Why has US monetary policy become ineffective lately?

Some recent studies show that US monetary policy has lost its stimulative traction, especially since the early 1980s. They argue that the Fed’s forward guidance has enabled economic agents to anticipate the changes in interest rates more accurately. As a result, it is harder to find truly exogenous monetary policy shocks, which has made monetary policy ineffective. In this article, we find that anomalous economic behaviours of financial institutions might be the true reason for the ineffective monetary policy. Our structural vector autoregressive model shows that increases in the US money supply mostly flowed into the financial sector to increase its profits instead of stimulating the real sector of the economy through business investment.     

重读《公开信》 再论生育观——兼谈我国人口政策的未来选择

1980年9月5日中共中央《关于控制人口增长问题致全体共产党员、共青团员的公开信》所引发的人口发展方式和生育观念的双重转变,彻底改变了我国人口发展大局以及支撑人口发展的生育文化氛围。继续推进先进生育文化建设,以及坚持数量控制为先,同时兼顾对结构问题的治理,是《公开信》给我国人口未来发展带来的重要启示。     

Trajectories to reconcile sharing and commercialization in the maker movement

Maker technologies, including collaborative digital fabrication tools like 3-D printers, enable entrepreneurial opportunities and new business models. To date, relatively few highly successful maker startups have emerged, possibly due to the dominant mindset of the makers being one of cooperation and sharing. However, makers also strive for financial stability and many have profit motives. We use a multiple case study approach to explore makers’ experiences regarding the tension between sharing and commercialization and their ways of dealing with it. We conducted interviews with maker initiatives across Europe including Fab Labs, a maker R&D center, and other networks of makers. We unpack and contextualize the concepts of sharing and commercialization. Our cross-case analysis leads to a new framework for understanding these entrepreneurs’ position with respect to common-good versus commercial offerings. Using the framework, we describe archetypal trajectories that maker initiatives go through in the dynamic transition from makers to social enterprises and social entrepreneurs.     

城市开放空间场所性本质探析

本文运用场所理论作为研究的理论基础,对城市开放空间的场所性本质进行研究,探析开放空间的设计如何更好的服务于人与自然,同时担负着协调人类和自然生态过程的作用,使人类的生活环境在良好的生态环境下持续发展。     

Monetary policy and fiscal limits with no-default

This paper discusses monetary and fiscal policy interactions that stabilize government debt. Two distortions prevail in the model economy: income taxes and liquidity constraints. Possible obstructions to fiscal policy include a ceiling on the equilibrium debt-to-GDP ratio, zero or negative elasticity of tax revenues, and a political intolerance of raising tax rates. At the fiscal limit two mechanisms restore solvency: fiscal inflation, which reduces the real value of nominal debt, and open market operations, which diminish the size of government debt held by the private sector. Three regimes achieve this goal. In all regimes monetary policy is passive. In all regimes a muted tax response to government debt is consistent with equilibrium. The propensity of a fiscal authority to smooth output is found to determine what is an acceptable response (in the form of tax rate changes) to the level of government debt, while monetary policy determines the timing and magnitude of fiscal inflation. Impulse responses show that the inflation and tax hikes needed to offset a permanent shock to transfers are lowest under nominal interest rate pegs. In this regime, most of the reduction in the real value of government debt comes from open market purchases.     

Taxing land for urban containment: Reflections on a Dutch debate

Excessive land use regulations aimed at containing urban sprawl have been criticised, because they may overcompensate for the external effects of uncontrolled greenfield development and contribute to stagnation in house building. Taxes on building in green spaces may be an instrument for balancing urban growth and the protection of the landscape. This paper discusses development tax and puts it in the context of other planning instruments. It reviews a recent policy debate in the Netherlands relating to the introduction of an open space tax and the research into this tax. It also investigates the policy process, which resulted in the tax not being introduced. Finally, conclusions are drawn as to whether the taxation of development may be a useful instrument to complement other planning measures.     

Mining external R&D

Open Innovation presses the case for timely and thorough intelligence concerning research and development activities conducted outside one’s organization. To take advantage of this wealth of R&D, one needs to establish a systematic “tech mining” process. We propose a 5-stage framework that extends literature review into research profiling and pattern recognition to answer posed technology management questions. Ultimately one can even discover new knowledge by screening research databases.Once one determines the value in mining external R&D, tough issues remain to be overcome. Technology management has developed a culture that relies more on intuition than on evidence. Changing that culture and implementing effective technical intelligence capabilities is worth the effort. P&G's reported gains in innovation call attention to the huge payoff potential.     

Equilibrium capital taxation in open economies under commitment

This paper analyzes equilibrium capital taxation in open economies with strategic interaction in a neo-classical growth model. Under perfect commitment, I show that non-cooperative capital taxes are zero in the long run for a large open economy, thereby generalizing the result previously established only for the special cases of a closed and a small open economy. This does not represent a race to the bottom, though, since the result is independent of the degree of capital mobility, the number of countries, or a country׳s size relative to the rest of the world. Moreover, when countries cooperate, they still set capital taxes to zero in the long run. These outcomes are robust to different equilibrium specifications, the inclusion of endogenous government spending, and heterogeneous agents and non-linear labor income taxation. Governments find it optimal to implement the efficient capital allocation in the long run, both in a closed and an open economy; this trumps incentives to tax foreigners’ domestic capital holdings by raising capital taxes and attracting capital from abroad by lowering capital taxes.     

腹腔镜开窗术治疗肝囊肿患者的临床疗效

目的：探讨腹腔镜开窗术治疗肝囊肿患者的临床疗效。方法将需手术治疗的48例肝囊肿患者完全随机均分为观察组与对照组,观察组患者给予腹腔镜开窗术治疗,对照组患者给予开腹手术治疗。观察两组患者的术中及术后恢复情况。结果观察组患者术中出血量明显低于对照组（P＜0.05）;观察组患者的排气时间、下床时间、肠鸣音恢复时间及住院时间均明显短于对照组（均P＜0.05）;观察组患者的并发症发生率明显低于对照组（P＜0.05）。结论腹腔镜开窗术治疗肝囊肿可有效改善患者的术后恢复情况,减少并发症的发生。     

Bayesian estimation of an open economy DSGE model with incomplete pass-through

In this paper, we develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model for an open economy, and estimate it on Euro area data using Bayesian estimation techniques. The model incorporates several open economy features, as well as a number of nominal and real frictions that have proven to be important for the empirical fit of closed economy models. The paper offers: i) a theoretical development of the standard DSGE model into an open economy setting, ii) Bayesian estimation of the model, including assessments of the relative importance of various shocks and frictions for explaining the dynamic development of an open economy, and iii) an evaluation of the model's empirical properties using standard validation methods.