodology is also applied to partworth data on refrigerators, which provides a concrete example of the concepts and demonstrates results consistent with the propositions developed earlier in the paper.     

Gaia bites back: Accelerated warming

This scenario portrays a human extinction event in approximately 500 years due to entangled human and planetary positive feedback loops that lead to terminal system failures. The underlying dynamic of the catastrophe for humans is the shift of the Planetary Life System (or Gaia) to a higher temperature steady state, somewhere below the boiling point of water, but above a tolerance zone for human life. The scenario explores how human systems failures could parallel a suite of natural processes that bring about humanity's extinction by accelerating global warming and removing its nominal temperature range and ecological niche. The scenario posits that human development and progress could continue to flourish up to the “bitter end.”