Business interests versus geopolitics: The case of the Siberian pipeline in the 1980s

In the years 1979–1984, the Soviet authorities and various coalitions of Western European companies, some of them subsidiaries of US corporations or benefiting from licences and patents, supported by state authorities, negotiated several agreements to provide credit and equipment for the building of a 3,500-mile-long gas pipeline between Northern Central Siberia and Western Europe. There was a fierce controversy between the US and European states and firms whether to honour such contracts or not amid renewed geopolitical tensions between East and West. Business history was thus intimately mixed with geopolitics and corporate commercial and industrial tactics were challenged by diplomatic ethics. While the rules of capitalism can once more be discussed, the numerous lobbying circuits are reconstituted in this article as a way to determine the potential freedom of action of day-to-day business when confronted with high-level politics.     

Intercultural Discourse Ethics: Testing Trompenaars' and Hampden-Turner's Conclusions about Americans and the French

Are culture driven ethical conflicts apparent in the discourse of the protagonists? A multi-year, multi-cultural study of managers by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner resulted in two conclusions relevant to business ethics. The first is that intercultural business conflicts can often be traced to a finite set of cultural differences. The second is that enough similarities exist between cultures to provide the grounds for conflict resolution. The research reported here gives credence to their study when applied to an ethical conflict viewed from French and American perspectives.     

Intra-industry spillovers and innovation: An econometric analysis at the firm level

This paper studies spillover effects of innovation at the firm level and the comparability of generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators with maximum likelihood estimators of the earlier studies. Two sources of spillovers are identified, i.e. intra-industry R&D expenditure and intra-industry innovation output. This paper estimates a negative R&D spillover effect and a positive output spillover effect. Because of the substitution effect of intra-industry R&D spillovers, the elasticity of patent with respect to firm's own R&D expenditure is greater than those estimated in the earlier studies. With GMM, individual effects are incorporated into the models either by developing proxies for them or attempting to eliminate them.     

Consumer surplus analysis under uncertainty: A general equilibrium perspective

This paper derives an exact form of partial equilibrium efficiency measure under uncertainty which is consistent with expected utility maximization in a general equilibrium situation with ex-post spot markets for many goods and asset markets which are in general incomplete.We consider that the good under consideration tends to be negligibly small compared to the entire set of commodity characteristics which is assumed to be a continuum, and look into the limit property of preferences over state-contingent consumption of the good and state-contingent income transfer associated to it. We show that the limit preference exhibits risk neutrality, not only that it exhibits no income effect, meaning that the two conditions are tied together. We also show that the marginal rate of substitution between extra income transfers at different states of the world converges to the ratio between the Lagrange multipliers associated to those states. When the asset markets are complete such ratios are equalized between consumers, but it is not the case in general when the asset markets are incomplete. This means that using the aggregate expected consumer surplus as the welfare measure will be in general inconsistent with individuals’ expected utility maximization in the general equilibrium environment or with ex-ante Pareto efficiency.     

马克思恩格斯的公共经济观

构建中国特色公共经济学需要以马克思主义公共经济思想理论为指导.马克思、恩格斯作为马克思主义理论创始人虽然没有专门的公共经济学著作并且否定私有制基础上有名副其实的"公共经济学",但他们却有极为丰富而系统的公共经济思想,以辩证唯物主义历史观和方法论为基础的公共经济观则是其中最重要的理论板块.其中主要内容包括:基于人作为社会性"类存在物"二重属性而肯定与私人经济共存并相互作用的公共经济存在观;对阶级社会公共经济性质的辩证观;公共经济演化逻辑的唯物史观;公共经济辩证发展的历史趋势观.     

An existence theorem for Cournot–Walras equilibria in a monopolistically competitive economy

We establish an existence theorem for Cournot–Walras equilibria in a monopolistically competitive economy. Instead of the traditional approach which depends on Kakutani’s fixed point theorem, we employ the theories of aggregative games and best reply potential games. We show that, if there exists a representative consumer, under some conditions on preferences and production technologies, the profit maximization game is a (pseudo) best reply potential game. Hence, the existence of the equilibria is proved independently of the well known convex-valued assumption on the best responses. Although our assumptions result in the additive separability on a utility function of a representative consumer, the existence of increasing returns and indivisible productions can be allowed. In our model, it is shown that the game played by firms exhibits strategic substitutes whether the products of firms are substitutes or complements, and this plays an important role for the existence of the equilibria.     

How does adaptive co-management relate to specified and general resilience? An approach from Isla Mayor,Andalusia, Spain

Resilience provides a framework to study the dynamics of social-ecological systems (SESs). The inherent complexity and uncertainty of SESs reveals the necessity for new approaches in management, such as adaptive co-management (ACM). The objective of the present research is to analyse the link between ACM and specified/general resilience debate. For the empirical analysis, a qualitative case-study approach is conducted in Isla Mayor, a southern municipality of Spain with an intensive rice cultivation tradition and a few limited secondary activities such as fishing and tourism. First, we explore five different faces of ACM in Isla Mayor’s rice farming: (1) institution building, (2) power sharing, (3) governance, (4) problem solving, and (5) knowledge co-production, social learning and adaptation. Secondly, we analyse specified and general resilience from two perspectives: (1) stakeholders’ perceptions, (2) adaptive capacity and self-organization. The results highlight the existence of a task-oriented process aimed at solving problems related to the rice activity. This process has contributed to shape a new multi-level governance system and sharing of power between public authorities and local rice farmers, seemingly contributing to an improved rice cultivation specified resilience. However, the lack of collective power and vertical/horizontal links in the governance framework of the remaining socio-economic activities in the region have given rise to some difficulties in their management and interactions with the rice sector, thereby raising barriers to diversify activities and enhance general resilience. The case shows that ACM can provide the opportunity to navigate the trade-offs between specified and general resilience.     

Forest sustainability and trade policies

Many analyses of trade and environment have concluded that trade liberalization is Pareto improvement with Pigovian tax systems even when production and consumption processes bring non-market externalities. But in case of global forest issue there are many accusations that the trade liberalization of forest products has caused the degradation of forest sustainability. In this paper we try to explain the gap between the theory and the real situation from theoretical point of view. We will analyze comprehensively about free trade and forest sustainability by partial and general equilibrium analyses. Pigovian systems work well under the assumption of complete substitutivity of consumption between external effects and marketable commodities. If it were not satisfied, it is inevitable to levy import tariff or to take some domestic price support systems to guide the production point into sustainable forests.     

A panel data robust instrumental variable approach: a test of the new Fama-French five-factor model

Fama and French (FF, 2015) propose a new five-factor asset pricing model that adds profitability and investment patterns to the market, size and value variables used in FF (1992). Our purpose is to investigate this new model using an improved generalized method of moments (GMM)-based robust instrumental variables technique in a fixed-effects panel data framework. To test for measurement errors, we use a modified Hausman artificial regression. We also examine an augmented FF six-factor model that includes the Pástor–Stambaugh (PS, 2003) liquidity factor. Using the FF dataset, our GMM-based panel data approach leads us to conclude that the only consistently significant factor is the market factor.