Incentives and teacher effort

Few would contest that teachers are a very important determinant of how much students learn in school, and how to improve teacher performance has been the focus of lively policy debate in both rich and poor countries. This paper examines how teacher incentives, both pecuniary and non‐pecuniary, correlate with teacher effort. Using school survey data from Lao PDR, we estimate measures of teacher effort, including the number of hours that teachers spend preparing for classes and teacher provision of private tutoring outside of class hours, which are not the typical measures used in previous research. Estimation results fit well under the standard labour supply framework and indicate that greater teacher effort is associated with non‐pecuniary incentives such as more teacher autonomy over teaching materials and monitoring as measured by the existence of an active parent – teacher association and the ability of school principals to dismiss teachers. Methodologically, this paper provides a detailed derivation of a simultaneous OLS‐probit model with school random effects that can jointly estimate teacher work hours and tutoring provision.     

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.     

Does Tourism Improve the Community’s Well-Being in Marine-Protected Areas?

International Advances in Economic Research -     

The dynamic impact of macroeconomic factors on initial public offerings: evidence from time-series analysis

This article examines the explanatory power and the dynamic impact of macroeconomic conditions on Initial Public Offering (IPO) activities in US during the period from 1970 to 2005. Applying time-series econometric techniques, we find the existence of long-run equilibrium relationships between IPO activities and selected macroeconomic variables. Stock market performance and volatility are shown to play the most important role in the timing of IPOs. The Fed funds rate and the 10 year US Treasury Bond (TB) yield play a comparable role in determining the amount of proceeds raised in the IPOs. There also exist different short-run dynamic adjustment mechanisms between IPOs and macroeconomic factors towards the long run equilibrium path and they are mostly completed within the period of 6 months to 1 year. The results have some useful implications for forecasting IPO activities.     

Green financing for sustainable development: Insights from multiple cases of Vietnamese commercial banks

Although the public sector is seen as the main party responsible for taking action on climate change and sustainable development, private commercial banks are in a unique position to support or shift the funding focus on green investment. By employing a qualitative research approach based on six commercial banks, this paper aims to investigate the current practices of how commercial banks are contributing to advance green business initiatives. Accordingly, this research examines and identifies the facilitators and challenges in domestic and foreign commercial banks in Vietnam which support green business initiatives. In addition to addressing the recent calls for the investigation of the role of commercial banks in facilitating green finance, our study expands the emerging literature by demonstrating the current efforts of Vietnam's commercial banks in fostering green finance during the Covid-19 pandemic.     

State Auditing With the Investment in Public Sector： Case of Vietnam

In Vietnam, in the current period, public investment plays an important role in the improvement of technical infrastructure systems, economic and social development of motivation to promote national development. However, the question is how to ensure that these sources of funds are used most effectively in terms of limited resources. In this article, the author would like to emphasize the critical role of the state auditor which is not only in the transparency of information, in enhancing the trust of the citizens, but also in providing important and reliable information to the public sector agencies, units, investors, and people in the society. From that, it could help to serve the management and administration of revenues and expenditures of the state budget as well as reasonably and efficiently using financial resources and assets. In case of perfectly conducting those tasks, they will contribute the power to the economy, fight corruption as loss or waste, and detect and prevent violations of law; improve the efficient use of the budget, the money, and property of the state; and serve effectively for the operation of the National Assembly and People＇s Councils at all levels of the implementation and monitoring function to decide important issues of national and local governments. With the above information, these matters in Vietnam will be solved through this paper that consists of five parts： （1） the basics about the current public investment in Vietnam; （2） the role of state auditing in improving performance management and monitoring of investment; （3） the limitations of state auditing in public investment; （4） many solutions to promote the role of state auditing in improving the effective investment activities; and （5） conclusion.     

Tariff escalation and invasive species damages

We investigate the interface between trade and damages from invasive species (IS), focusing on escalation in tariffs between raw-input and processed-good markets, and its implication for IS-based damages. The current tariff escalation in processed agro-forestry products motivates our analysis. Tariff escalation exacerbates the likelihood of IS introduction by biasing trade flows towards increased trade of primary commodity flows and against processed-product trade. We show that a reduction of tariff escalation, by lowering the tariff on processed goods increases allocative efficiency and reduces IS-based damages, a win-win situation. We also identify policy menus for trade reforms involving tariffs on both raw input and processed goods leading to win-win situations.     

Time and place where gold acts as an inflation hedge: An application of long-run and short-run threshold model

This study examines the short-run and long-run inflation hedging effectiveness of gold in the United States and Japan during the period of January 1971 to January 2010. Previous research has shown in the long-run that inflation tends to appropriately increase the price of gold in the U.S., leading to gold's popularity as an asset in portfolios to reduce the risk against sudden inflation. However, gold is only partially effective in hedging against inflation in Japan. This research found that the rigidity between the price of gold and the consumer price index affects the inflation hedging ability of gold in the long-run. The gold price is characterized by market disequilibrium induced by the price rigidity, causing the price of gold to be unable to response to changes in the CPI. To explore the inflation hedging ability of gold in the short-run, this study further examines the price rigidity in low and high momentum regime. It is found during the low momentum regimes that, gold return is unable to hedge against inflation in either the U.S. or Japan. However, during high momentum regimes, gold return is able to hedge against inflation in the U.S., while the price rigidity in Japan causes the price of gold to not fully hedge against inflation in the short-run.     

越南企业准备好了吗？

公众舆论普遍认为“入世”将给越南带来更多外国直接投资，但是，越南当地的企业家该如何面对外来挑战？[编者按]