Gendering and Gender in Public Service Organizations: Changing Professional Identities Under New Public Management

This article examines the enactment of new public management (NPM) in public service professional organizations, the nature of professional/managerial subjectivities promoted within the NPM discourse, and the implications for male and female professionals/managers. The article has two aims. First, taking a gender ing organization perspective, it explores the gendered meanings of NPM and the promotion of new professional/managerial subjectivities. Second, focusing on gender in organizations, the article then considers the implications of the enactment of NPM for male and female professionals/managers. The article illustrates the complex, manifold and fluid nature of both the meanings ascribed to NPM and individual responses. It is argued that a gender lens offers a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of NPM enactment and the implications of this for public service professionals/managers are considered.     

Capital taxation, long-run growth, and bequests

It has been shown that higher capital taxes can have a growth-enhancing effect when combined with a revenue-compensating cut in wage taxes or with an expansion in productivity-increasing public services. The present paper demonstrates that these results critically hinge on the existence of a bequest motive. It is shown that a wage-tax cut is no longer growth-enhancing when bequests are operative. By way of contrast, increasing productive public services may well boost growth. The theoretical findings are illustrated by numerical simulations based on US data.     

Comparing linear and nonlinear forecasts for stock returns

We compare the out-of-sample performance of monthly returns forecasts for two indices, namely the Dow Jones (DJ) and the Financial Times (FT) indices. A linear and a nonlinear artificial neural network (ANN) model are used to generate the out-of-sample competing forecasts for monthly returns. Stationary transformations of dividends and trading volume are considered as fundamental explanatory variables in the linear model and the input variables in the ANN model. The comparison of out-of-sample forecasts is done on the basis of forecast accuracy, using the Diebold and Mariano test [J. Bus. Econ. Stat. 13 (1995) 253.], and forecast encompassing, using the Clements and Hendry approach [J. Forecast. 5 (1998) 559.]. The results suggest that the out-of-sample ANN forecasts are significantly more accurate than linear forecasts of both indices. Furthermore, the ANN forecasts can explain the forecast errors of the linear model for both indices, while the linear model cannot explain the forecast errors of the ANN in either of the two indices. Overall, the results indicate that the inclusion of nonlinear terms in the relation between stock returns and fundamentals is important in out-of-sample forecasting. This conclusion is consistent with the view that the relation between stock returns and fundamentals is nonlinear.     

新公共管理运动背景下税收管理的国际比较及对中国的启示

20世纪70年代末80年代初,伴随着经济上新自由主义思潮的兴起和信息技术革命的浪潮,西方国家掀起了一场新公共管理运动。新公共管理运动给西方国家税收管理方式带来了巨大变化,并对税收征纳成本的有效控制起到了积极作用,本文总结他国经验,以期从发达国家税收管理制度设计和安排上得到一些解决我国目前问题的有益借鉴。     

我国财政改革中几个全局性问题的思考

按照党的"十六大"提出的战略构想,未来20年里我们将完成经济体制转轨的任务,实现全面小康.这样的构想意味着,中国经济体制改革目标的实现已从政策设计的角度锁定在1978-2020年的时段内,我们正处在承前启后的转折点上.在政府主导的渐进路径上,政府既推进着市场机制的建立,也同时推动着计划手段的创新,在市场机制发挥作用的同时,又始终承担着计划体制下的诸多任务与责任.财政作为政府政策实施的财力保障,以自身的变动见证了这一过程,与体制转轨进程和经济运行状况有着深刻的互动关系.因此,在这样一个特殊时刻,对财政改革中的一些关系全局的问题进行思考、解释,不仅关系到财政自身的运行,无疑也将直接影响到整个经济发展的绩效.本文主要围绕三个方面的重大问题提出了分析的路径与依据,并做出了基本的评价.     

Aging: Some Pleasant Fiscal Arithmetic

Projections of age-related public expenditure growth have raised widespread concerns about fiscal sustainability. This paper examines how total expenditure would develop under four policy rules on public expenditure growth. Some simple arithmetic of expenditure, GDP, and population is reviewed and applied in simulations for 19 OECD countries over 2000–50. A general and a specific conclusion arise from the results. Generally, long-term expenditure projections could benefit from revisiting common assumptions on non-age-related expenditure growth. Specifically, realistic gradual adjustment in non-age-related expenditures could go a long way towards maintaining fiscal sustainability under age-related spending pressures.

The effects of mid-career military enlistment on civilian career prospects: evidence from the Australian banking industry during World War II

This paper uses personnel records of employees from an Australian bank to analyse the labour market consequences of career interruptions due to voluntary military service during the Second World War. The records contain the employees’ career position and pay histories, and pre-war outcomes are used to control for selection bias caused by non-random enlistment. It is shown that, despite losing human capital during the War, upon their return veterans did not face a wage penalty relative to non-volunteers. Finally, evidence from non-wage outcomes suggests that the absence of a wage penalty was a form of positive discrimination by the Bank.

The Costs of Increasing Transparency

In their seminal paper, Morris and Shin (Amer Econ Rev 92(5): 1521–1534, 2002a) argued that increasing the precision of public information is not always beneficial to social welfare. Svensson (Amer Econ Rev 96: 448–451, 2006) however has disputed this by saying that although feasible, the conditions for which this was true, were not all that likely. In that respect, therefore, increasing ‘transparency’ remains most of the times beneficial to social welfare. In this paper, we extend the Morris and Shin attempt by setting it up as an explicit interactive game between the Central Bank, the objectives of which we model explicitly, and the private sector. We show that in the absence of costs, both players benefit from transparency in the manner described previously in the literature, and point the differences in their gains. Following that, we then introduce the fact that increasing transparency comes at some costs and show how both players face incentives to free ride on each other as a result. The presence of costs thus alters the way in which greater transparency is attained.

论行为公共政策及其在财政治理中的应用:逻辑、案例与对策

行为公共政策尚处于全球学术研究的前沿领域,而其应用特别值得中国中等收入发展阶段财政治理的重视和探讨。本文首先论述了行为经济理论四个阶段的发展逻辑,并对每个阶段进行了简要述评。基于理论逻辑所揭示的从"经济人"到"人类"的假设条件变化,在对公共政策进行简要回顾的基础上,本文阐述了行为经济为其带来的改变,并对行为政策与传统政策进行了比较分析。接着,在提出行为政策的五点特征及其对财政治理的启示后,本文较详细阐述了行为政策在全球实践的典型案例,并在最后为中国当下财政治理提出了五个方面的对策建议。     

优化营商环境的财税政策研究——以江苏省为例

近年来,江苏财政部门积极支持营商环境建设,贯彻落实减税降费政策,采取设立风险补偿资金池、引导社会资本投资、设立支持企业发展的奖补资金等举措,在优化营商环境方面取得一定成效,但在政策执行过程中还存在一些不足,如部分行业税负可能上升、无定价权的企业在税制改革中获益相对较少、减税降费"降成本"效应下降等,针对实际工作中存在的问题,还需要进一步增强"降成本"政策的协调性,采取完善增值税抵扣机制等措施。