乔治·梅森大学——“听美国人话，中国转型就不会那么成功”

在人民币汇率问题上，中国希望人民币保持低价值，主要希望以此扩大出口，并消化从农村涌到城市的劳动力。中国在对外出口上的成功有着多方面的原因，不仅仅在于它的低工资和高生产率。人民币汇率在这方面不构成一个主要因素。     

Real exchange rate behavior

Using random simulations with artificial data with identical sample characteristics to the long-sample exchange rate data employed by Lothian and Taylor (Lothian, J.R. and Taylor, M.P. (1996). The recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries. Journal of Political Economy 104, 488–509.), we show that standard unit-root tests have extremely low power over sample sizes corresponding to the recent float. The probability of rejecting the null hypothesis when it is false is extremely low with 20 years or even 50 years of data and only reaches an acceptable level over much longer spans.     

Noncash Income Transfers and Agricultural Land Values

Several studies have considered the impact of government cash income transfers to agricultural producers on agricultural land prices. This study examines the effects of a noncash income transfer on agricultural land prices. The impact of the U.S. sugar program on irrigated land prices in Montana is evaluated using a hedonic regression model. The model considers the impacts of sugar beet price and land characteristics on land prices. The results indicate that noncash income transfers generated by the U.S. sugar program have been capitalized into cropland prices.     

International trade and finance: Complementaries in the United Kingdom 1870-1913 and the United States 1920-1930

Do international trade and finance flow together? In a variety of theoretical models, trade and finance can be shown to have the potential to be substitutes or complements, so the matter must be resolved empirically. We study trade and financial flows from the United Kingdom from 1870 to 1913 and the United States in the interwar years. These were the two major capital exporters and key financial centers in each era. We find that trade and finance were robustly correlated for each case. We consider simultaneity issues. We also discuss evidence from the British Empire which casts doubt on the idea that trade is a punishment device in the event of a default.     

Asset Write‐downs: Evidence from 2001–2008

Accounting for asset write‐downs has received substantial media attention throughout the Global Financial Crisis and has been the subject of academic debate and numerous accounting regulations during the past three decades. This study provides evidence of the magnitude and frequency of quarterly asset write‐down activities for a sample of US firms between 2001 and 2008 and examines whether reported asset write‐downs mirror market and economic indicators during the sample period.     

A model of biased intermediation

We study situations in which consumers rely on a biased intermediary's advice when choosing among sellers. We introduce the notion that sellers' and consumers' payoffs can be congruent or conflicting, and show that this has important implications for the effects of bias. Under congruence, the firm benefiting from bias has an incentive to offer a better deal than its rival and consumers can be better‐off than under no bias. Under conflict, the favored firm offers lower utility, and bias harms consumers. We study various policies for dealing with bias and show that their efficacy also depends on whether the payoffs exhibit congruence or conflict.     

The technological gatekeeper

The present study identifies a two-step flow process of communication mediated by technological gatekeepers for scientific and technical fields characterized by dynamic information environments. Peer identification and a supervisory recognition of the phenomenon validate the gatekeeper finding. Certain characteristics of this study differ from previous research. The external communication needs of military in-house researchers are mitigated greatly by the infusion of technical information into the laboratory which is a part of the everyday activities of the organization. Gatekeepers are differentiated by topic and not the media monitored. Finally, the gatekeeper phenomenon is implicitly recognized, even though the development may be spontaneous; development that results because either the formal media leave a void in information needs or that engineers are not trained in the use of the formal information sources. In either case, the technological gatekeeper is a natural response to an information need.     

Nonlinear Aspects of Goods-Market Arbitrage and Adjustment: Heckscher''s Commodity Points Revisited

We propose that analysis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price should explicitly take into account the possibility of “commodity points”—thresholds delineating a region of no central tendency among relative prices, possibly due to lack of perfect arbitrage in the presence of transaction costs and uncertainty. More than 80 years ago, Heckscher stressed the importance of such incomplete arbitrage in the empirical application of PPP. We devise an econometric method to identify commodity points. Price adjustment is treated as a nonlinear process, and a threshold autoregression offers a parsimonious specification within which both thresholds and adjustment speeds are estimated by maximum likelihood methods. Our model performs well using post-1980 data, and yields parameter estimates that appear quite reasonable: adjustment outside the thresholds might imply half-lives of price deviations measured in months rather than years, and the thresholds correspond to popular rough estimates as to the order of magnitude of actual transport costs. The estimated commodity points appear to be positively related to objective measures of market segmentation, notably nominal exchange rate volatility.J. Japan Int. Econ.December 1997,11(4), pp. 441–479. Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-3880; and Department of Economics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208-2600.     

A diffusion approximation for the ruin function of a risk process with compounding assets

Abstract

The traditional theory of collective risk is concerned with fluctuations in the capital reserve {Y(t): t ?O} of an insurance company. The classical model represents {Y(t)} as a positive constant x (initial capital) plus a deterministic linear function (cumulative income) minus a compound Poisson process (cumulative claims). The central problem is to determine the ruin probability ψ(x) that capital ever falls to zero. It is known that, under reasonable assumptions, one can approximate {Y(t)} by an appropriate Wiener process and hence ψ(.) by the corresponding exponential function of (Brownian) first passage probabilities. This paper considers the classical model modified by the assumption that interest is earned continuously on current capital at rate β > O. It is argued that Y(t) can in this case be approximated by a diffusion process Y*(t) which is closely related to the classical Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. The diffusion {Y*(t)}, which we call compounding Brownian motion, reduces to the ordinary Wiener process when β = O. The first passage probabilities for Y*(t) are found to form a truncated normal distribution, which approximates the ruin function ψ(.) for the model with compounding assets. The approximate expression for ψ(.) is compared against the exact expression for a special case in which the latter is known. Assuming parameter values for which one would anticipate a good approximation, the two expressions are found to agree extremely well over a wide range of initial asset levels.